HSBC Life (Singapore) Pte. Ltd. honoured at Asian Experience Awards 2025 with 2 wins

The company was the recipient of Singapore Customer Experience of the Year - Financial Services and Singapore Service Experience of the Year - Financial Services.

HSBC Life (Singapore) Pte. Ltd. claimed victory at the Asian Experience Awards 2025 with its initiatives in redesigning key journeys and transforming contact centre experience post-integration.

Elevating customer experience

Following the integration of AXA Insurance Pte Limited (Singapore) and HSBC Insurance (Singapore) in February 2023, HSBC Life Singapore embarked on a journey to align all processes and customer journeys with HSBC Group’s global operating model. Using a data-driven approach and design-thinking principles to enhance customer experience (CX), particularly in integrated shield plan purchase and renewal, payments-in, and contact centre servicing.

One of the top priorities was to identify customer pain points and fix them with both speed and empathy.

With this, HSBC Life Singapore used the voice of customer insights and operational metrics to pinpoint the three most critical journeys. It then held cross-functional design workshops to map current experiences, identify gaps, and craft solutions. 

This marked improvements, including enhanced communication in renewal notices that led to a 30% drop in policy lapsation. Additionally, as confusion arose due to differing payment methods for various policies, a smart filter was added to the website to guide customers to the correct payment option.

HSBC Life Singapore also addressed the challenge of service agents relying on back-office teams for answers by providing direct system access and training.

Despite the complexities of integration, HSBC Life focused on its customers and succeeded in addressing key pain points with empathy, data-driven decisions, and customer-centric design.

Design-thinking approach

HSBC Life applied a design-thinking and customer-centric framework to improve response times, complaint volumes, and Net Promoter Scores (NPS). 

After the integration, contact centre operations were transitioned to HSBC’s global function team in India to streamline support. However, this move initially led to the contact centre NPS falling by over 20 percentage points and resulting in more detractors than promoters.

HSBC Life Singapore realised that training alone was not enough to solve the issue, so it adopted a structured design-thinking approach with the goal of deeply understanding and resolving pain points from the customer’s perspective

A 2-day hybrid workshop was then held with teams from both Singapore and India. A senior customer experience executive from Singapore joined the India team on-site to facilitate a customer journey mapping exercise, and they analysed together the top two journeys causing the most friction.

This exercise identified the key gaps in processes and communication, so the team acted swiftly by implementing immediate process changes where possible. It also scheduled longer-term digital improvements into the technology roadmap.

HSBC Life Singapore introduced its CARE principles (Connected, Accountable, Responsive, Empathy) through face-to-face training. Aside from these, initiatives included revamping the recruitment strategy, improving the knowledge database, enhancing quality monitoring, and launching recognition programmes to motivate service teams were also done.

Within months, these efforts brought a drastic improvement in the customer and distributor experience metrics. The contact centre NPS improved by 69 percentage points year-on-year, whilst the average speed of answer beat the internal target by more than 5 seconds. The complaint volume also reduced by over 10% YoY, with top satisfaction scores increasing by 11%.

The Asian Experience Awards serves as a platform that honours ingenious initiatives of creative companies. It gives the rightful recognition to those that deliver meaningful brand experiences to their stakeholders.

The Asian Experience Awards is presented by Asian Business Review Magazine. To view the full list of winners, click here. If you want to join the 2026 awards programme and be acclaimed for providing meaningful brand experiences to stakeholders, please contact Marni Marco at [email protected].