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Aviva Life Insurance, joint venture between Aviva and Dabur, has its offerings spread across a whole range of policy options including whole life, endowment, child policy single premium, pension, term, fixed term protection plan, and a 5 year recurring premium investment cum protection plan. For providing efficient services to its customers across a wide and dynamic portfolio of products and services, the company is leveraging beyond the scope of the traditional means of communications for CRM.

Effectively complementing voice with data through the new age enterprise tool of SMS has helped in enhancing the customer services at costs lower than the traditional means. Apart from customer-centric application, the SMS tool is also being leveraged for dissemination of real times sales MIS to the company's internal customers, impacting operational efficiencies.

As part of the SMS application based on ValueFirst VelocityPlus SMS messaging platform, the customers can access their policy details. The company can also forward the policy related specific information. Aviva launched its SMS 'push' services for its customers in June 2003 followed by the introduction of SMS 'pull' services in April 2005. The SMS traffic has increased steadily since the launch, indicating a high usage pattern and favorable customer acceptance.

	How It Helped
	Enhanced customer services at low cost over traditional mode of communication Customers can reach from anywhere and select the mode of getting their policy information Immediate fulfillment More convenience to customers in accessing information Dissemination of real time sales MIS to internal customers Timely premium collection Enhanced productivity

Extending the traditional mode
Prior to implementation of the SMS system, the traditional mode of communication such as postal, courier, and tele calling were not robust and cost effective. 

There was need for a solution that would allow automated reminders for premium payments. According to Abhay Johorey, director-transformation and services, Aviva Life Insurance, overall a system was required to enable immediate fulfillment and customer convenience.

Aviva's SMS system is based on the 'ValueFirst VelocityPlus' solution, an enterprise-class SMS suite to send, receive, and process data via SMS transactions.

Further, VelocityPlus fulfilled any customer need related to SMS transactions in an automated or a manual mode as both the modes are supported.

Challenges
While the spurt in the SMS traffic is an indication of the mode's popularity among Aviva's customers, the company did face some initial challenges with respect to the adoption of the application. This was primarily the unwillingness of customers to provide their cell phone numbers. Furthermore, due to the large prepaid population, cell phone number changes frequently. As a result, one looses the essence of this utility as SMS goes to trusted cell phone number (cell phone which is registered with Aviva) only.

Benefits
The challenges notwithstanding the company has derived some key benefits in terms of more effective CRM leading to higher customer satisfaction, timely premium collection, enhanced productivity apart from a cost effective, reliable and efficient mode of data transmission. Additionally the messaging platform has enabled providing real-time critical information like sales leads, policy renewals and other MIS to its work force on the move. Thereby, helping reduce the response time considerably.

Shipra Arora
shipraa@cybermedia.co.in

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