A commitment to improve services and communication with its customers led to a 500 per cent increase in the scale and reach of miLife’s mobile life-insurance product miWay in 2020.

The significant increase in the reach of miWay shows the strong need for affordable, accessible insurance among Ghana’s emerging consumers amid the pandemic.

Consumers sign up to and pay for miWay insurance through their mobile phone account making it easily accessible, and starting at US62¢ a month, affordable. It is principally focused on covering funeral expenses, which can be a debilitating cost for Ghanaians.

The product is key to miLife’s strategy to reach informal workers and now covers 343,362 emerging consumers and households in Ghana. And it serves the need they have, with 90 per cent of emerging consumers’ claims paid, from a total of 32,779 claim payments made in 2020.

“The product forms a core part of the company (and LeapFrog’s) strategy to increase the informal market reach through mobile-led product distribution. The company has achieved very strong results,” explains LeapFrog impact labs senior manager Roshni Bandesha.

During the year LeapFrog’s CX (Customer Experience) experts worked with miLife to improve the collection of insurance premiums and the number of new customers self-registering for miWay through their mobile phone. Three problems for emerging consumers were targeted: having trouble reading payment reminders, not understanding policy terms, and being unable to pay premiums.

LeapFrog’s CX Launchpad program builds digital experience capabilities in the portfolio companies. As participants, the miLife team learned to research customer issues, prepare solutions and test them in the market. The understanding gained from this process led to several changes making miWay more accessible and easier to pay for: changing the billing cycle, communicating to clients using simple text and images through WhatsApp, and in some cases using voice messages rather than SMS. The team also minimised the information required for new customers to register for miWay through their mobile phone.

The improved customer experience resulted in premium collections jumping 8 per cent and self-registrations of miWay increasing 27.8 per cent, comparing November 2020 with December 2020.

These latest improvements follow several years major CX transformation at miLife under the guidance of LeapFrog’s CX experts, and through execution by a revamped CX team at miLife. This team introduced a new approach to product development, including investigating customer experience to uncover their pain points.

This work led to the relaunch of miWay as a mobile phone based microinsurance product targeting emerging consumers, which has increased its reach into that market by 2295 per cent since December 2018. Other specific initiatives over this time include an app to calculate premiums in real time and an app for agents to track performance and commission-earning policies.

The overall benefits to miLife from these customer-experience projects include reduction in claims turnaround times, reduction in call drop rates, and reduction in application rejections. The net result – and the ultimate goal of miLife and LeapFrog – are better services and more protection for emerging consumers.