Singlife brings the personal touch to mobile-first insurance with Twilio and WhatsApp
Time to read: 2 minutes
Singlife, a mobile savings and protection company based in Singapore, began with a simple idea: reimagine the way people experience insurance and make it better for them. In 2017, the company was among the first to offer a platform for consumers to purchase insurance policies entirely online, without speaking with a financial advisor or agent.
The immediate success from this prompted Singlife to fix bigger problems that plague the consumer financial industry in Singapore, particularly the challenge of managing finances when money is spread across insurance, wealth management, and savings.
Enter Singlife’s flagship product, Singlife Account, an app-based insurance savings plan that allows customers to easily manage, grow, and protect their finances on a mobile device.
As a young brand with a unique and untested offering, Singlife recognized that providing exceptional customer service was key to building trust and making the Singlife Account a success.
A solution for customer engagement
Singlife first turned to Twilio’s Programmable Messaging API for its SMS platform, deploying an SMS solution rapidly to better communicate with users for things like alerts and one-way notifications. But while SMS was an immediate solution for that challenge, it needed a complementary channel to handle more complex customer queries, especially those about products as nuanced as insurance.
What the team needed was a way to provide the personal, trusted touch that financial advisors bring to insurance, but on a platform more familiar and comfortable to the mobile-first user.
The answer was the WhatsApp for Business API.
To make Singlife’s WhatsApp experience more intuitive, the customer service team needed to be able to identify who each customer was from the moment a message is received. This required WhatsApp messages to be routed through Singlife’s Salesforce omni-channels. To enable this, Singlife used Twilio’s Programmable Messaging API and designed a customized platform, integrating customer profiles with WhatsApp messaging for a more seamless experience.
“We wanted our customer service to be as mobile-first as possible. Our partnership with Twilio has allowed us to double-down on this, and to be among the first fintechs in Singapore to offer consumers with a WhatsApp focussed customer experience. With the customised platform, we are able to operate with a leaner and more efficient CX team, making sure that all queries between different contact channels are managed seamlessly.”
Building trust with customers, powered by Twilio
Through the WhatsApp Business API with Twilio , Singlife’s messaging experience now allows for:
- Instant identification of customers:By matching the sender’s WhatsApp number to the mobile number registered with the Singlife Account in its Salesforce database, customer service representatives get a full view of customer profiles and history the second a message is received.
- Tracking of interactions between customers and customer service representatives:Efficient process in allocating messages to customer service representatives online, based on recent activity with the customer. If a representative isn’t online, messages will be routed to the next person available. If all representatives are offline, messages received are routed as an offline case, and shared with the first representative that comes online.
With this feature, different customer service representatives can troubleshoot one issue seamlessly, by constantly engaging in dialogue with the customer, while solving the issue internally. Any customer service representative can keep the customer updated on the status of their query at any point in time.
Collectively, this ensures a customer feels like they are communicating with a single person who knows the entirety of their inquiry, preventing disruption to customer conversations and information silos that are typically experienced with traditional customer service hotlines.
Since launching support for WhatsApp, Singlife has already received substantial positive feedback, with customers stepping forward to commend its responsive and helpful customer service. The platform has also been instrumental in facilitating onboarding, with WhatsApp conversations with customers proving to double their chances of becoming a verified Singlife Account user.
Singlife raises the bar for financial services in Singapore
As Singlife looks to deliver a wider and more connected range of financial products, the WhatsApp Business API with Twilio will continue to anchor its customer experience and bring a more trusted and personal touch to the Singlife experience.
“Twilio’s account team has been quick to resolve our challenges, and has provided support in a timely manner. As Singlife expands on our offerings, we are confident that Twilio’s solutions will scale with us, ensuring that our customers experience the best of our brand and products.”
