AIA Australia streamlines employee and customer experience with DocuSign Agreement Cloud

More than three million Australians put their trust in AIA Australia (AIA) to protect their lives and financial welfare. Driven by helping its customers live healthier, longer, and better lives, AIA is focused on building sustainable relationships that add value to customers and business partners. An innovative mindset for improving customer experience through digital transformation helps AIA deliver on its mission and stand out from its competitors.

AIA is embracing the DocuSign Agreement Cloud to transform how it does business. Like many customers, AIA started its journey with DocuSign eSignature, then it looked for other opportunities to create value through digitisation and automation. After successfully rolling out eSignature, AIA then turned to DocuSign Identify for ID verification and DocuSign CLM for contract management.

Helping Australians protect the things they value most

In order to provide AIA members with the best experience, a talented network of advisors work consultatively with customers to provide independent insurance advice. Prior to DocuSign, paper insurance contracts were signed in person or posted by advisors to customers who were then asked to sign and return.

Insurance is a highly regulated industry, and complex contracts and manual processes could often result in human error. Forms would sometimes need to be re-sent, causing significant delays to receiving signed contracts and this would impact advisor productivity.  

When COVID-19 hit, AIA’s extensive network of advisors were no longer able to meet customers in person and significant postal delays created barriers to receiving signed insurance agreements. These challenges helped accelerate the adoption of DocuSign eSignature and AIA was able to shift to digital contract management quickly, while still ensuring the highest level of accuracy.

“DocuSign offers visibility and transparency for our advisors and gives our customers a far better user experience. It’s more convenient and it saves so much time in the signing process,” says Sam Smith Optimisation and Efficiency Specialist at AIA.

Having worked with DocuSign since 2019, AIA was using DocuSign for Special Acceptance Terms, Application Reinstatement, and Financial Adviser Authority forms.

Upon completion, these forms are placed automatically into AIA’s workflow, where AIA administration teams are able to process requests, significantly reducing average completion time from days to hours. As a result of the successful rollout, AIA expanded the use of PowerForms on the AIA Advisor Site. This enables advisors to create self-service documents and trigger the signing process through DocuSign, paving the way for an approved electronic form that no longer requires manual completion. 

This led to AIA to invest further in digital transformation, having DocuSign automate operations by sending pre-filled AIA forms digitally to customers. These were automatically updated in AIA’s workflow system, without the need for data entry, delivering improved efficiencies and cost savings.

This innovative process improvement also delivers on security. Customers trust advisors with their most sensitive personal health information so it's vital that any technology meets AIA high security and compliance standards.

“DocuSign is a trusted solution that lives up to those security standards and becomes a vital part of securing our business,” says Sam.

Identifying a more streamlined customer experience

After implementing DocuSign eSignature to transform the advisor network, AIA looked for further areas of the business that could benefit from DocuSign's Agreement Cloud. One of those areas was the Savings and Investments business unit.

Due to the success of implementing DocuSign eSignature, AIA also integrated DocuSign eSignature with Australia Post’s Digital iD, allowing users to prove their identity for e-signatures without uploading physical identity documents separately.

“This integration opened huge possibilities for us,” says Padraig Houlihan, Head of Savings and Investments at AIA. 

Before DocuSign and Digital iD, a customer would need to go to an AIA contact centre to fill out and post a form. They would also have to provide a copy of their driver’s licence, which would need to be certified.

“Before DocuSign, the identification process would take one to two weeks minimum, but it could easily run into three to four weeks,” explains Padraig.  

Padraig shares that when AIA launched the DocuSign eSignature and Digital iD integration, their first customer took one hour to sign and return all the paperwork. 

The result? Funds were deposited to the customer in less than 48 hours from beginning the application process.

“The ID verification sped up the process and removed friction. We’re offering a faster, digital experience,” he says.

Continuous improvements through smart automation

Agreements are an essential part of any legal team, including the legal team at AIA. For AIA’s in-house legal department, digitising electronic signatures was the first step in creating more efficient workflows. But the team wanted to go further and add enhanced reporting and AI capabilities to its contract management process.

Jose Rendon-Bolivar, Group Legal at AIA, says that before leveraging DocuSign's Agreement Cloud, dealing with contracts was a manual, time-consuming process. 

“After introducing DocuSign eSignature, we saw an opportunity to automate further and enhance reporting,” says Jose. 

“We engage with Risk and Finance teams so we needed a tool that would automate and streamline the entire process."

The integration of DocuSign CLM had helped create even more efficiency for the legal team, resulting in other AIA business units jumping on board. 

The decision for AIA to partner with DocuSign came down to its user-friendly capabilities, seamless amalgamation with the business, and the ability to integrate CLM with eSignature. “We’ve seen a significant amount of time saved,” Jose says. 

For AIA, beginning with DocuSign eSignature and expanding to other solutions like Digital iD and DocuSign CLM enabled AIA to have seamless integration between tools to get the most out of the DocuSign ecosystem.

“Automating our processes helps us better serve our clients and improves their experience with us,” Jose concludes.