Award Applications

Digital Agency Workforce by Muang Thai Life Assurance

Muang Thai Life Assurance (MTL) is Thailand’s leading life insurance company. With our long-standing history, MTL remains committed to pursue our vision in becoming customers’ trusted lifetime partner through innovative life and health solutions by putting customers at the heart of everything we do. In actualizing this vision, corporate-wide digitization is vital, however, to truly create a lasting impact on customer experience, we continuously invest in our agency force, one of the main customer-facing taskforces, who plays a crucial role in distributing our products and upholding our reputation.

In 2016, MTL’s strong agency force of over 24,000 people contributes to THB 23.7 billion, leaving the company to stand at a strong number two in the industry. In the past five years, premium by the channel alone registers 14.7% in CAGR, which almost doubles the industry’s 7.4%. Such performance did not come smoothly. Our agency had faced various pain points along their journey, such as ineffective recruitment, inaccessible training, immobile sales process and un-digitized customer service. As part of our efforts to enhance our agency to remain competitive in the future, MTL has therefore utilized technologies to develop innovative solution along an agent’s journey.

Agency digital recruitment and management
Agent management starts as early as the scouting process, where we deploy online tools to create strong presence among Gen-Y prospects who express interests in becoming insurance agents. In addition, we also utilize Recruiting Application, the exclusively designed and developed application, as a tool to introduce and induce prospects into embarking on the career path with us. The application itself outlines the day of an agent’s life, benefits and perks, as well as the career development as an agent. After being recruited, each team is equipped with our web-based tool, SmartWeb, to manage day-to-day activities and overarching goals for the team. SmartWeb allows agents to stay afloat with streams of news, updates, sales illustration, performance reports, as well as customers’ portfolios. These functions have enabled our agents to service their clients more effectively, wherever they are.

Agent development
To stay competitive, MTL invests in skill development and knowledge sharing for our employees, as well as our agency force through our learning center, “Muang Thai Academy.” Available courses range from basic insurance knowledge to more advanced and specialized skills like tax planning, CFP and mini-MBA. With our agents’ need for mobility, we, therefore, launched our e-Learning platform, where our agents can access the knowledge bank and online courses anytime, anywhere. Besides, we also introduced exciting tools to enhance everyone’s learning experience, including real-time interactive tools for classroom participation and Investory, simulation software to familiarize agents with investment concepts. We continuously seek innovative tools to equip our agents with necessary knowledge and skills, because we understand that a capable agent can help our customers in many ways from selecting appropriate insurance plans for themselves and their loved ones to planning their personal finances.

 
Advisory-based sales process in a digital era
With an aspiration to become a digital insurer that stay connected to customer over lifetime, MTL has developed and launched numerous enabling technologies, such as Bizbox and Hearsay to unleash agents’ full potential for the greatest benefits of our customers.

To assist our agents’ advisory-based sales process, they also have access to MTL’s Bizbox (Business-in-the-box) – an iOS application that provides MTL agents with an end-to-end paperless sales and service processes, bringing together the essential sales, customer service, and management functions. Its functionality includes FNA (Financial Needs Analysis) to determine product suitability for customers, Smart proposal to calculate premium on-demand, E-Application to submit application and receive underwriting results instantly, mPOS to receive premium payment electronically, and High Q Agent to review their previous sales and upcoming premium due dates. To best serve existing customer, data analytics are also used to identify the next best offer, based on customer’s purchasing history, life stage, and lifestyle, enabling agents to recommend suitable products and close their sales more productively. Additionally, Bizbox also acts as a communication center between MTL and all agents, offering updates on sales promotions and agents’ activities. The app makes insurance purchasing experience more convenient and time-saving for both agents and customers and in return reduces costs by at least 10% compared to paper application.

One of the latest addition to our agency’s tool kit is Hearsay Social, the powerful social listening solution to maximize their opportunities to engage with customers along life journey. Today, Hearsay Social is implemented to monitor, track, and analyze customers’ social media information to assist our agents in adding professionalism to their social media profiles and sharing relevant content at the most effective timing which are aligned with their prospective and existing customers’ life events. Be it a career switch, marriage, or childbirth, the system provides the agents relevant information for a meaningful engagement and notifies agents of perfect opportunities to introduce relevant products that fit into customers’ financial needs.

These tools and initiatives have been beneficial to our agents in providing life planning to our customers, resulting in consistently high customer engagement scores for agents over the past years. Such success only propels MTL to continue seeking and innovating new solutions and platforms to simplify the lives of our agents. All the end-to-end digitization of our agency journey is one of the ongoing efforts to keep our agency force relevant in the fast-changing world. We firmly believe in growing our agents into strong force of reputation and true trusted lifetime partners, who will ultimately deliver the sustainable happiness to our customers.