VITALITY
18
“ If you just concentrate on trying to deliver value for your customers and creating an exceptional experience, more often than not, you’ re going to do the right thing”
— Dave Priestley, Chief Digital Officer, Vitality
of‘ Vitality at home’. This involved negotiating commercial arrangements to provide members with discounts linked to physical activity and integrating with these partners so that a fully digital end to end experience was up and running within three weeks of lockdown starting.
“ That was a big success for us; we were still able to provide comprehensive wellness benefits to our members by capitalising on our cultural assets.” In many ways the achievement encapsulated the thoroughness of Vitality’ s strategy and demonstrated its adept digital skills. It also demonstrates Priestley’ s insistence that any tech innovation introduced has a functional purpose in delivering quality service to users.“ Philosophically, Vitality focuses on the outcome we’ re looking for and then works out what technology solution would be best.” Not allowing the technology itself to guide his approach, Priestley says that the current applications of blockchain would not benefit the company’ s customers at this time, although explorations of AI( artificial intelligence) and ML( machine learning) had revealed their potential for‘ proactive servicing’.“ You can then reach out to customers and ask,‘ How can we help?’ We’ re also using ML models to power personalisation in the experience, as well as RPA( robotic process automation) to speed up admin and allow our staff to focus on value-adding work instead.”
Although 2020 has been a catalyst year for change across so many aspects of life globally, Vitality retains the same level of commitment to making people healthier that it always has. There can be no mistake: the insurance industry is changing, with or without COVID-19, but the desire for digital transformation which the pandemic’ s restrictions have introduced is here to stay.“ Things