Aditya Birla Capital’s subsidiaries cross the 4 million mark in digital interactions

By Edil Corneille

End to end financial solutions provider Aditya Birla Capital Limited (ABCL), the holding company of the financial services businesses of the Aditya Birla Group, has witnessed a significant increase of customer interactions on the digital channels of its subsidiaries. The company apprised that it crossed the 4 million mark in terms of the interactions which transpired on platforms such as WhatsApp, chatbots, websites and apps, in the past 3 months during the COVID-19 lockdown. This was almost 2X jump compared to the same period last year.

Ajay Srinivasan, Chief Executive, Aditya Birla Capital encapsulated, “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.”

ABCL’s subsidiaries have significantly ramped up their digital services across various channels over the last year. The company stated that this was to ensure the availability of over 94 per cent of their services online, as compared to about 71 per cent last year. 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.

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digitalisation among banks in India as well as globally as customers are wary to visit branches with social distancing being the norm currently.

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In a press release, the bank mentioned that, “…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.”

Owing to the ongoing lockdown, there has been a shift in demand for zero contact and paperless purchase options. Last year the 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. The NBFC and Mutual Fund businesses have launched video KYC for its customers. Over 90 per cent of customers were onboarded through digital channels alone in FY20, as compared to 72 per cent in FY19. The businesses mentioned that it deployed over 200 robotic processes (RPA) to automate mid-office and back-office work.

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