Insurers Now Offer Value-Added Services Assistance

Insurance companies are now not just offering plain vanilla insurance products, but have gone beyond to offer facilities like concierge services, doctors for second opinion, gift delivery and day-to-day repair assistance for home. Further, communities are also being build to share information about products. Reliance General Insurance is now offering specialised services to the home insurance customers apart from the road-side assistance services for motor insurance. Rakesh Jain, CEO, Reliance General said that they took a decision to go on retail with assistance service, and in motor cars, assistance is embedded within the product. We extended it to home insurance post Chennai floods."

For instance, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance also gives value-added services in car insurance like accommodation benefits. Here, if your car meets with an accident / breakdown taking place beyond 100 km from your city and repairs for which will take more than 12 hrs, they will provide hotel accommodation for the occupants of the car for a maximum of two days and two nights limited to Rs 2000 per person per day and maximum total of Rs 16,000 through out the policy period Similarly, others like ICICI Lombard General Insurance have already built in value-added services which could provide assistance to family at home when one is abroad as part of travel insurance scheme. Further, you can also use their services to send gifts to family in India when you are travelling abroad.

Even forums are being created to simplify insurance. HDFC ERGO General Insurance has announced the launch of a community portal to provide a peer-to-peer channel where users can get advice, discuss their experiences and share information about anything & everything under the umbrella of non-life insurance.