How AI helped an insurance major improve its front-line employee retention | EY India | EY - India

A leading life insurance company implemented a strategic people initiative to hire and retain the best talent while leveraging AI technology.

The team

Photographic portrait of Anurag Malik

Partner and Leader, People Advisory Services, EY India

Photographic portrait of Neha Sharma

Partner, People Advisory Services, EY India

Digital Hiring

1

The better the question

Is sales force attrition a necessary cost of growth?

With a finite talent pool to tap into, an insurance company was seeking a technology-based solution to help it hire and retain the best talent while keeping costs low.

One of India's leading life insurance companies, a joint venture between two global conglomerates, registered phenomenal year-on-year financial growth in the past few years. It aimed to be one of the top five life insurers in India in the next 3-5 years. However, controlling the attrition rate of the sales force posed to be a major hindrance and was impacting its bottom-line.

The company operates in an industry which traditionally observed high attrition rates along with a finite talent pool. Reducing the attrition rate and driving sales productivity became a strategic priority for the company. The company was also aware of the need to build a digital-led modern organization with minimal disruption of existing business and people processes. Hence, the company wanted to drive a strategic people initiative to control attrition, hire and retain the best sales talent available in the market on the back of an efficient data-backed process, and thereby, improve the bottom-line of the company.

AI solutions for HR processes

2

The better the answer

An AI-focused solution helps diagnose core HR issues and make better decisions.

With the help of AI, the company was able to obtain a better view of its HR processes and make data-driven decisions.

EY TalentMiner - Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Digital Hiring Solution

EY TalentMiner – AI recruiting tool that helps organizations reduce time to hire, improve candidate experience and enhance quality of hire. Learn more about AI in recruitment.
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EY conducted a detailed diagnostic of the organization structure and developed imperatives to understand HR processes better. Key focus areas for the organization were:

Finalize current baseline attrition metrics and project success measures to review overall performance improvement directly resulting due to EY intervention
Have a scalable AI based algorithm to determine quality of every new hire and incorporate renewed technical assessments of candidates
Establish control levers to reduce dropouts across the hiring funnel
Establish an integrated and centralized HR function to build an accountability-based ecosystem to ensure improved retention of sales force and higher sales productivity measures
Develop robust data architecture to institutionalize factual decision making

EY worked on a 10-month-long HR transformation journey, while leveraging EY TalentMiner (an AI based digital hiring solution), which changed the way the client was functioning across its entire value chain.

The key initiatives of this digital transformation included:

Significant improvement in the data maturity index of the organization with single source database of every new joiner, which enabled easy access to any employee related information. This aided reporting and intelligence provided to the senior management anchored by the HR workstream.

Next Generation Route to Market Capabilities

3

The better the world works

The manufacturer increased market coverage, built customer loyalty and boosted sales.

The company witnessed better performance across all aspects of their envisioned growth targets.

Over a period of just 10 months, the client started to reap the benefits of the integrated business and HR transformation initiative. The benefits came in the form of significant reduction in attrition related costs, enabling the client to improve its growth trajectory. This included:

How EY TalentMiner improves the business performance

Some of the more qualitative benefits delivered included efficient, scalable and robust HR processes, which were enabled and automated by an integrated technology backbone. Another key benefit included adoption of a data driven culture within the organization.

The overall HR transformation process helped the client create a more resilient and efficient recruitment ecosystem backed by modern technologies such as AI, which are not only future-ready, but also equipped to better manage market volatility.

Arijit Chakraborty and Gautam Kumar also contributed to the case study.

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