AIA Singapore maximizes business performance with Tableau center of excellence

AIA is one of Singapore’s leading providers of insurance and financial services. Headquartered in Hong Kong, AIA Group Limited has a presence across 18 markets in the Asia-Pacific region. Senior Manager of Enterprise Data, Dion Thorpe leads a team within the strategy department in running a centre of excellence to train and build a community of Tableau users.

He shares how AIA Singapore used Tableau to optimize operations and understand the customer journey. Tableau has also helped the business accelerate decision-making with timely insights and achieve seamless integration across many markets.

1 in 4 employees at AIA Singapore are now using Tableau, and Dion’s team is working towards enterprise-wide adoption. The software’s interactive and intuitive user experience helped the team drive a data-first culture, empowering employees to understand the value of data and embrace analytics as a key part of decision-making.

Getting from an insurance application form to an issued policy can be a long process involving assessments by multiple parties like underwriters and medical professionals. Delays can occur along the way, and teams would rely on more experienced employees to identify the roadblock based on conjecture. There was no evidence or deeper insights to help them understand where the problem lay and how to speed up the process.

With Tableau dashboards, teams can track the application status and ensure timely conversion from pending to issued business. This improves AIA Singapore’s services by giving customers greater peace of mind, and helps the business optimize its sales and operations processes.

Every morning, AIA Singapore’s leaders and executives track and monitor performance on Tableau dashboards. Previously, performance metrics could only be measured and shared through monthly reports, which would often be too late to respond to market changes.

“Tableau has proven to be a great tool to do analysis on the fly to answer questions in meetings and presentations,” says Dion. “We no longer have to wait up to five days to get answers to our questions.”

With updated information at their fingertips every day, teams in AIA can detect trends and adapt to changes, strengthening the company’s competitive advantage.

Analytics teams combine data from sales, claims and the AIA Vitality program to gain visibility into the end-to-end customer journey and understand their customers’ profiles and needs better. AIA Vitality is a health and wellness program to encourage AIA customers to keep fit and lead a healthy lifestyle, with rewards and incentives along the way.

Health data from the AIA Vitality program, combined with sales and claims data can be a powerful resource to help AIA build more personalized products and services to meet their customers’ needs better, fulfilling the company’s brand promise of enabling Healthier, Longer, Better Lives.

The greatest reward for Dion and his team was to witness employees building their confidence and thinking more strategically for the business. Armed with deep insights from data, many business users in AIA have become trusted subject matter experts who shape the way the company thinks and operates strategically.

“It’s really good to see people who are usually quiet go into meetings with their Tableau dashboards and advising the leaders on what should be done based on their findings from data,” shares Dion. “Tableau has enabled a whole evolution.”

Having achieved success with Tableau in AIA Australia, the Senior Manager of Enterprise Data adapted the existing Tableau templates for AIA Singapore’s market. He shares an example of how his team spent only 3 days to reverse-engineer a workbook from Australia, which took 2 years to build.

“This is knowledge that someone would have taken two years to build up, but with Tableau we can transfer it immediately to get a new market up and running.”

While there are certainly market-centric needs across the Asia-Pacific region, the nature of the business is largely similar. AIA has witnessed growing collaboration between different markets because of Tableau.

“There is always knowledge to be shared and benefits in sharing it. Tableau has been a scalable and effective analytics solution for our business so far, helping us gain valuable insights in Singapore and Australia, with more markets to come in future.”