Spotlight on health

The recent COVID-19 outbreak has impacted millions of lives worldwide, reshaping economies and altering lifestyles. The pandemic has highlighted the importance of being prepared for unforeseen crisis – and pushed the need for health insurance to the forefront.

Before COVID-19, health insurance in India was more discretionary spending. Over the last five years, the health insurance market in India has been growing at a slow pace of 13% to 14% year-on-year without much change and of this the health insurance category remained underpenetrated.

However, the current pandemic changed this discretionary spend to mandatory. In June 2020, the government of India mandated health insurance companies to roll out a COVID-19 specific coverage plan within a period of 10 days. One company was well-prepared to handle this challenge, thanks to the digital transformation journey it had already undertaken just a year prior.

Max Bupa, founded in 2008, is one of India’s leading health insurance companies, catering to more than 3 million lives across the country. The company has been growing at a steady pace of 35% CAGR for the last five years. However, until recently, the role of digital in its growth had been minimal, contributing only 5% to the overall business. But Ashish Gupta, Chief Technology Officer at Max Bupa wanted to change this — he set sights on making Max Bupa, a digital-first company.

Taking a digital-first approach

Over the last few years, the health insurance ecosystem has been steadily shifting to a paperless model. Max Bupa established its digital presence in 2020, with the launch of its website. However, despite the convenience of an online platform, consumers still relied on intermediaries such as agents or tele-callers for assistance.

The ‘Research Online, Buy Offline’ model was also prevalent, where a consumer would gather all the product-related information online but depended on a tele-caller to take the conversation forward. Almost 100% of Max Bupa’s digital sales were driven through the tele-agent model because its digital platform was not designed with a focus on customer experience.

To attain the vision of becoming a digital-first company, Max Bupa needed to sharpen its digital strategy and create a completely unaided model where consumers could buy insurance end-to-end online. The company needed to build better customer connections, more personalized customer experiences, and higher engagement to encourage online buying of insurance. Max Bupa also wanted to attract younger consumers and bring down the median age of buying health insurance from 36 years to 24 years.

To achieve this, the company needed a suite of tools that would work seamlessly to drive its digital evolution and recreate a digital platform that was flexible, scalable, and robust.

In 2019, Max Bupa decided to partner with Adobe and make Adobe Experience Cloud the backbone of its digital transformation journey. “Adobe Experience Manager, along with Adobe Analytics, Adobe Campaign and Adobe Target, helped stitch together different aspects of the consumer buying journey and create a dynamic, contextual, and seamless customer experience with fast turnaround time,” says Ashish Gupta, Chief Technology Officer at Max Bupa.

Empowering the customer

Putting the customer at the center of the digital transformation journey, Max Bupa ran a survey to understand their digital buying preferences. The idea was to design a customer experience that would deliver exactly what they want. The survey results highlighted three aspects that affect consumer buying decision — knowledge about the Max Bupa brand and its offerings, awareness of the company's network strength, and the ease of engagement. Max Bupa made the tough call of including these experience fragments on the home page at the risk of affecting page performance to help customers in their decision-making journeys.

To showcase its network strength and ease of accessibility, Max Bupa incorporated Google Maps on the website’s home page. Customers could zoom in to see the network of hospitals in their vicinity, down to the closest town or village. There was a concern, however, about Google Maps affecting the page performance since the application takes time to load. But with Adobe Experience Manager, Max Bupa successfully implemented Google map API on the home page while keeping the page load speed at an industry best of 2 to 4 seconds.

A major challenge Max Bupa’s customers faced while using the old website was choosing the right insurance product due to lack of information. “There was no way to showcase the difference between our numerous insurance offerings,” says Akshay Vaidya, AVP - Digital at Max Bupa. “In the new website, with the help of Adobe Experience Manager, we created a configurator that projects the comprehensive differences between the products and suggests the right one based on the user’s requirements.”

To keep the process seamless and unaided, Max Bupa also created an insurance calculator that calculates not just based on your specific details but also different diseases and provides personalized suggestions. While Adobe Experience Manager was the architecture and content management system that helped build the website, Adobe Analytics and Adobe Campaign powered the path to personalization and better customer engagement for Max Bupa.

Personalization to the max

Before Adobe came on board, Max Bupa’s website didn’t capture customer details at a granular level, for example where they were coming from or, more importantly, if they were a new or returning customer. Health insurance is a high gestation product where a person can take from a few weeks to several months before making a purchase. In such a scenario, it is crucial to be able to differentiate between a new and returning customer to initiate conversations accordingly. Unable to provide returning customers with a suitable experience, Max Bupa was experiencing many drop-offs. With Adobe Analytics, there was finally a solution.

Max Bupa could now access multiple customer touchpoints across platforms and channels. The company could track where the traffic was coming from, which device prospective customers were using, what products they were looking for, and at what point they exited. The entire experience was integrated with Adobe Campaign that further collected and added data to the already created customer profile.

For the first time in years, Max Bupa had a 360-degree understanding of its customers, especially the returning users, and could finally provide them a more engaging and relevant experience. Adobe Analytics helped Max Bupa discover that it had almost 40% returning customers. Since the launch of its new website in February 2020, Max Bupa witnessed a 70% surge in visitors and the bounce rate reduced from 85% to 40%. With the right platform, Max Bupa now has the capability to launch new products faster. “With Adobe Experience Manager, we can restructure experiences faster as it allows the experience fragments and components to be easily reused to stitch the entire product structure seamlessly,” says Gupta. This was one of the key factors that helped Max Bupa launch its COVID-19 specific product within just seven days.

Marching ahead with Adobe

Corona Kavach Plan, launched in July 2020, was the first product to be introduced on the new website since it went live in February. With the help of the agile platform, Max Bupa was among the earliest companies to take the product live within just seven days with a complete digital end-to-end experience. Since its launch, almost 95% of Max Bupa’s consumers have bought Corona Kavach Plan online, fully unaided.

The successful launch of the Corona Kavach is testimony to the fact that while health insurance might be a complex product, customers are willing to buy it online provided they have the right experience. The digital contribution to Max Bupa’s business has increased from 5% to 15% in the few months since the transition. Max Bupa is completely focused on strengthening its digital journey and redefining the process of buying insurance online.

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