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ICICI Prudential Life Insurance, a leading private life insurer, has formally tied up with global messaging platform WhatsApp as part of its attempts to create more channels of “simpler, faster and easier” communication with its policyholders and customers.
With this move, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance has become the first and only life insurer in the country to have formally and directly integrated with ‘WhatsApp for Business’ and a WhatsApp-verified account, Puneet Nanda, Deputy Managing Director, told BusinessLine .
“With this tie-up, we are the only official partner (life insurer) with WhatsApp on this. We will now give our customers the option to interact with us through WhatsApp. If they like, they can register, and once they do so, we will start sending customer communication information relevant to them through WhatsApp,” he said.
Besides giving comfort on the security aspect to a customer, this arrangement will also work as an official communication from the company and not from a particular employee, said Nanda.
Over time, ‘WhatsApp for Business’ is expected to emerge as the most important communication tool with customers for ICICI Prudential Life, Nanda added.
Not for revenue
Nanda said this tie-up should be seen as a ‘customer service initiative’ of the company and not a revenue-raising measure.
Nanda also made it clear that the life insurer will not use WhatsApp to propagate business or sell policies, but only use it as a “pure customer service tool and to give one more option to customers to interact with the company on a secure channel”.
The communication from ICICI Prudential Life Insurance to customers could be in the form of policy documents and premium receipts.
“Only communication relevant to that customer for his or her policy will be sent. Slowly as customers become comfortable, we will start using this WhatsApp channel for making claims and customer queries. Over time we may look at customer on-boarding, but not as of now. We want customers to be comfortable with it (WhatsApp messages) and give only what they want,” he said.
As on date, ICICI Prudential Life Insurance has about 50 lakh customers. In 2017-18, the life insurer had in all received 1.6 crore service requests. Of these, 72 per cent of the service transactions were initiated and concluded by the customers themselves.
WhatsApp in India has more than 200 million monthly active users.
Nanda highlighted that servicing part of a life insurance contract is the most intense and, therefore, ICICI Prudential Life is focussed on improving the convenience of its customers. “Our motto is to make life simpler, faster and easier for our customers,” he said.
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