Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Sunday, Mar 24, 2002
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Sunday, Mar 24, 2002 |
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Investment World
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Life Insurance licindia.com: Ensuring information, practically Anand Ram
ONLINE availability of data is now de-rigueur to disseminating information. What is the key information insurance companies would do well to give out? What is that influences a customer's decision to buy insurance? The premium rates. Almost all companies in the nascent private insurance sector have their premium rates online, either in the form of charts or calculators. Others that do not, give an idea of your payment obligations through a policy benefit illustration. However, a company that wins hands down over the rest, in making its premium and bonus rates transparent across almost all its policies is the Life Insurance Corporation of India. LIC has an on-line premium calculator that readily gives your premium commitments based on such parameters as the age, the sum assured, the mode of payment and the term of the policy. LIC's Web site is very practical. The masthead on the home page has menu bars that link you to the `About Us' and `Contact Us' sections, a site map and the LIC Hindi Web site. The first section is divided into `Know us', `Our Commitment' and the `Financials' segments. The Know Us segment states the corporation's objectives, vision, mission statement, and areas of operations. It also tells you how its IT initiatives are implemented and hooks you up with its interactive voice response numbers across its branches. The `Commitments' section makes available a citizen's charter while the `Financial' section gives out the corporation's operational numbers. The exhaustive list of mail addresses and phone numbers of the various functional departments gives you an idea of the spread of LIC's operations. The company also showcases its national presence through an attractive `map of India' interface. The home page also has another menu bar that has online premium payment and policy status options. LIC has tied up with HDFC Bank, UTI Bank, Bank of Punjab, and ICICI Bank and independent outfits such as Billjunction.com and timesofmoney.com to enable policy-holders pay their premiums online. The product section informs you of LIC's Individual plans, group schemes, pension plans and market-linked plans. The Services section tells you how your grievances are redressed and has a helpline to iron out minor issues on the policy bought. LIC has also made available online various forms for death claims, maturity claims, survival benefit claims and proposal forms that can be downloaded either as a Portable Document Format or a Word document. This section also features a customer services corner where issues, such as policy alterations, nomination, assignment, how and where to pay premiums, grace period, policy loans, surrender value, maturity, death or disability claims and contents of a policy document, are addressed. The policy conditions subsection provides insight into the fineprint of a policy contract. LIC India.com is a Web site all of you may browse before buying a policy, as it forms the bedrock of the country's insurance business at present. This state-run monolith's informational utility comes through in its web pages that seem to reflect all developments on the brick and mortar front. A case for an e-perestroika?
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