Raising the bar: How Singlife elevated its customer experience through a customer-centric approach

Headquartered in Singapore, Singlife is a leading homegrown financial services company, offering consumers a better way to financial freedom. Through innovative, technology-enabled solutions and next-generation products and services, Singlife provides consumers control over their financial well-being at every stage of their lives.

In addition to a comprehensive suite of insurance plans, employee benefits, partnerships with financial adviser channels and bancassurance, Singlife offers investment and advisory solutions through its GROW with Singlife platform. It also offers the Singlife Account, a mobile-first insurance savings plan.

Singlife’s efforts to stay up to date with the times through its implementation of artificial intelligence (AI), reviewing and resolving customer pain points to deliver a superior customer experience, pioneering the digital underwriting processes among other digitalisation efforts, has made the company a recipient of three awards at the Digital CX Awards 2024, hosted by The Digital Banker, in Singapore.

Quality in Underwriting

As trailblazers in the insurtech space, Singlife has pioneered the digitisation of medical underwriting processes by integrating data science to enhance its underwriting model.

This innovation extends across life, health, and long-term care underwriting, pushing the boundaries of its assessment approach.

Furthermore, Singlife has introduced new digital services on its financial advisers’ portal, enabling advisers to efficiently address straightforward customer requests digitally. This initiative significantly reduces service request cycle times from 30 days to eight days for medical underwriting with eMedex, ensuring customers receive insurance coverage promptly.

To elevate the experience for its stakeholders, two crucial enhancements were implemented – reduction in underwriting approval time and empowering financial advisers through digital self-help services – both contributing to customer service excellence.

Giving a nod to Singlife’s underwriting customer journey, judges for the Digital CX Awards 2024 presented the firm with the Best Digital CX – Underwriting award.

Use of Data and Analytics

As an insurtech pioneer in AI adoption, Singlife is propelled by its commitment to customer-centricity to integrate cutting-edge technologies including AI and data analytics to optimise business operations and enhance efficiency, while elevating the experience for both customers and advisers.

Singlife has transformed its claims and underwriting processes, as well as key customer touchpoints to elevate overall customer satisfaction.

It introduced Aristotle, an intelligent lead allocation system, to cut down on the time consumed in allocating leads to advisers, enhance operational efficiency and ensure each customer inquiry is matched with the most suitable adviser.

Additionally, to offer a refined and personalised experience, Singlife implemented a propensity model which tailors interactions based on a customer’s individual likelihood of product interest and purchase. This multi-dimensional approach of assessing client behaviour has resulted in a 3x uplift in conversion rates.

Overall, these transformative changes have played a crucial role in optimising client engagement and maximising business potential. For this, Singlife was declared as the winner in the Best Use of Data and Analytics for CX – Insurance category at the Digital CX Awards 2024.

Leader in Customer Satisfaction

Singlife’s Project Serve saw cross-functional teams collectively reviewing over 40 customer pain points to prioritise the top 10 improvement areas and feasible initiatives that would have the greatest transformative impact on customer satisfaction.

The company primarily focused on harnessing data analytics to elevate customer engagement through the initiatives implemented on its digital platform.

In 2023, the project commenced with a kick-off workshop wherein representatives from various business units collaboratively reviewed customer pain points and prioritised initiatives. Through this workshop, the teams collectively identified the top 10 improvement areas and feasible initiatives to adopt and implement, aiming to enhance customer satisfaction in a meaningful way. These include:

Issue 1: Customers encounter errors on Singlife platforms/app without prompt notification or quick problem resolution.

Solution: Improve incident management procedures to proactively inform customers about platform issues through banners, login disablement, etc.

Issue 2: Customers may forget to renew their plans due to confusion about payment methods during the renewal process.

Solution: Establish a task force to review end-to-end renewal journeys, ensuring timely and clear content delivery through appropriate channels.

Issue 3: Customers face difficulty in self-serving on claims submission through the platform, relying on email and calls for support.

Solution: Revamp the web portal to allow electronic forms for claims submission.

Issue 4: Long wait times for query resolution due to a lack of automated status updates between service teams and relevant departments.

Solution: Streamline communication between internal and external teams/stakeholders in claims processing through process review.

Issue 5: Customers cannot check their claims status independently, leading to multiple calls for clarity.

Solution: Enable customers to check claim status independently via the MySinglife portal/ ClaimConnect, Singlife’s claims app designed for claims by employee/group medical benefits customers to offer customers a fast and convenient digital health insurance experience.

Issue 6: Inconvenience caused by limited payment/ refund options.

Solution: Continue efforts to introduce PayNow collection/payment on digital platforms.

Issue 7: Some customers face delays in receiving policy documents and notifications.

Solution: Enhance the inbox feature by centralising the notification system on the MySinglife portal for easy access to all policy documents.

Issue 8: Customers cannot perform basic self-serve tasks across all platforms due to unsynchronised information.

Solution: Singlife’s ongoing BetterProfile initiative aims to unify customer data, ensuring updates on one platform reflect across all systems.

Issue 9: Current web and portal self-help features do not meet all customer needs, resulting in increased support requests.

Solution: Review and improve website help pages, compile FAQs into a searchable help centre for prompt customer assistance.

Issue 10: Lack of ‘autofill’ functionality for customer details during online purchases increases effort for repeat customers.

Solution: Encourage customers to log in during the purchase journey based on provided data and connect logins from the customer portal to the Quote-and-Buy journey.

Singlife’s efforts to not just address customer pain points but also tackle them with efficient solutions, was lauded by The Digital Banker, which presented it with the Excellence in Next-Gen Customer Satisfaction – Insurance award.

Singlife initiated several digitalisation efforts in 2023, focusing on achieving high Straight Through Processing rates to ensure customers’ requests are fulfilled quickly and accurately.

These advancements have enhanced the customer journey in terms of quicker claim approval and claim handling times, resulting in elevated customer satisfaction, trust, and operational efficiency, and for this, the company was also highly acclaimed in the Best Digital CX – Claims category at the Digital CX Awards 2024.