Aditya Birla Capital’s Subsidiaries Record Over Four Million Customer Interactions on Digital Service Platforms

Aditya Birla Capital Limited (ABCL), the holding company of the financial services businesses of the Aditya Birla Group, recorded a significant rise in customer interactions on the digital channels of its subsidiaries. These interactions on platforms such as WhatsApp, Chatbots, Websites and Apps crossed the four million mark in the past three months during the Covid-19 lockdown, witnessing an almost 2X jump when compared to the same period last year. ABCL’s subsidiaries have been at the forefront of adopting new technologies for customer convenience. Several services like change of address on the website for the stock broking business or using WhatsApp for renewal of Health Insurance policies or registering SIPs for Mutual fund were introduced for the first time in the industry. The Mutual Fund business recently introduced Google Assistant based voice bot for the top customer queries. The Lending business and Mutual Fund business have developed a machine learning (ML) based email bot for automated servicing of over 30,000 customer queries a month

Over the last one year, ABCL’s subsidiaries have significantly ramped up their digital services across Websites, Chatbot and WhatsApp to ensure availability of over 94 per cent of their services online, as compared to about 71 per cent last year. This has been a huge advantage during the lockdown when customer and distributor onboarding and purchase journeys have been enabled digitally. The WhatsApp/Chatbot channel is now one of the most comprehensive in the financial services industry, offering over 180 services across the mutual fund, lending, housing finance, life insurance and health insurance businesses. The businesses witnessed WhatsApp emerging as one of the most preferred channels, with almost a million customer interactions since March’ 20.

Ajay Srinivasan, Chief Executive, Aditya Birla Capital, said, “Digital enablement to create a superior customer experience throughout the customer journey has been a key part of our agenda. This enabled us to proactively transform our customer journeys to being 100% digital during the period of lockdown. These capabilities held us in good stead when COVID hit the world and helped us to service our customers without any interruptions. We will continue to leverage new technologies to make our customer and distributor experience best in class.”    

Owing to the ongoing lockdown, there has been a shift in demand for zero contact and paperless purchase options. Last year ABCL’s subsidiaries had worked on developing non-contact, paperless, seamless purchase journeys across product lines through mobile apps and tabs. Many technologies such as biometrics, intelligent OCR, Video KYC, e-contracts were used for the first time in the industry. The NBFC and Mutual Fund businesses have been one of the first in the industry to launch video KYC for its customers. Over 90 per cent customers were on-boarded through digital channels alone in FY20, as compared to 72 per cent in FY19. The businesses deployed over 200 robotic processes (RPA) to automate mid-office and back office work.