DA: Data has three roles:
- Measuring performance and providing guidance for optimisation actions that impact product, sales, marketing, and promotion efforts.
- Providing customer intelligence based on their behaviours in considering, purchasing, and repurchasing products, which should also influence actions that drive better conversion.
- Identifying the problem statement or ambition, using data as a source of intelligence.
All of the above require first forming a single holistic view of our customers, which is not an easy task.
For a composite insurer like Income Insurance, serving customers across life, health, general, corporate businesses, harmonising the customer data across all of these categories sourced from different channels of sales – agents, branches, and online sales – is the first challenge that the organisation had to overcome and continue to optimise.
The second step is to convert this harmonisation into actionable insights that drive specific customer actions to cross-sell or upsell products. At Income Insurance, we have identified four key segments — young adults, independent adults, parents and seniors – and these data insights enable us to create targeted ad campaigns across various digital and offline platforms.
Has customer feedback influenced the promotional strategies or design of insurance policies? How so?
DA: Customer-centricity is the cornerstone of our business strategy.
Our ethos of “putting people first” exemplifies our commitment to create products and narratives that meet with customers’ needs and resonate with them, driving continuous revenue growth for the brand.
At Income Insurance, we are continuously keeping in step with market trends, technological advancements, and competition while actively engaging with our customers through various means to gather insightful feedback and understand their experiences. We also gather insights from our channels.
Customer feedback was key in the development of our new Complete Cancer Care and Complete Critical Protect products.
We received feedback that most insurance policies do not provide cover after one has been diagnosed with a critical illness. We further observed that more people are surviving critical illnesses, and these survivors have their whole lives ahead of them and will continue to need ongoing protection.
This is why Income Insurance launched the first products in the market that provide a guaranteed option to buy another life insurance plan with Complete Critical Protect and Complete Cancer Care plans, which extend the insured an added peace of mind even after a severe critical illness diagnosis.
Recognising the impacts of travelling without proper protection and the continued perils of Covid-19, we created an 18-minute horror film, ‘TRAPPED’, to raise public awareness and campaign about the enhanced Covid-19 coverage of our travel insurance plan. Directed by renowned local director, Kelvin Tong, ‘TRAPPED’ depicted the horrors of being trapped in a sub-par hotel after contracting Covid-19.
Together with the film, we also launched an escape room inspired by its narrative, which was experienced by 2,600 visitors. The effective campaign resulted in a revenue growth of 45.2% and a 61.1% uplift in customer acquisition, marking the impact of such innovative, untraditional marketing strategies. It was also recently recognised as Gold awardee at the WARC Awards Asia Pacific in the “Instant Impact” category.
SNACK by Income, the first bite-sized, stackable insurance that integrates seamlessly into everyday lifestyle activities, was based on 10 months of research including consumer interviews. Customer feedback prompted us to realise that they not only needed a new insurance product, but an entirely different way of purchasing insurance altogether, so we developed a business model that grants flexibility to consumers as to when, how much and how long they want to get covered for.
We are always listening to our customers. In 2023, we conducted about 300 hours of dialogue with our customers via our ‘Customer Connects’ sessions.
What challenges have you faced in marketing insurance products? How did you utilise technology or data to overcome them?
