Building a Digital Ecosystem for Solving Customer Problems
Sumeet Aggarwal, CTO, ManipalCigna Health Insurance is building a future-ready digital ecosystem that’s agile, scalable, and deeply customer-centric.
Since joining the Company, my journey has been both dynamic and rewarding. With over seven years in the insurance space, I’ve always believed that innovation should be grounded in solving real customer problems. At ManipalCigna, we’ve focused on building a future-ready digital ecosystem that’s agile, scalable, and deeply customer-centric while in parallel working on some foundational capabilities which help us be ready for future. We pulled together a data lake which is now the powerhouse for the entire AI capabilities and customer journeys.
We introduced several key interventions, including the launch of Expert Assist, an AI-powered chatbot designed to provide real-time support with intelligent escalation to live agents. We also leveraged AI and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to streamline backend operations, particularly in claims and servicing. We additionally, leveraged AI for predictive analysis of claims, contact centre auto response to emails, fraud detection models to prevent abuse.
Beyond automation, a unified 360-degree view of the customer has helped us deliver contextual and personalized experiences across channels.
We have enhanced and enabled sales with a simple yet powerful customer onboarding platform and a distribution platform with real time dashboard for agent hierarchy to manage, track and engage with leads and customers, helping them in smooth servicing and renewals. Our e-servicing portal and mobile app has helped moved 50% of traffic from call centre to self-service, giving superlative experience to customers.
Ultimately, every intervention has been aimed at simplifying customer journeys and improving internal efficiencies which in turn gives superlative experience to customers in terms of reduced TATs.
Our digital initiatives have delivered strong, tangible outcomes. Fraud detection has improved, with systems that can now flag suspicious patterns in real-time, enhancing trust and reducing fraudulent instances.
More importantly, we’ve made the insurance experience simpler and more intuitive for our customers. From managing policies to accessing documents or filing claims, everything can now be done through our mobile app or chatbot, eliminating paperwork and delays, providing a personalized experience to our customers. On the operations side, automation has helped us reduce manual interventions, improve consistency, and lower operational costs. At ManipalCigna, our focus remains on leveraging technology not for its novelty, but for its ability to genuinely improve customer outcomes. We’re building solutions that empower users and offer them choices tailored to their needs, meaningfully over time.
Every technology transformation comes with its own challenges, and ours was no different. One of the biggest foundational requirements for any AI-led transformation is data. Managing and safeguarding data is complex and requiring rigorous governance frameworks and adherence to principles like Zero Trust security.
For instance, while developing the chatbot, one major challenge was ensuring seamless handover to live agents without disrupting the user experience. Adding voice support and preserving conversational accuracy required several rounds of training and refinement.
Our mobile app also evolved into a comprehensive self-service platform, which meant balancing rich functionality with ease of use. This required careful UI/UX planning and multiple iterations. On the backend, implementing RPA involved identifying the right processes, ensuring compliance, and managing change across teams. These challenges reminded us that successful transformation is as much about mindset and collaboration as it is about the technology itself. These challenges were about prioritising based on value rather complexity. The devil is in details, making sure its digitised and automated fully end to end rather only at the touchpoints. The nuances and use case lie in catering to not just happy paths but also corner cases and negative scenarios.
The past year and a half have reinforced a number of critical learnings. One of the biggest takeaways is that simplification, reusability and scalability matters. Particularly in health insurance, where the volume and complexity of data can be overwhelming, simplifying claim processes has a direct impact on customer satisfaction. While there have been industry firsts highlighting examples of three-second claim settlements, our aspiration is to focus not just on speed but on accuracy and transparency in every customer interaction.
We’ve also learned that data hygiene and governance are non-negotiable. As we move toward more AI and GPU-driven analytics, ensuring clean, secure, and well-structured data is essential. Technology can only be effective when built on a solid foundation of reliable data.
Another important learning is the growing value of personalization. Customers today expect services that are not only fast but also relevant to their unique needs. By building deep customer insights into our systems and enabling self-service tools, we’re empowering users in a way that aligns with modern needs.
Finally, it’s clear that strong cross-functional collaboration, between tech, product, operations, and compliance, is what turns digital strategies into successful outcomes. At ManipalCigna, we use technology as a lever to make health insurance simpler, faster, and more personal, with the customer at the heart of everything we do. We are growing at a rapid pace and the systems we build have to be scalable to be able to take this volume with no major interventions.
Read more here: https://cio.financialexpress.com/interviews/building-a-digital-ecosystem-for-solving-customer-problems
