How MetLife Australia is using technology to deliver a better CX

TRADITIONAL businesses, especially in the financial services space might not be able to immediately dive into cutting edge technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) or the internet of things (IoT), but that doesn’t mean they can’t use technology to climb the digital maturity curve and improve the CX they provide to customers.

Take MetLife Australia for example. The company built a simple system to simplify the claims process for customers and won a place on the list of top leaders in insurtech for 2018 compiled by the Association of Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD).

For those outside Australia, ACORD is a 50-year-old an industry-owned non-profit organization that sets global data standards for insurers.

In an exclusive interview with Tech Wire Asia, MetLife Australia Senior Digital Product Manager Sourav Shah explains more about the solution, how it helps customers, and the technology it actually uses.

“In Australia, a life insurance claim as a member of a superannuation fund (retirement fund) can require multiple touchpoints with the fund itself, the fund administrator and the insurer. MetLife’s eClaims service simplifies the customer experience (CX) by facilitating the claims process through a single electronic form.”

Essentially, the digital service aggregates the claim with demographic and eligibility information already held by the fund or fund administrator to create a fast, seamless CX.

“The eClaims platform is helping reduce the time taken to process and approve claims (because it reduces the number of touchpoints and improves the accuracy of data submitted to the insurance company). We are now seeing claims approved within 1 business day – this is top quartile for the Australian industry.”

Although the platform is now an award-winning solution, the team has had to navigate through a few challenges to build something within the parameters set by regulators and other stakeholders in the industry.

One of the first challenges that Shah talks about was technical.

“Integration between eClaims and their administrator’s platforms. To achieve this in a “neutral” and repeatable manner, we worked with ACORD to leverage their global insurance standards to create this API: this work earned MetLife recognition as a global insurtech leader.”

The second challenge the team faced was usability. And that’s key to building a digital solution in this day and age.

“A significant amount of customer testing and experimentation was conducted to ensure it was as easy to use as possible and this has been proven in the positive resulting uptake.”

An exciting point to note about the way MetLife implemented this project and something that probably makes it an example for the entire financial services industry is the fact that the team ensured there was a focus on the customer’s needs and used technology to simply support that need.

In fact, it’s what paved the way for the company to roll it out the solution to customers.

In the future, of course, the sky is the limit and the team will, of course, explore how new technologies can help improve what they’ve built as they scale the eClaims platform to more superannuation funds and develop more functionality.

“Having captured claim information digitally through eClaims, we are now exploring applying AI /data analytics to further accelerate claim adjudication.”

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