Bajaj Allianz moved service fully remote in lockdown — grievances fell 90% (interview)
In an ETBFSI interview, operations head KV Dipu said lockdown digital pivots cut grievances to a tenth and pushed 80% of servicing onto digital channels.
What was changed
In an interview with ETBFSI published June 5, 2020, KV Dipu, head of operations and customer service at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, said the Covid lockdown 'has been a blessing in disguise': with outsourced call centers shut overnight, the insurer enabled work from home for all employees, ran a campaign pushing customers to digital channels, and found that consumer grievances 'are down by 90% and are at 10% of what it was prior to lockdown' — figures he self-reported. About 80% of servicing, he said, was now happening on digital channels.
The pivot had a trick for customers who still wanted a human: a missed-call service that converted inbound calls into outbound callbacks, replacing call-center monitoring that work-from-home had made impossible. Health underwriting went remote — doctors inspected customers over the phone in a new tele-medical process — and claims documents moved from courier and branches to app uploads and portal scans, which Dipu called 'absolutely paperless and seamless.' WhatsApp, bots and the Caringly Yours app carried the load, with humans stepping in inside the same chat when bots failed.
Dipu said the company would keep a 'phygital' mix as branches reopened — more than 100 were already open — but saw no reason to abandon work from home in cities like Delhi and Mumbai where one-way commutes exceed an hour. He flagged cyber-security as the biggest emerging risk of the unmonitored home workforce.
Why it worked
The lockdown removed the option of doing service the old way, so the bank — the insurer — stopped defending the channel that generated the complaints.
Converting inbound calls to outbound callbacks preserved access for touch-and-feel customers without rebuilding call-center monitoring.
The bot-to-human handoff inside one conversation kept digital self-service from becoming a dead end.
What can be applied
A forced remote cutover is the moment to retire the channel customers tolerated rather than liked — measure whether complaints fall, not just whether calls get answered.
Aftermath
As of the June 2020 interview, Bajal Allianz planned a hybrid 'phygital' servicing model and continued work from home in large cities, with cyber-security investment highlighted as the enduring priority of the remote setup.