GGI Nippon Life is building customer trust in Myanmar with Salesforce

Myanmar insurance company GGI Nippon Life is meeting rapidly developing customer expectations with an ongoing commitment to digital transformation.

Grand Guardian Insurance (GGI) has been bringing peace of mind to the people of Myanmar since 2013. The home-grown insurance company quickly built its reputation as the one of the most trusted names in Myanmar’s developing insurance industry.

In 2019, GGI partnered with Nippon Life Insurance Company to provide life insurance under the joint venture GGI Nippon Life. Under this exciting partnership, GGI Nippon Life will provide localised insurance with global expertise and accelerate the development of Myanmar’s rapidly evolving insurance market.

“The life insurance market in Myanmar is very young. It is probably the last frontier market in the Asia Pacific region,” says Tan Yeow Hau, CEO, GGI Nippon Life. “When we started in 2013, most things were done manually. Internet across the country was patchy and smartphone penetration rates were low.

Much has changed in just a handful of years. Internet connectivity has vastly improved, and the people of Myanmar are widely embracing technology with almost 80 per cent of people now owning a smartphone, and access to information has become much easier.

“Customer expectations are rising as a result,” says Yeow Hau. “Prior to 2019, foreign insurance companies were not permitted to operate in Myanmar. That meant local insurance companies were focused on simple products because we didn’t have the expertise to do what companies in major markets could do. Good customer service just meant fast policy approvals and paying claims on time. But that’s changed.”

GGI has focused on customer centricity since the company’s launch in 2013. However, the partnership with Nippon Life was a catalyst for the new joint venture to redefine what it means to be customer centric.

“We understand that true customer centricity isn’t just about delivering basic insurance services. It’s really about understanding the needs of our customers, and how they change through different life stages,” says Yeow Hau. “Our customers could be with us for the next 20 to 50 years, and it’s likely their insurance needs will substantially change during that time.”

To understand customer needs, the company needed a way to drive more meaningful conversations between salespeople and customers. And their locally developed legacy insurance policy core system wasn’t getting the job done.

“There was not much legacy to speak of when we started,” says Yeow Hau. “Our insurance core held policy information we were capturing from our customers, but there was no customer portal, no CRM, and no real analytics.”

Yeow Hau and team decided Salesforce’s Customer 360 suite was the way forward and to use an initial Service Cloud deployment to build a business use case with the HR team.

Through the Service Cloud pilot, the HR team is now able to digitalise several processes relating to creation of job positions, job applications by candidates, and candidate selection. HR employees no longer have to print out manual forms to seek approvals, and information from manual job applications has been replaced by electronic job applications, facilitating easy tracking and reporting. Information about previous applicants is well maintained and serves as a future talent pool for the company to draw upon when required.

“We started our Salesforce journey at the beginning of 2020 with a Service Cloud deployment to help our HR team manage talent acquisition,” explains Hnin Sein, Deputy CEO, GGI Nippon Life. “It was a very fast deployment and the management team saw the advantage. That gave us the momentum to follow up with a Sales Cloud deployment.”

Yeow Hau says they needed a solution that was lightweight and returned business value in the shortest possible time. Sales Cloud ticked all the right boxes.

“It is Software as a Service (SaaS), we saved on buying hardware or incurring additional costs to engage extra vendors to handle information security related matters or custom build mobile apps for users. A lot of our salespeople are out in the field working on mobile tablets, and Sales Cloud was mobile-ready out of the box. This ease of configuration enabled us to build up our local expertise quickly.”

GGI Nippon Life took Sales Cloud live in early June 2020, and the results to date have been positive.

“We established operating procedures within every process with guidance and instructions,” says Manoranjan Sahoo, Chief Distribution Officer, GGI Nippon Life. “We also pre-set tasks salespeople need to complete at every stage, so it’s very clear what the next step is to progress the lead and eventually close an insurance sale.

“In June we closed about 50 policies with a small pilot team of five to six salespeople. That number doubled in August, and doubled again by December.

“Sales Cloud has also improved operational efficiency. Previously, our salespeople spent two to three hours per day on paperwork. That’s now down to 30 minutes or less.”

Improved conversion and efficiency is just the beginning, says Manoranjan. A 360-degree customer view is perhaps the most important benefit Sales Cloud has delivered.

“Some of our salespeople work out of the branches of our bank partners,” he explains. “They get referrals from the bank, register that information in Sales Cloud, and every single activity and meet-up with their customer is recorded.”

Manoranjan says this has been vital for building trust with customers. When salespeople leave the company, the data records remain for their replacement to seamlessly pick up and maintain customer relationships. And deep customer relationships are key to the company’s long-term strategy.

“For us, building trust with customers begins from the very first conversation our salespeople have with them,” Manoranjan explains. “Conversations are always focused on the customer’s current situation. We want to know their main concerns about life so we can start to build long-term customer relationships. Proposing insurance solutions to customers comes at a much later stage once we have a good understanding of the person’s financial situation and what they are really concerned about.”

Activity and conversation logs are stored and tracked in Sales Cloud to create a 360-customer view that is always at the fingertips of the sales team. This, says Manoranjan, was particularly valuable as the company dealt with Covid-19 lockdowns.

“The pandemic didn’t get really bad in Myanmar until September,” he says. “At that point we had already used Sales Cloud to digitise most manual workflows across our sales process with customer records stored within the system. This enabled us to keep productivity up and keep working remotely when our salespeople were unable to physically attend bank branches due to the pandemic.”

Looking to the future, Yeow Hau and his team will be further embracing digital transformation. He is expecting a spike in demand for new life insurance policies when the pandemic lifts and is preparing to meet it head on with a new development sprint.

“Many customers that come to us expect to see various combinations of insurance packages before they decide on the ideal one,” he explains. “We are building a quotation and benefit illustration engine in Salesforce. This will enable our salespeople to quickly and easily generate personalised proposals for a single customer inside Salesforce.”

Yeow Hau says his team is working with their Salesforce implementation partner to build the engine with Salesforce standard objects as far as possible.

“That means that we don’t have to invest in additional software, and are able to keep any custom development work to a minimum,” he says. “This has significantly shortened the development timeline and eliminated the need to set up a much larger support team to manage and maintain custom code and user change requests.”

The company is also using analytics through Tableau CRM to refine their sales model and ensure the company is well prepared to tackle the next big challenge.