MetLife · 2015–2018
VR sales and service for life insurance
In India, death is taboo, so nobody wants to talk about life insurance. At 23 I pitched a virtual reality story that has that conversation for the customer. A working prototype beat three slide decks, and MetLife put it in 15 branches.
What happened
- 20,000+ customers served in 15 branches across 10 cities,and over 90% of them rated the experience positively.
- Innovation of the Year 2017 at the Asia Insurance Industry Awards,prime-time news on NDTV, and case studies from IDC and the Institute of International Finance. Coverage in 120+ publications, worth $3M in advertising terms.
- Pitched at 23, then hired to build it.After the win, MetLife's innovation lab in Singapore hired me away to finish it inside one of the fifty largest companies in the United States.
The problem
Nobody wants to talk about death across a desk with a stranger.
In India, talking about death is taboo. Families don't plan for it, and a life insurance conversation asks a customer to imagine the worst thing that could happen to them, across a desk, from a stranger. Agents struggled to start that conversation, let alone finish it.
With conVRse the customer does not have to imagine it. Instead of a sales pitch, they watch a story.
The pitch
The other three finalists came with slides. I came with a working prototype.
I was 23 and working in the managing director's office at PNB MetLife, MetLife's Indian joint venture, when I submitted conVRse. It made the final four. I partnered with Ramneek Jain, head of customer success, and a young VR studio in India, and we built a prototype you could put on and use.
At the finals in Singapore, we put the headset on Chris Townsend, CEO of MetLife Asia, and he went through the whole story himself. He took off the headset. Then he sat through three slide decks from the other finalists. The panel he chaired picked conVRse.
The story
A tree grows beside you. Lightning strikes. A cloud puts out the fire. Nobody says the word death.
You put on the headset and a tree grows beside you. It is your life. The branches spread, seasons pass, and a family shelters under it. Then lightning strikes. Fire takes the tree, and what's left is ash. That is death, or a critical illness, and everyone who sat under that tree is now in the open. Then a cloud rolls in. It puts out the fire, and the tree grows back over the family. The cloud is the policy.
A real MetLife agent stands in the room with you the whole way, talking you through it.
In branches
I resigned. Then MetLife's innovation lab called and asked me to come and finish it.
The win got me noticed, but nothing moved fast enough back at PNB MetLife, so I resigned and was about to join a startup. Then Zia Zaman, MetLife Asia's chief innovation officer, called. I joined LumenLab, the innovation lab he ran in Singapore, and built it properly. Every session started with the story. After it, customers could check their policy details, pay premiums and make claims inside the same virtual branch, with the agent beside them.
The recognition
Prime time on NDTV, Innovation of the Year, and a case study in a report on financial inclusion.
The Institute of International Finance write-up is the one I'm proudest of. It sits in a report on financial inclusion because conVRse was doing the same job in a different way. It found a way to have the conversation about death and insurance with people who would never have it across a desk.
I wouldn't pitch VR today, but I would do the rest of it again. Eight years later I did, with an LLM instead of a headset.
NDTV Prime, prime time
India's national news channel ran conVRse on its evening technology show.
Innovation of the Year 2017
Zia Zaman accepted it for MetLife Asia at the Asia Insurance Industry Awards, and Asia Insurance Review filmed it.
The IIF and CFI report, July 2017
The Institute of International Finance and the Center for Financial Inclusion included conVRse as a case study in their report on reaching people that banks and insurers miss.