Challenge

Income Insurance Limited (Income), established in 1970, currently serves 1.7 million people in Singapore.

Before COVID-19, insurance was an industry where offline sales channels were the business’ primary revenue drivers. Data sources predominantly came from agents, representatives and financial advisors, who played a significant role in building customer relationships on behalf of Income. 

However, since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the insurance industry has had to pivot quickly to digital channels to ensure a steady revenue stream. 

Income faced challenges in transforming its legacy systems and processes into meaningful digitisation to create excellence in omnichannel customer experiences (CX). Therefore, it was difficult for Income to  increase its digital presence to sell beyond its footprint and remain ahead of the competition. 

These challenges, compounded by the sea of messaging and outreach by competitors that were also trying to capture digital audiences simultaneously, led to a lack of, if not a total absence of personalised customer experience and low campaign engagement rates, which led to the loss of market share. 

Solution

To overcome these challenges, Income and Merkle Singapore created a centre of excellence and migrated a significant proportion of Income’s customers into operationally-efficient online interactions.

Income and Merkle Singapore also identified the need to move beyond just knowing Income’s customer preferences to data democratisation across the whole organisation to allow real-time unified personalisations across different online and offline channels. 

This is achieved by expanding its Customer Omni Data Insights (CODI) dogma to a Customer Omni Data Activation (CODA).  

In the past, CODI allowed Income to generate insights from multiple sources on the preferences of their customers and prospects and consolidate them into a single Data Puddle & data strategy. While this helped inform their promotion offerings, messaging & product teams to target their customers better, the next phase was to go beyond just knowing customers’ preferences to enhance the customer experience across all digital touchpoints. 

CODA was conceived to ensure that real-time data can be activated across omnichannel to allow Income to identify its audiences’ preferences while allowing the different teams within Income access to this data. The CODA approach prioritises data democratisation to enable Income to stitch a unified customer experience while allowing synchronous personalisation across products, digital interfaces, digital ads and agent outreach. 

To lay the foundation for superior customer experience, Merkle Singapore onboarded a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to help consolidate and activate unified customer experiences across the different channels, informed by the robust data foundations laid over the last five years. 

Utilising the PISA (Pre-collect, Ingest, Segment, Activate) principle, Merkle Singapore took a long-term view on collecting actionable data points and placed emphasis on ‘pre’-collection to ensure that we do not make the mistake of only collecting data when they need them because it will be too little, too late.

The data was collected from different sources such as digital interactions (web), Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), historical digital interactions that were stored in Google Cloud and progressive profiling data from SAP Gigya. 

The CDP was deployed to integrate the data from various marketing platforms, such as Google Analytics 360, Google Tag Manager 360, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Facebook Conversions API, Google Cloud Platform, into a centralised location to create a democratised source of truth for data activation.

The CDP deployment allowed Income to unify customer experiences across online to offline channels through O2O (Online to Offline) Conversion Mapping and build unified customer journeys across omnichannel touchpoints, thus enabling personalisation at scale. 

Audience segmentation allowed Income to gain a better understanding of its customers, which allowed them to upsell and cross-sell to its customers. 

A word from Income

"At Income, we are always asking ourselves how we can do more in terms of our digital business. As we get to know our customers’ preferences, what’s next for them? 

With Merkle Singapore as our technology partner, together we addressed these challenges to see how we can go above and beyond to deliver superior customer experiences across all touchpoints for our customers. With the development of the CODA framework and the CDP implementation in place, we were able to see results within a short period of time.”

Anny Huang, Income's VP and Head of Digital Growth