Emerging Project Lessons
Regular training of the IPs and ICs is critical. The IPs and ICs carry the message of insurance, hence they need to be completely aligned with the project’s objectives, and their skills need to be enhanced constantly. The insurance company initially provides the product knowledge and sales training, but this needs to be constantly reinforced at the local level.
Incentives structures need to take care of expenses. Some of the IPs were spending a lot of money while travelling to the customers place and so a decision was taken to introduce a fixed component in their compensation in addition to the percentage of commission.
Incentive mechanisms improve staff participation in enrollments. 
Since staff members of the federations had a long-standing association with the prospective beneficiaries, they were playing a significant role in helping the IPs and the ICs in consumer awareness, education and enrollments. An incentive mechanism was developed to take care of their interests and the time and effort they spent in the process. This has led to staff of federations playing a greater role in the enrollment process and has been a big help to the IPs. In the PALMA federation, for example, 80 per cent of the enrollment is staff-assisted; and in the RED federation, the entire enrollment is done by federation staff.
Use of mobile phones for enrollment has reduced policy issuance time. Under the manual process used by BAGI, insurance cards used to take 30 days to reach the customers. Under the mobile phone-based enrollment, confirmation is received instantly and the cards are available in six days. This is of great comfort to the customers as they receive proof of their enrollment much sooner.
Date of last Learning Journey update: June 2011
