Award Applications

AIA Singapore’s POS EZ: Changing the game for after-sales service
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For insurers around the world, digital transformation now ranks among the most pressing and critical items on the agendas of industry leaders. Rapidly developing technology has brought about the inevitable consequence of ever-rising consumer expectations - a customer in 2018 now expects unprecedented levels of service and delivery, and meeting these has become a key challenge for all businesses, who may potentially face the threat of what Uber has done to the taxi industry, or Alibaba to brick-and-mortar retailers.

The Challenge
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The insurance industry is no different. According to research by EY in 2017, global insurance consumers place an extraordinarily high value on quality digital experiences. Surveys show that 40% of consumers actually decide to whether or not to continue a relationship with an insurer based on the quality of their experience.

Insurers have since invested primarily in the building of robust digital platforms for new business acquisition. This is great news for the agents on the ground, but from the customer’s perspective, after-sales service remains on the backburner in the quest for digital transformation. Insurers need to ensure exceptional service and experience for customers throughout their life journeys, which goes far beyond and only begins after a customer has come onboard.

The Solution
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Enter AIA Singapore’s POS EZ. The opportunity was to create a digital platform focused on after-sales service, to engage the customer end-to-end in an integrated digital ecosystem that can support their insurance needs throughout their policy’s lifetime.

POS EZ is an online platform that enables AIA Singapore’s insurance representatives to facilitate a multitude of customer requests around the clock and without any geographical restrictions, by providing their customers with remote authentication capability. While a simple change in address would have taken the customer two forms, a face-to-face meeting with the insurance representative, and three working days to be processed, the customer can now get this done within a matter of minutes and be able to authenticate his/her request without having to meet up with the sales rep via the remote authentication function – which is a first in Singapore!

Security is also enhanced with POS EZ. POS EZ allows customers to authenticate their requests via 2FA (two-factor authentication) using a personal OneKey device, providing an extra layer of system and physical security to all authentications. It is important to note that this OneKey device is already employed for transactions with almost 60 Singapore government agencies, hence with the convenience of our customers in mind, deliberate efforts have been taken to enable OneKey authentication with POS EZ. With a rejection rate of approximately 12% attributed to irregular signatures, this is definitely a step towards providing more efficient and effective customer experiences.

Smart Forms in POS EZ, pre-filled with real-time validation using latest policy records, also reduce room for common human errors, incorrect data entry, or missing data which cause unnecessary delays to the fulfilment of the customer’s service request. For every omission, or inaccurate data provided via hardcopy form(s), the AIA insurance representative will need to dedicate additional time and resources to remedy them, resulting in delays and inconvenience for themselves as well as their customers. POS EZ also prompts the insurance representative when there’s outstanding information required for the submission – reducing the need for back-and-forth administration as mentioned before.

With POS EZ, an average of 1.5 minutes per service request is saved, and this excludes the time taken for post submission follow up (which typically takes 30 mins per follow up). The overall time savings is very significant, considering the monthly volume of around 30,000 service requests that are currently supported by POS EZ.

POS EZ also provides the ability to submit multiple requests within 1 submission, and in that vein, customers need only authenticate once, regardless of the number of request types or policies involved. This is not only time-effective, but also environmentally friendly as reliance on paper resources is reduced.

The benefits described above are all the more salient in time-sensitive transactions such as fund-switching. Digitising fund-switching empowers AIA Singapore’s customers to be much more nimble and take full advantage of movements in the market by removing the unnecessary administrative delays.

Since its launch in April this year, POS EZ has seen an ever-increasing number of insurance representative using the platform each day. Out of the approximately 60,000 processing requests that come in each month for AIA Singapore, 10% has already transitioned to the POS EZ platform, with the number expected to continue growing as more types of requests and functions are integrated into the system.

The Way Forward
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POS EZ is a crucial component of the digital ecosystem which AIA Singapore has constructed to provide a unified experience across its many customer touchpoints.

AIA Singapore’s iPoS launched in 2012, for instance, is a fully mobile and secure interactive Point-of-Sale (iPoS) system – the first of any insurer globally. This game-changing system increases the efficiency of the insurance-purchasing process, allowing customers to obtain insurance coverage as fast as within one day.

A first-in-market digital underwriter enables customers to submit and instantaneously approve 90% of new business applications, while the AIA eCare app enables customers to access their policy e-documents independently and on-the-go.

POS EZ is just one more step towards AIA Singapore’s goal of becoming the most digitally enabled insurer by 2025, all whilst putting the customer front and center of all we do. Digitising after-sale service and administration opens AIA Singapore’s insurance representatives up for more value-added interactions with customers – with form-filling and paper-pushing now a thing of the past, physical face time can now be spent on relationship building or strategic consultation.

With such promising numbers of new users and customer requests coming through via POS EZ month-on-month, there is no doubt that we are on the right track as we continue to develop a more robust and customer-centric digital ecosystem on the road to 2025.

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