With more than 10 years of experience, Exide Life Insurance Company Limited (Exide Life Insurance) is an established life insurance company serving more than one million customers in 200+ Indian cities. Headquartered in Bangalore, Exide Life Insurance distributes its products through key channels in a huge market that was dominated by state-owned entities until fairly recently.

Since opening up the sector to private players, competition has steadily increased. Despite having a web presence, technology limitations and staff time constraints meant the website was unable to support the large number of initiatives desired to reach new customers. This made it difficult for the company to meet changing business demands.

Exide Life Insurance engaged Idealake Information Technologies, a digital and web application development agency, to redesign and develop the website. Idealake provided the cutting-edge solutions needed to support the personalized digital activities in the company’s pipeline. Exide Life Insurance charged Idealake with creating a dynamic—yet agile—website that could be updated easily to meet changing market conditions. “Our website design philosophy mirrored Exide Life Insurance’s desire to break away from traditional, cluttered and static web design strategies. We were a good fit,” said Viraj Sawant, CEO, Idealake.

The site also had to meet several business needs. The company required a well-structured product section, a robust knowledge center that covered everything under the sun about insurance, a simplified online claim filing and premium payment interface, comprehensive customer services, planning tools and more, such as the ability to support content contributions from multiple owners.

“The website is now quintessentially modern, scalable and modular. This approach was perfected by bringing together Telerik Sitefinity CMS and Idealake’s Finance Frameworks,” said Sawant. “The result of our endeavor was to simplify complex life insurance concepts, making the information easy for consumers to digest.”

In terms of design approach, Exide Life Insurance went “design agnostic,” employing responsive web design and implementing across smartphones, phablets, tablets, desktops and laptops. The Telerik Sitefinity™ platform provided the flexibility to keep this principle at the core of Idealake’s design strategy.

Further, the Sitefinity framework enabled a huge amount of personalization. Idealake customized solutions and unique features to align with the company’s strategy to personalize activity for specific target groups. For example, the customer profiling feature displays personalized content based on one’s past visits.

Since Sitefinity CMS is extremely nimble, uploading and managing content was easy. This enabled the website to feature content from different owners, who would then be responsible for its upload, management and upkeep, making changes whenever desired.

As Exide Life Insurance is a compliance intensive organization, compliance, or “workflow,” was an additional feature built in the CMS. Integrating two levels of authorization ensured documents and information were only published after due diligence.

The Exide Life Insurance website received a positive reception and had strong post-launch traction. Refreshingly new age, yet simplistic, the website has copy that gets right to the point.

“We have literally changed the game when it comes to offering overall web user experience to our customers,” said Mohit Goel, Executive VP-Marketing, Exide Life Insurance. “Our new website is completely customer-centric. The intuitiveness, intelligence and interactivity offered by the website ensures that customers spend less time researching and more time exploring.”

Further, the website's appealing layout makes navigating easy and finding information quick. It offers customer friendly features, such as a well-structured product segment and an exhaustive insurance knowledge center. Customers can easily file claims, make premium payments, get insights into the network of advisors and partners, and even access financial planning tools. In the first six months post-launch, the company experienced:

• 31-percent increase in mobile traffic
• 39-percent increase in visits from tablet devices
• 13-percent drop in average mobile visit duration, meaning visitors quickly found what they needed

While desktop visits dropped 8 percent in the same period, the 39 percent increase in mobile traffic meant Exide Life Insurance was pulling in new users—just as it hoped.