Businesses now need to respond to customers’ willingness to come online: Mayank Bathwal

The sixth edition of the exchange4media Content Jam, held in Mumbai on December 8, saw the coming together of industry heads from across categories, as well as marketing experts and ad bosses, for a day filled with engaging and interesting conversations and discussions.

Mayank Bathwal, CEO- Aditya Birla Health Insurance, started the day, speaking to Nawal Ahuja, Co-founder, exchange4media, in a freewheeling conversation on ‘how the BFSI sector is using marketing effectively to get millions of people to insure their lives’.

Perhaps only naturally, the conversation began with Covid-19 and its impact, with Ahuja observing that while digital penetration and awareness around health had significantly gone up during the throes of the pandemic, the same had since waned.

On being asked how the insurance sector had been impacted by the same, Bathwal started by noting he was a business head, and not a marketing expert. “Like every other sector, we were affected by how people looked at digital, because there was no other option. The physical world was non-existent. There were two-three things that impacted us specifically. There was always a portion of the population that was already comfortable with digital, but there was also a portion that wasn’t and they also switched to digital,” he shared.

As an example, Bathwal spoke about one of his company’s products, called ‘Doctor on Call’, which nobody used to use. “We introduced it very early, and no one ever used it. We were well ahead of our time in 2016 when we brought in that facility. Suddenly, during Covid, it became a huge hit because digital was the way of interactions.”

Furthermore, Bathwal spoke about how the push towards digital allowed the brand to reach out to customers at scale, and, more importantly at a hyper personal level.

The CEO of Aditya Birla Health Insurance then went on to go into the nitty-gritty of the business, explaining, “We run our health insurance business very differently from what you’d traditionally experience from the same. Health insurance is usually what I’d call sickness insurance or sickness funding, and I don’t think that's the way the category can run because you’re building a lifelong relationship with a consumer that needs to be more meaningful and more positive, rather than fear engagement.”

 “We are a health-first insurance service, which engages with our customer first on health, and then insurance if something happens. Now something like that needs high-scale engagement, and needs to be very personal, which we excel at,” he said, adding that the pandemic saw that digital adoption go up, and open up to new categories like senior citizens, who were earlier wary of coming online for such important things.

“Now it’s up to businesses to respond to customers’ willingness to come online in a way that makes it more relevant to them. This is the response we’ve got from them, and now it’s our time to respond back to them in a meaningful way,” said Bathwal.