Karin Zulkarnaen: A wide-open market

Vol 47: Issue 2 | July 2024

Karin Zulkarnaen, chief customer and marketing officer at Prudential Indonesia, was raised to seek a challenge and explore new experiences without fear. Her father, a professional in the textile industry and an entrepreneur, and her stay-at-home mother always rewarded her for trying something out or starting a new project.

“That approach has shaped the person I am today,” says Zulkarnaen, who joined the life insurance industry in 2000 as a management trainee in Singapore.

Helping families

While the insurance industry was initially unfamiliar to her, Zulkarnaen quickly recognised it as one that helps families in difficult times. “I thought, ‘OK, this is really cool’,” she recalls.

Having experienced a variety of roles across sales, marketing and product during her trainee position in the United Kingdom, Zulkarnaen also observed that the industry in Jakarta was relatively young.

As the current life insurance market leader in Indonesia, Prudential is just 28 years old, and many of its 56 other competitors are much younger. Meanwhile, life insurance penetration is less than 1 per cent of gross domestic product. Financial literacy is just 49 per cent, with insurance literacy even lower.

Distribution challenges

Zulkarnaen says a major challenge for life insurers in Indonesia is distribution, with customers currently concentrated in the country’s largest cities.

“Indonesia is a big country with thousands of islands, so access to financial advice in much smaller cities is nearly impossible,” she says.

She asserts that there is still a common public misconception that once a life insurance policy is purchased, it covers the insured for everything — and that a health insurance policy means all expenses will be paid.

“Customers perceive insurance to be complex, so gaining an understanding of their product can be a challenge,” says Zulkarnaen. “They need to understand what is covered and what is not covered and have exclusions and pre-existing conditions explained to them properly by our agents.”

To remedy the situation for customers and the population, she says education and continuous communication from agents and the industry overall is required. She believes this has always presented exciting opportunities for development and innovation — factors that perfectly suit her personality.

“I like doing things that no-one has done before,” she says. “This industry has allowed me to explore and implement new ideas and initiatives.”

A 25-year career

Born in Manchester, England, Zulkarnaen grew up in Jakarta and went back to the UK to study at The University of Warwick and London School of Economics and Political Science.

As part of the Allianz Asia Pacific insurance management training program, Zulkarnaen spent two years working in Singapore, Germany and again in the UK. Having gained experience in a variety of life insurance functions, she returned home well prepared to start her career.

At Allianz Indonesia, she held roles including product manager, bancassurance business development manager and agency general manager.

From 2005, when she was appointed general manager of marketing at AXA Services Indonesia, she progressed to Bank OCBC NISP’s head of bancassurance in 2006 and was promoted to the bank’s division head of direct sales almost three years later.

Before joining Prudential two years ago, Zulkarnaen held several senior marketing and sales positions back at Allianz Indonesia, culminating in chief marketing officer in 2019.

Leading customer transformation

As chief customer and marketing officer at Prudential Indonesia, Zulkarnaen is spearheading an internal transformation in customer centricity.

“Our new purpose as a group is to revisit how our relationship with customers can improve,” she says.

“We are currently rolling out our ‘Customer is our Compass’ values, which intentionally incorporate the insights we receive through feedback from our customers into services and solutions.”

Zulkarnaen explains that part of the strategy involves a deep level of communication with agents, who are the company’s representatives when interacting with customers.

“We also create various opportunities for our 1,000-plus colleagues to meet with the customer through our ‘Customer Day’ campaign,” she says. “For example, staff can sit in on conversations within call centres and walk-in centres.

"They can also join our service teams’ huddles to witness how feedback — especially complaints — can be turned into real opportunities for service improvements.”

Zulkarnaen adds that such initiatives are crucial for back-office staff, who may not have a direct sense of the ‘real’ customer on a day-to-day basis.

“Staff need to hear what customers say about our services, products or transactions,” she says.

“Fulfilling customer needs is not just a task, because each customer is a real person with emotions. When our colleagues experience conversations in the call centre or walk-in centres, the importance of making our services more relevant becomes more tangible for them.”

Providing benefits

With the cost of hospital stays and medical treatment rising, Prudential Indonesia also partners with the healthcare industry to help contain customers’ expenses.

“We partner with hospitals with strong service standards, and that provides customers with clear clinical pathways and tariffs,” says Zulkarnaen.

“Such collaboration with ‘priority hospitals’ has become extremely strategic as it drives the cost of claims and to some extent determines the way we will price premiums in the future.”

She adds that Prudential also works very closely with hospital partners to create prevention programs for customers. “We offer breast cancer screening, for example, and access to a discounted rate for vaccines including pneumonia, typhoid and influenza.

“When these vaccines or other treatments are not covered by our products, our wholesale deal with the hospitals means we’re able to provide lower prices to our customers and they sincerely appreciate it.

“If our customers can access vaccines, they can hopefully stay healthy for longer. We believe educating the public and maintaining their health and wellness is our larger role in society.”

The role of technology

Incorporating technology and automation into the customer experience is another critical aspect of Prudential Indonesia’s customer strategy.

“We are proud to say that our existing processes have made us Indonesia’s life insurance market leader and service leader,” says Zulkarnaen.

“But we’re not stopping there. There are always new technologies introduced to the market that we need to review so we can ascertain how their adoption might simplify the customer journey.”

Zulkarnaen says the evaluation of technology is based on customer feedback — specifically, the company’s Net Promoter Score. This supports decision-making around assigning priority improvements.

She says best-practice customer service brings together an understanding of various customer personas, as each segment comes with different expectations. “We need to acknowledge that there is no one size fits all,” she says.

One similarity among all customer segments, whatever their age, is that they want their insurance experience to be fast, simple and seamless. Given this, Zulkarnaen says it’s up to insurers to identify the differences between each customer persona and how to simplify their transactions.

Providing transparency

Another similarity customers share is the desire for transparent processes and options.

For example, younger customers want self-services on their mobile; they want access to policy information anytime, anywhere; and they expect it to be easily available online. Anything less than this is deemed not good enough.

Older customers want a personalised service, with agents making time to explain their options. “They like to make their own decisions, but they also want our agents to be available anytime for a conversation,” says Zulkarnaen.

“We frequently observe the demand for comprehensive cover with personalised services from high-net-worth customers. On the other hand, we also have customers who need basic affordable cover.

“Understanding these differences and how we can facilitate all kinds of personalised transactions and channels both on and offline, while maintaining availability for all our customers, is key.”

Implementing automation

In the next three to five years, Zulkarnaen would like to implement more automation to customer feedback processes so that it can be received and monitored more systematically.

She also aims to increase automation in back-office operations, so that customer-facing services can be undertaken faster. “For example, if customer service could use an AI chatbot, they could create a much better experience for the customer,” she says.

“With greater automation we’ll also have better control of data privacy, including how customers access the data. This will give them confidence that their data is secure with us and create greater access across all the online touchpoints.

“With all this in mind, we’re currently assessing how we can adopt technology to support the way we design future services for customers.” 

Read this article and all the other articles from the latest issue of the Journal e-magazine.

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