Personalized experiences: Life insurance for the digital era
To win in the digital era, insurance companies need to stand out by delivering personalized experiences. Here's how they can connect with customers and build loyalty.
Like most industries, life insurance is going through massive change in the digital era. The old ways of selling insurance are fading fast. In-person meetings with customers are rare, a trend that COVID accelerated. And with consumers doing so much of their own research, resorting to hard-sell, scare tactics to get them to buy no longer works.
Today, consumers expect online options and the ability to buy insurance with a few clicks, just as they buy other products.
As life insurance companies adapt to this digital reality, they’re finding ways to help their agents and brokers succeed.
They’re modernizing their processes and streamlining workflows to improve efficiency and sales performance. Here’s how one company did it.
Bringing insurance agents into the future
Haven Technologies sprung out of Haven Life, a direct-to-consumer player in the United States for life and annuities. A wholly owned subsidiary of MassMutual, Haven Technologies provides a flexible, cloud-native technology stack that can stand alone and interface with a variety of technology environments, from antiquated batch systems to contemporary, real-time ones.
As they work to improve the life insurance buying experience for customers, Haven Tech’s leaders knew they needed to get their insurance agents and brokers on the same page. With customers turning to digital channels, the role of the agent is shifting from a product to a customer-centric focus.
To help agents make this transition to trusted advisors, Haven Tech wanted to empower them and improve their overall experience by speeding commission payments and streamlining the process from sales orders.
Traditional sales agent vs the insurance agent of the future
To stay competitive, insurers need to understand what the insurance agent of the future looks like in the digital era.
Gradual roll-out wins insurance agent and executive buy-in
Haven Tech began a trial program using SAP Commissions and SAP Agent Lifecycle management. After receiving buy-in and feedback from 3,000 internal agents and executives, they rolled it out to 20,000 brokers and agents as a full-scale solution.
Insurance agents who quickly saw the benefits became evangelists for the solution, helping to get others on board.
“We took a top-down and bottom-up approach to rolling out our advisor and customer-facing platform, collecting feedback from early rollouts on use cases, nuances in commissionable events, and productivity gains,” said Bharat Rao, Product Manager at Haven Technologies.
With SAP, Haven Technologies counted multiple benefits, including:- Increased agility and efficiency in sales performance management
- Increased ability to react quickly to market changes
- Faster commission payments
- Seamless user experience for agents, brokers, and distributors
Sales performance management solutions: 5 challenges an SPM solves
Sales performance management solutions can help businesses solve some of their biggest challenges when it comes to quotas, incentives, trust, and more.
Standardization = operational efficiency, better experiences
In addition, built-in functionality reduced engineering resources needed to build the solution, freeing up scarce resources to work on other projects.
This modernization resulted in an increased level of standardization and streamlining of various critical functions and an increase in operational efficiencies and resource utilization.
Haven’s standardization resulted in one streamlined process from sales order to payment, speeding commissions, and a providing a superior user experience for distributors, agents, brokers, and career advisors.
With its digital platform, Haven Technologies stays true to its fundamental value propositions of speed to market and flexible solutions.
