The much-loved tablet device now has a fast-growing role as an all-in-one sales tool for life insurance distributors, especially in Japan. Amy Friedman explains.
Sitting with a client and showing sales videos, clicking on an application app to enter personal information, taking the e-signature and the first premium, then with the tap of a finger, sending the applicant’s information to underwriting might seem like many years from now. However, providers in several overseas markets have recently made it a reality.
Tablet devices are fast emerging as powerful presentation and product sales facilitators for life insurance agents in markets around the globe.
Tablets customised for life agents have already popped up in Japan, Singapore and Turkey, providing seamless integration of the sales process, from presentation to application to quote to underwriting to delivery.
In Japan, two life insurers – Sony Life Insurance Co and Taiyo Life Insurance Company – have issued their sales forces with tablets that integrate the sales process.
Taiyo Life’s tablet, now being used by the company’s 9,000 sales representatives, allows them to take applications, send the information to the home office, and produce the electronic declaration form.
Sales people can facilitate the applicant’s medical interviews using the tablet’s video function. The only function not automatic for the Taiyo tablet is underwriting, but information is sent to the office automatically.
Last October, Sony Life distributed 5,000 tablets customised for its insurance agents as a piece of Sony Life’s ‘Co-Creation Project,’ a programme launched in 2012 that seeks to provide high-quality consultation services to each of its life insurance clients. The tablets, provide an end-to-end sales process that focuses on insurance as a piece of a customer’s overall life-planning needs.
Customers provide information about health conditions to the adviser, who enters the data into the tablet’s software. The platform permits e-signatures and payment, and includes Customer Satisfaction Management (CSM) software.
This synchronizes with an agent’s smartphone and tablet, and is designed to enable agents to update each customer’s life plan and financial condition.
AIA Singapore’s tablet-based sales system, designed for iPads, is a fully mobile end-to-end life insurance sales quotation system. Now in use by 3,500 AIA financial services consultants in Singapore, its point-of-sale technology allows multiple quotations to be generated based on customers’ specific financial and protection needs.
The system, called iPoS, automates the sales process by implementing electronic application forms and e-signature acceptance capability. iPoS integrates with the company’s iPad-tailored sales quotation system as well, enabling a full end-to-end electronic sales platform.
