Ben Telfer:

Welcome to Episode four of our series on “The Digital Mutual”. Today’s case study comes from the US with mutual insurer, Securian Financial. It’s my pleasure to introduce today’s speaker, Adam Taylor. Adam is a director in the Institutional Market External Facing Platform at Securian Financial. I’m sure Adam will explain a bit more about it as well in his introduction to his presentation today. Adam, pleasure for you to join us.

Adam Taylor:

Thank you, Ben, and good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to everyone joining us today. I’m excited to be here to share a little bit more about Securian Financial’s journey, the digital learnings and transformation, introduce one of our products, Benefit Scout, to help highlight some of this. So again, just a little bit of housekeeping here with the agenda. We’ll cover a background of Securian Financial and our digital transformation and enterprise strategy. I recognize that not everyone may know whose Securian Financial is or the markets we serve.

We’ll talk about Benefit Scout, which is an example project we’re using to highlight some of the work that we’ve done to support the strategy. And then we’ll rewind back to the beginning of that project to explore how we used customer need through design thinking to determine where to go and support the resulting product that we have. We’ll dive into that, how we build a business case coming out of that work. And then a current state assessment of where we are with the product and future plans. We’ll share a little bit of how that then has translated into broader learnings and impact within the firm. And if I do this right, we’ll have some time for Q&A at the end as Ben mentioned, and I’m excited to engage in.

Just so you know a little bit about me, I am responsible for the web applications and services, supporting the products that we have distributed through employers. Whether that is a group insurance product like life insurance, or a supplemental health product like accident, critical illness, or hospital indemnity insurance, as well as 401K and retirement savings plans, and as well as products that we distribute through banks, credit unions, other financial institutions here.

I’ve been with the firm for 16 years, and I’ve been in both marketing, technology, and now engineering leadership, and currently provides leadership to just over 40 associates engaged in the product function and really in the engineering and development effort. So hopefully, that background just gives you a little bit of understanding on who I am and the role that I have here. Within the firm, I’ve been a sponsor of the Benefit Scout product. I’ve been involved in all of the work streams that have sort of led up to the end result that we’re at right now.

So before we dive directly into the product and what our strategy is, let’s take a second to look at some background and a little history here on Securian Financial. Over on the left hand side of the screen, you can see some of the height and weight that we have. A little bit of the size of our firm, the amount of coverage that we offer, and the number of employees and representatives that we have worldwide. On the right hand side of that, and this is where as a mutual insurer, I think I put most of my focus and most of my energy and what gets me out of bed in the morning is recognizing that there’s more than 19 million customers that our products help support. And those 19 million customers and ensuring that they have the products they need and are able to make the decisions, well informed decisions that are right for them and their family are what motivated this project. And it’s my hope that as we get through this presentation and I share the story with you, that you’ll be able to see that we’ve kept those 19 million customers at the center of the decisions and at the center of the work.

Securian is active in a number of different markets. We do provide direct coverage to individuals and families. We’ve got a focus there especially on being able to help small business owners and executives who may have more complicated needs for their family. We also are a significant insurer. We’re the third largest writer of life insurance in the group employer space. And so we serve both private and public employers, again, providing life insurance, supplemental health coverage, and then retirement products as well. We’re also active in the financial institution space providing coverage that people may obtain through a loan or through a relationship with a bank or a credit union.

And lastly, we also serve individual or institutional investors leveraging the knowledge and expertise that we have in fund management and investing to be able to meet their needs. Then the product today that we’re going to be talking about, and the market that we’re working in primarily is that employers and employees segment. That said, the learnings and the journey that we’ve been on could play in really any of those first three columns as we choose to grow the product and as we continue to engage with customers. But let’s double click for a second into that employer and employee segment just to give you a little example of the target customer that we’re working with here.

In the group insurance space, we focus primarily on those Fortune 1000 type organizations. And we’re a little bit unique in the sense that we offer a more narrow product set. We do not offer a disability insurance, which is commonly bundled in with the life insurance, or any sort of health or medical insurance. Instead, we’re really focused on delivering great life insurance products, accidental death and dismemberment. And then what are common in other parts of the world but are relatively new to the US? Those supplemental health products that can help provide additional benefits when somebody suffers an unplanned accident and is diagnosed with a critical illness or has a hospital stay, and has other expenses, our supplemental health products can help provide support to families when in that, of course.

And the employers that choose to work with us on all have more than a thousand employees. So we’re typically thinking larger firms. I think our largest plan has over a half million participants. They also are employers who typically value a high level of service and a firm that’s doing interesting things with technology to improve the experience of their employees. In our market, the benefits that a company offers are really instrumental to part of their total employment package. And when life insurance is not always the most important or most thought about benefit, it really is a critical one that employers want to make sure that when it’s needed, it’s well executed. And so we have a history of providing exceptional service in this product set and being there to have long-term partnerships with our employers where they know that we’re going to consistently be investing in this market.

Regardless of what the market we’re in, or regardless of which products we’re serving, we are guided by our purpose. And then that’s to help customers build secure tomorrows. And then to do that, we do to enable them to celebrate their family every day no matter how they define it. And this has been a guiding principle for us as we started the work and began with customer centricity, is recognizing that our products are really something that enable people to have confidence that should something unexpected happen, that their loved ones and the people that count on them, and whether that’s a traditional definition of family, whether that’s a network of friends or even organizations that are dear to them are able to be supported or that they’re able to continue living the life they want, or being able to have some protection should the unexpected occur.

And so with that guiding framework and an understanding of the highest level of organization, I want to dive into Vision 2020, which is our current enterprise strategic plan, and serves as a foundation and driver for much of the work that we’re going to discuss and was the impetus to the development of the product that we now know as Benefit Scout. Chris Hilger who is Securian Financial’s Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer launched this with a statement saying that Vision 2020 focuses on engaging our customers and channel partners. And channel partners is language that we use to refer to anyone who helps us deliver products to the customer. So that could be the employer, a financial institution, an advisor, really anyone who’s involved in helping us support that customer and providing them with exceptional experiences.

And as I look at that, the phrases that jump out to me are really the engaging, exceptional experiences. And you’ll see that come through again in some future slides. But we recognized as a firm that in order to be relevant, in order to meet the new and expanding needs of new customers and new markets, that we would need to be able to really come in and provide services and supporting experiences in addition to sound product, which would help them leverage the product and see value in where they’re investing their dollars.

And so the themes which guide the enterprise strategy really focused on customer centricity. This is a spot where we know we need to lead in order to be a relevant and winning firm. If we’re going to be able to help more customers achieve those goals, we need to have the customer and their needs at the center of the work that we’re doing. We also knew that we needed to be able to change faster. The rate of change in our industry and in the overall environment and with customer expectations is increased to a speed not seen before.

And so as we continue to modernize, and as we continue to look forward, we needed to enhance our flexibility and responsiveness so that when customers have new needs, when we have new products, or when one of the solutions that we deploy to the market was showing new signs of unexpected behavior, we can quickly pivot to respond to that and ensure that we were providing new capabilities, new solutions, or if something wasn’t working or no longer hitting the mark, quickly take corrective action.

We also knew that we need to focus on doing things differently and in new ways to have a top level change in how we perform within the market. And to do that, we view that achievement through innovation. At the same time, we had a history of good ideas may start in one of those business segments. So perhaps more focused on employers and employees or perhaps focused on an individual need, and oftentimes, that idea would stay there. It had a difficult time moving across the organization and finding a new home based on the different distribution method. And we consciously want to begin to change that because we recognize that customer needs are common oftentimes regardless of the channel in which they choose to engage us.

And so one of the key guiding principles has been to develop solutions and to think of an enterprise perspective to help us bring more opportunities and more solutions to more of our customers. And as we look at the millions of customers we serve, being able to ensure that they all have the best technology and the best solutions available. And so what that’ll pull into, a snapshot view of where our strategic plan is brought into a nice graphical form. And these ladders up to some strategic aspirations, some enterprise strategies and markets below that, and then initiatives. And the digital component here is really something that hits on a couple of these.

So first and foremost, digital is absolutely key and paramount to how we can deliver exceptional experiences. And a Benefit Scout example lands squarely on that. It’s a new way of engaging people as they work through making decisions about the benefits to purchase. And currently, that is a fractured experience. And we’ll talk a little bit more about that. But recognize as we do this, the work that we’re doing anchors into this highest strategic aspiration. And at the same time, there is an aspect of financial performance to ensure that we’re growing our business and we continue to be be a thriving firm that can support the members that we have.

We’re focused in on that employer and employee segment, but we’ve also done some work to determine whether or not this solution could extend to fit well within the offerings provided by financial institutions, and potentially even direct customers who are looking to solve and support their needs directly. And it aligns with their enterprise initiatives focused on technology and marketing. And again, we’ll talk a little bit more about how this manifests itself in the product we have in the coming slides. But first, I’ve talked about Benefit Scout a handful of times. I’d like to take a moment now that you’ve understood Securian’s organization, the markets we serve, and our guiding principles to talk a little bit more about the product that is the example we’re using to tell this story. So that is Benefit Scout. It is a decision support tool that is designed to help employees get education when they need it most.

In the US, many times, the only time that an employee can interact with the benefits provided by their employer is at a significant life event. So it’s when they’re newly hired, and they’ve got a brand new job. It’s perhaps at annual enrollment where they’re asked to make decisions on up to 17 different products that are available to them, or when they add an eligible life event such as a marriage or birth of a child or a loss within a family. And what we found was those times are often chaotic. Imagine starting a new job and you’re working on determining everything from where to park and where to get lunch to learning in your business and learning a new team. And at the same time, you’re given 30 days to make decisions around benefits, some of which you may not have had at your previous employer.

And so we knew that we needed to provide something to come into the space that was easy to use, engaging, and would help people quickly move through the process. Additionally, we knew that we were solving a real need. Even US, we know there’s a well-documented coverage gap where people do not have the level of life insurance that they need or would want to have for their family in case of the unexpected. And with the supplemental health products being relatively new to the market, there’s not a great pattern for how to buy that or how to know which products you need. Or if you do know which products you’re interested in, what level of cover might be appropriate for you?

With the life insurance, there’s rules of thumb. There’s old adage is there’s the ability to talk to a parent or another trusted advisor who’s had familiarity with these products. And that’s just not the case with some of these new products. And so to that end, we were seeing more participation. And that was frustrating to employers and frustrating to us because we knew that those products could help people have less financial stress when a covered event occurred to be able to help pay for their medical deductible or to be able to help pay for those unplanned expenses, which arise when you’ve had an accident or have an illness.

And through all of this, we also wanted to reduce the time that employers had to spend becoming experts on these products and trying to provide education to their employees. They got into HR and benefits to help serve their firm’s customers and help organize talents to execute on results. And they didn’t want to join the insurance industry. And so we wanted to make sure it would be easy for these folks to be able to offer our products and bring them into their offering. And with that, the next slide, I’ve got a brief video that talks a little bit about Benefit Scout so you can see it in action. We’ll watch the video and then come back for a little bit more detail.

[VIDEO]

Introducing Benefit Scout, a digital experience designed to educate your employees so they better understand the benefits available to them and there’s less guesswork during enrollment. This interactive tool guides employees step by step through their decision journey. First, they answer a few simple questions about things such as their family, lifestyle, savings, and debt load. Then Benefits Scout analyzes their answers with data and decision logic to calculate the best options based on their unique needs.

Finally, employees get specific benefit recommendations and cost estimates which they can evaluate and customize before they enroll. They have 24/7 access to Scout, our virtual chat assistant, and they can rely on our benefit counselors for one on one support. Benefit Scout gives employees more confidence. In fact, 92% of users at one large company said they were more confident about their benefit decisions because they enrolled for the right benefits with the right amount of coverage. For you, Benefit Scout can boost plan participation and save HR staff time, and it promotes financial wellness for all employees. We can set up benefit scout for this year’s enrollment season at no cost to you. Contact your Securian Financial Account Executive to get started.

Adam Taylor:

Hopefully, that video gave you just a high level overview of what we’re talking about and how we position this experience within the market. At the same time, to get those results and to have that level of execution, we needed to develop a very solid vision for what this was doing. And what I’m sharing on the screen is the Benefit Scout Experience Vision that was developed through a process that I’ll share more about. But I’m starting with this first because I feel like this is a great way to ground all of you in understanding how we’ve approached this product and the intentionality of that. And so each one of the words in this vision statement was carefully selected.

So the Benefit Scout Experience Vision is to provide a unified experience. And that’s really key. We view this as an experience. It’s not just a site or an application, but we view the entire journey from the first time that customer learns about the opportunity to use this tool all the way through enrolling as the Benefit Scout product. And that was a bit of a mind change for us. It wasn’t just the technology or the code that was deployed. But it truly was that end to end journey. We want that experience to provide information and tools to help employees understand and make decisions. This isn’t something that’s driven about selling the product or just driving revenue or growth or earnings. It’s really about helping those employees who are our customers make solid decisions and make informed choices about where they want to invest their time and money and how or if this coverage is right for them.

And we want those decisions about those benefits to lead to increased enrollment and improve participation because we do know and we believe that when customers see the results and understand how these products fit together and work to help protect them, that many of them will choose to purchase the coverage in order to have that protection should the unfortunate occur. And with helpful plan information and coaching, coaching is key for us and we’ve actually moved from coaching to recommendation based on the feedback and asks of the employers and employee customers who have used the tool who want more specific guidance and our recommendation. They view us as experts on knowing how these products work and they’re interested in hearing from us and seeing from us where we think they should go.

There’s online task calculators, but more than that, they’re on demand benefit counselors. And these are trained, knowledgeable associates who understand our products, but also understand the broader financial picture in which a customer may live, and are able to offer advice either through online chat or over the phone conversation to help that employee gain confidence and understanding that whatever decision they’re making is a good one based on the knowledge at hand. And that multichannel differentiated customer experience guides those employees to make the confident choices.

And even if that choice is not to purchase our products, we want to show that they were doing some confidently and uninformed basis rather than just opting into a default of, “I guess I’ll just take what I had last year.” Or, “I guess I’ll just take what I have from my prior job.” Or, “I might buy this coverage, but I’m not sure what level to buy. So I’ll just buy based on price point.” We knew that those weren’t great ways to shop for complex financial products. And so through this experience, we’re looking to address those needs and ensure that customers can move forward feeling confident in their choices.

The Benefit Scout experience starts with direct marketing led by Securian. And that’s not common in our benefits business where the carrier is leading that engagement. But we tried to have three separate touch points with the employees because remember, oftentimes, when they’re eligible to enroll for benefits, they’re going through a significant life change. Whether that is a new job or a new family. And so we want to be able to contact them multiple times to be able to hit them at the right moment when they’re ready to engage in benefits. And knowing that most people are working on an email from their phone, we ensured and built Benefit Scout to be mobile first. And it’s designed to start on your phone and then be able to be completed on your phone or migrate to a larger device if needed. But we wanted to ensure that when someone was on their commute or on their couch engaged in their benefits or in their email, that we were able to provide the best experience possible to them as they engaged on the phone.

We then quickly worked to provide education and clear guidance so that the visitor or the employee customer in this case can understand, what’s in it for them and then what this tool is going to provide them. We asked them targeted questions that then are fed into our algorithm that leads to results that now provide three different options for them. What our best fit recommendation is, as well as choices on how they can make a more cost conscious choice. And what coverages on coverage levels are the highest value and highest priority and where perhaps if they wanted to get additional coverage, we would suggest they invest. It then provides them direct ability to enroll for that coverage, or to access their employer site to do so.

And all along the way, those benefit counselors are there to provide support and guidance if there’s something in the experience that they don’t quite understand, or they have a more detailed personal question that they want confidence in. So let’s rewind to where we’ve been, recognizing that we are almost three years into this project. Half of that time was spent defining what we would do and building the initial version of the application, the MVP or minimum viable product. And the other half of it has been running the MVP, expanding that, building this to scale, and now being positioned to innovate and iterate next year.

Going back to 2017, we took a new approach to this through the exploration of the customer need through a design thinking approach. And for those of you who aren’t familiar with design thinking, I’m going to spend a little bit of time talking about what the design thinking experience looks like for us. But going back to 2017, our digital strategy office here at Securian Financial had been charged with exploring ways that we could disrupt our current businesses with digital applications. But it was an open book. We didn’t know whether or not we would be disrupting or supporting customer experiences or agent experiences, potentially product beneficiaries, or even our internal associates.

They pulled together a team across all the markets that we serve across functions, as well as across tenure and title. We wanted to have a rich group of people who had different points of view, had different experiences, and all could bring something different to the table to explore and determine what three potential opportunities were where we viewed mobile and digital technology as a spot for disruption within our industry and market. At the same time, there was a clear overlapping need emerging from the employer business segment to have something new to support the new products that were being offered to our market. And these two initiatives were being run separately, but it’s important to understand that they ended up converging together in order to help us form Benefit Scout.

So to start with the design thinking, 25 individual interviews were conducted. And you can see at the bottom, along the way, some of the pictures of these events and the people that we interviewed, we had two large group discussions and two full one day workshops exploring these ideas and testing out without the traditional barriers, what would it cost? Or what would the technology be? Or we haven’t done that, or we can’t do that but sometimes are present as we begin the initiatives. From those workshops, those participants worked in four teams and they developed eight separate concepts to consider. Those eight concepts were then whittled down to three, which were prototyped.

And as part of this journey, the prototyping was critical because it took a hypothetical idea, an option, an ability to do something and made it tangible, and it gave all of the associates the ability to interact with that and better inform the next steps. And so being able to turn an idea. And in a series of sticky notes and whiteboard drawings into something that was a prototype and you could interact with helped make it much more real to everyone working on the project to understand what this could mean. And it also allowed us to engage customers where we could go do man or woman on the screen interviews and get their feedback around something that we just created, and quickly validate whether or not we were onto something, or whether or not we weren’t quite hitting the mark.

From that, we chose to focus on the group voluntary education concept, and I don’t expect you to be able to read the slide here. But this is an example of some of those early sketches and some of those early ideas. This was a spot where we knew there was a need. The business was clearly articulating that customers weren’t understanding these products and weren’t able to take advantage of them. And we also knew that this was right for mobile disruption because one of the most common ways that employees learn about their benefits is through an in person event at their employer’s office. And that may be somebody coming in over the lunch hour and sharing more about the benefits program, or a large event held at the company cafeteria or an open space where employees are invited to come down and stop by the tables with all of the different solution providers or benefit providers.

And so we knew that that wasn’t having any impact because it’s hard to have a personal conversation and get one on one guidance and coaching in a large setting like that. And so this is a spot where we felt like being able to provide something on demand and customize would really be able to give that customer an improved experience over what was currently offered. And so with that, we reformed the teams and we decided to begin, again, with a deep dive into the employer benefits business. We had a foundation of research and insights. The teams had been working on the digital disruption project, and had been understanding where we could disrupt that, what customer needs were, and what some of the new technologies available were.

At the same time, we needed to now bring that down a level and reconcile that with the specific needs, ways of working, and the disruption possible within the employer benefit space. But rather than just taking that high level digital concept that it had been stranded at disruption for someone, we then show this to you, repeat the process again, but to be much more focused on the employer benefits space and in the benefits enrollment segment. In order to maintain that customer need focus rather than a sales objective or a general business result, we have a co-creation event which was the first of a kind event for us where we brought in our core Securian team members. These are folks that have rich subject matter expertise. They knew these products. They knew how the industry worked, and they knew what Securian would be capable from.

And we wanted them to be able to hear firsthand from customers about what they felt they needed. We also brought in HR or benefits representatives from current or prospective employers to get their feedback. And this was a great opportunity for us to invite employers that we’ve worked with to say, “We’re looking at investing and we’re looking at changing and making a difference in this market. And we’d like you to join us on this journey.” We also brought in people that we’re working with today to make sure that we got a well-rounded voice. And lastly, we brought in just regular consumers from looking like employers.

We didn’t want someone who may be having negative opinions of their benefits program to be sitting next to the vice president of benefits for their firm and have to wonder whether or not they needed to choose their own markets carefully. And so we recruited people who were eligible for benefits from their job and brought them in to bring an authentic voice to the conversation about what truly would be helpful as they made benefits decisions, and what value they truly saw and the benefits that their company offered. And all of these perspectives then led us to rich insights around what was really needed and not just what we thought was needed.

So in this workshop, you can see pictures of that as well as some of the prototypes and sketches that were created from it. We had an additional round of interviews. We didn’t want to rely on that old information or the unfocused information. And so we’ve expanded our stakeholders and our focus in on the benefits business. We then held a larger event with those 30 participants from across all different walks of life, and assigned them to teams. And from those teams, there were five concepts generated. So five different ideas on how we could solve and improve the experience. And we actually developed two concepts to test. And as I looked back at the themes ideas, on the left hand side, you see some guiding principles and some common things that we knew that we wanted. We knew that it needed to be personalized and be well integrated with the employee benefits buying experience.

But we also knew that this is something that had to have enterprise growth potential. It couldn’t be something that was only being built to support employee benefits, but needed to be able to support all of the aspects of our business. And it needed to align with our risk and legal tolerance as obligations as a firm. You can see on the right, the five separate ideas. And while there’s some overlap, each one of these ideas has something unique about it, whether it’s that one on one connection, or artificial intelligence, or being able to provide customers with bundles of ideas. We saw value in each one of these opportunities. And it was more difficult than we expect it to move from that concept creation, to the concept selection. We assumed and had a thought that coming out of that workshop, there’d be clear winners or clear consensus. We expected either to see much more similarity in the concepts created, or that once we saw all of the variety, there’ll be a clear winner.

And there wasn’t. As we looked at all of those, we saw value in each one of them. And deciding where to start became really difficult for us. That’s where we started to go back to the old way of working, recognizing and relying on one individual or a certain individual’s opinion, started becoming that where a lot of statements on, “I think this or I think that,” across the group and across the room, trying to understand what that feature was or where the most important need was. And luckily, we realized that we were doing things the old way. We stopped, we came back, and we went back to customers. And we went back to some of our current employers, and trying to validate what they saw as some of the most important aspects of each one of those concepts to allow us to identify where we needed to prioritize our focus to start.

From that, we were able to build out what we needed for a minimum viable product. How would we quickly expand that? And then what a full release would look like and put together this roadmap. And what you’ll see if you read through this is that we started simple. We kept the product mix narrow. We focused on a smaller number of clients, and really wanted to just prove whether or not customers would indeed have an experience and whether or not at the end of it, we’d be able to deliver something that they found valuable. We then knew that in order to fully justify whether or not this would be a viable product, we need to bring more products into it and get additional clients and really determine whether or not we were able to make an impact in more markets and with more products.

And we then felt if we validated those two things, we’d really need to bring this onto a larger segment of our employers and invest in much more richer functionality. So once we had a business case or once we had an MVP design and a roadmap of what we knew we wanted to do for customers, we needed to reconcile that in and build a business case to justify the investment that needed to be made. We didn’t know how to fund this. We didn’t know how we would determine whether or not to grow it, and we didn’t know how we’d know what the product was doing. And so to build the case to investment, we worked to move those customer focused objectives into something that fit with a business case that was expected within the organization.

Through this, we had developed key performance indicators. And from those KPIs which you’ll be able to see in just a few minutes, we knew what we would be able to expect from the business. At the same time, reconciling that into a traditional business case was a challenge for us. And luckily, we were able to partner with one of our lead actuaries who was able to help validate and look at the way we were modeling, bring in her perspective, and help us develop something that our actuarial and financial leadership team had confidence and faith in. But we also knew was something that was achievable. It was built up on example KPIs or performance metrics that were based on the customer feedback and based on what we’d heard loud and clear from the market. But also based on what the team felt were, in some cases, appropriate goals and other cases were big stretch goals. But we knew where those stretches were and we were able then to align and ensure that some of the early features that were put into the product were addressed to get early learnings on whether or not we’d be able to move the needle there.

And we didn’t know it at the time, but the KPIs that we developed would be critical to the ongoing product funding and feature prioritization. One thing that the team does exceptionally well now is they look at those KPIs for rally around what the next best improvement is with all of the data that’s available now, analytics, and all of the customer feedback, and all of the visibility that we had into this product, the ideas and opportunities to expand or enhance the product are endless. Knowing where to focus the energy became the challenge. And having those KPIs, they were able to serve as the lighthouses for the team to guide those decisions and rally around that, with that also becoming a personal bias. It was simply this stakeholder here have the biggest voice or this one thing that was going to allow us to unable or unlock a feature. We really used those KPIs to justify all of the prioritization for the product development.

Those KPIs were backed up by learning objectives and key questions. So we weren’t able to simply start with a metric. We wanted 30% of the people to do something instead of the questions like, does the customer or the employer see value in this? How would we know that? Well, we know that from the engagement they have. You have survey feedback, and we know whether or not employer saw value because we know whether or not they were actually promoting this with their employees or allowing us to access that. We were also able to look to see whether or not employees were getting value out of this based on what they were doing on the product. That then led to some key test metrics.

And I did remove exactly what our numbers were in there. That’s why you’re seeing a bunch of letters as you look at this funnel. But we were then able to develop this into a model where before the MVP, we set lower expectations. We had invested less. The product had less functionality and less feature. And so we set realistic expectations for what the MVP experience might be expected to deliver to allow us to know whether or not we were on target. We then looked ahead to say, “Well, if we then chose to invest in this, where would we expect to see significant improvement in the product? And what does that do to the overall impact that this makes on the business?” And from this, we were able to determine… we were able to justify this and to turn on a funding source to support the growth.

Now, for a technology guy, this is the first slide that I’m going to actually talk about technology. Up until this point, I’ve been talking about the customer. I’ve been focused on the first 18 months of our journey about what we did and how we made those decisions. But now as we pivoted into knowing that we were going to build something, Securian also recognized that doing new things with technology was part of our strategic plan. And this was an opportunity for us to do something different. And with that, there were three key things that we focused on. And that was one of our earliest hybrid cloud deployments. While we had on premises systems that provided much of the information that we needed to support the experience, we wanted to start moving to the cloud to provide the customer a better experience and to give our teams more flexibility and how we operate it.

And so we chose this product to be one of our first cloud applications. And with that, we build out the infrastructure to support that as an integrated product alongside some of our core systems. We also knew with this that we wanted to build a modern single webpage application. This was something that was important as we knew we hadn’t yet really engaged the customer. This would be an early experience with them. And they may or may not yet see the value in interacting with us. So we wanted to ensure that the experience they had was quick, easy, and responsive. When we asked questions, the site needed to be able to quickly adapt and reflect their answer and move on to the next step.

And lastly, we used this as a way to say, “How do we develop our talent? And how do we potentially acquire new people who are interested in coming and doing exciting projects like this within the firm?” And so there was also a focus on ensuring that the team working on this was growing and learning new concepts and new skills. To support that, we then set up additional learning objectives for technology on the use of cloud and what it is like to have that responsive front end that is a single page React application. This is the spot where we had these initial learnings. And quickly then, the team recognized that those weren’t enough. There were more things that we needed and could do with this opportunity. And three additional things came in as high features for us. And that was the deployment of test automation from the start.

The team recognized that as we were going to go to scale and as they wanted to be dynamic, with a lot of different AB testing and a lot of unique new features that may need to be turned on or turned off quickly, that we wanted to have test automation in and we wanted to do it now rather than to try to come back and boil the ocean later. They also recognized that we didn’t have a lot of experience building a single page application. We needed to partner and that Sauce Labs to help us execute on browser testing. So we can access any version of a phone or any version of a tablet with different browsers and different configurations to see how the experience renders and ensure that it’s meeting the expectations we know our customers have.

And lastly, the plan was originally and the first version of the application was built with the front end being in JavaScript, but the API ended up being in Java, which was Securian’s standard and something many of our associates were comfortable with and had knowledge on. And quickly, the team recognized that we needed to migrate that middle tier API into JavaScript so that the entire team would be able to work on either front end changes, or back end changes regardless of their skill set. And that would allow the team to be much more nimble and enabled to much more quickly pivot and change the type of work or the type of focus without having to worry about a shortage of skill sets.

So I’ve spent a lot of time talking about where we were and how we got here and the decision to build. I’m now going to pivot the rest of my remarks into, so what happened after we went live? What did we learn and what are the results? And what you’ll see here is a consistent set up. I’m going to share with you a key slide that shares some learnings and results from that. And then in order to help illustrate the growth in maturity, I’ve taken snapshots of what our KPI reporting dashboard was, and we’ll show that to you as well so that you can see the growth of the product over time. Well, I’d love to sit and show you and provide demos or provide the videos of the experience, but there’s no better way to see the growth of the product and the maturity than by looking at the KPIs and dashboards that help guide the team each step of the way.

So let’s look at our MVP. We successfully launched with three employers. And that was actually our goal. We wanted to launch with one to three. And we were able to go out and secure three of our current employers who were interested in partnering with us on this journey. We launched it in June of 2018. And with those three employers, some of them, it was just supporting their new hires while others ran a targeted enrollment campaign. And we certainly had learnings from that. We learned that there was actually no substitute for real customer usage to help guide what needed to be next. Those KPIs directly tied into the financial model, which also helped empower the team. And we also realized that the hybrid cloud deployment model was providing meaningful benefits. This is also a spot where we had our first pivot.

Initially, we thought that that benefit counselor one on one support would be something that a large percentage of customers would avail themselves off. And what we found was that just wasn’t happening. Rather than continuing to invest and enriching and building out that experience, the team pivoted over the summer, and in the next release, included the first version of a chatbot called Scout that was always on the roadmap, but was pushed out into a further phase. We were able to, over the summer, quickly react to that data, pull that chatbot up while pushing back some other features that we were seeing not being as important into a future release. Our results, they also weren’t perfect. We significantly underperformed in the ability to attract customers to this.

But that recognition and knowing the importance of that to the rest of the business case quickly allowed the team to focus and make changes, even within the first week to drive more engagement with the tool. But we also saw that in other areas, we were seeing performance that was near goals when it came to the customers who were engaging with the product and their ultimate result. And so we’ll now share just a version of the dashboard. And I have no expectation that you can actually read the detail here, but what I hope you see here is that you’re seeing three clients with three columns, each client being measured unique and individually. You can see that we’re using simple green, yellow, and red color coding to let us know how we’re doing. And with this, this report was done in Excel. It was produced manually by the project manager and analytics team. And it allowed us to see that we were seeing some inconsistent performance, but have some commentary about what was going on. And this ensured that everybody was looking at the same information as we tried to make decisions going forward.

We then from those results knew that we were ready to move into a pilot phase. We had success and we were making an impact and we were ready to bring more features, more investment and bring in more partners. So we added three clients to the platform. And we were then ready to support fall and annual enrollment, which for the benefits business is the busiest time of year. If you’re not having a new job or having a life change, you generally only get to change your benefits once a year. And that’s typically in October and November. So we weren’t geared up for that. This is where team managed AB testing quickly came into play where they were able to see if we use different wording, different calls to action or different imagery, did that have an impact on the customer experience? And if it did, let’s take those that are successful and quickly get them into the hands of everybody. And if they’re not successful or they’re impairing the experience, let’s quickly pull them back.

We were also able to see the impact on the feature improvements that we had made over the summer and we had a technical learning in the hybrid architecture that we developed performed well as we added more and more employees into the experience. So what did it mean? As we got into our results, we saw improvement in two of our three KPIs, and the other one was flat. We also started to get qualitative feedback that was positive. We were getting customer survey responses that were indicating that they were really impressed with or surprised by the level of information that they were able to get. And the employers were continuing to advocate for this. And many of them shared it more with their employee base than we had expected, or we ran into challenges. Were willing to champion that and partner with us on how to solve that in order to ensure that their employees could benefit from the tool.

As I flip over to the reporting dashboard for this version, you’ll see that it’s gotten a little bit more complex. We’re still looking at it in an employer by employer level, but we’ve now started to add some graphics and trending. And this is something the team continue to look at this, have it be front of mind, and understand how they’re doing and what changes they’ve made and how they’re affecting the experience. And so you’re seeing a little bit maturity here. The report looks a little bit better. There’s a little bit more detail. We’ve also got some better results. So this is the team continuing to grow and continuing to be able to improve the product they’re offering based on the knowledge and the investment that we make. So where are we today? And where are we going next?

This fall, I’m proud to say that we added over 50 employees to this experience and supported their fall enrollment. That said, the results from enrollment are still pending, but we did have some learnings from it. We found that customers did exceptionally well when we were able to pair this experience of finding their fit and getting a recommendation directly with Securian’s enrollment experience where they could take those results, and with one click, begin to purchase those products. We also found that the benefit counselors, that one on one interaction, is of high value to some customers, but it continues to be only a small percentage of the customers who choose to elect to use that feature.

And so that allows us to think strategically about how we position this. Well, it is an important feature. The scale on it doesn’t need to match the scale of the product. And we also realized that the Securian-led marketing was the one of the most influential factors on whether or not customers were able to visit it and ultimately found success in it. We also found that some employers elected to use Benefit Scout alongside other tools that supported all of their benefits. And first, we thought that that potentially could cause confusion or drive conflict between the tools. And we actually have examples now where that performed well.

I’m also proud to show that the KPI reporting is well established. What I’m showing you now is a series of screen grabs from a report that is generated and sent to the team every morning automatically, that encompasses everything from, what did side activity look like yesterday versus what was expected based on historical patterns? To where customers are engaging and non-engaging, and even demographic information to help us better understand which customers are using this. Do they have children? Are they married? What is their average age? What is their average salary? And that information can be used to help us support and target product.

This is also now automated and something that just shows up every day. So in a year, we’ve come from a simple three column spreadsheet that was produced manually on an ad hoc basis to automated reporting that’s reflecting and providing that quick feedback loop to the team as they invest. And that’s helped us form the 2020 product roadmap. While I can’t share all of the details, it’s about continuing to provide more products on the platform and ensure that we’re supporting them well. It’s about recognizing where we can continue to partner. And that may be even within Securian and leveraging this within those new markets.

It’s about also continuing to use the data and invest in that feedback that’s being given to us with every click that a customer has and using this product as a sandbox to experiment with new technology. But it’s not all about Benefit Scout. The learnings that we’ve had from this have gone on to have additional impact within Securian. As we’ve tried to change and mature our approach to agile and go from teams using just agile techniques and tools, but to changing a mindset, we’ve been able to use this as a reference example for an empowered product owner, leading a team that’s being guided by clear KPIs that are agreed to by the business and then giving that team the ability to act on what they think they need to do in order to deliver on those KPIs.

It also has given us a real world example where we can quickly bring in new technologies or try new ways of working or new development and see how well it works for us. And it’s still a new application, but it’s running alongside our core applications. And so we’re able to see what skills or ideas may be transferable between the two. And also, it’s really established some new ways of working or clear barriers between prior ways of working where we may engage earlier with our marketing partners, or our law and compliance officers, or our account management and sales team early in a project to get their feedback and then deliver something later.

Instead, these groups are now all core team members on the product delivery team, providing frequent feedback and being able to hear what we’re doing and be able to offer their perspective or guidance to oftentimes help us deliver a better solution. And so I’m proud to say that the product is performing well. I believe it echoes back well and fits with our strategy. And it’s also making a meaningful difference to the customers as well as bringing new ideas into Securian. And so with that, I do have what appears to be 10 minutes left to handle some Q&A from the audience.

Ben Telfer:

Thank you, Adam, for that excellent presentation. As you said, we do have time for quick questions. We have a number in already, but if you have any additional questions, please send them in. And if we don’t get time to ask Adam today, I’m sure he’d be happy to follow up via email. The first question for you, Adam, I think you almost touched it right on the end there. But the question is, how does Securian create their culture to enable optionality and agility to respond to changing customer needs?

Adam Taylor:

That’s a great question. So I think one of the key things is about putting that customer feedback and the customer actions front and center. So if you want to make the customer centric to what you’re doing, and to have that team rally around the customer need or the customer vision, you’ve got to give them access and insight. And so whether that’s the ability for them to directly connect with the customer, whether that’s the ability for them to see feedback from the site or to make the activity that the customer is doing real, it’s important.

So one of the things that I know the product owner for Benefit Scout does is frequently shares customer feedback. And it’s not all good, but frequently shares that with the team to help them understand where they’re making an impact or where something we’re trying isn’t working. It’s also then about rewarding and sort of out of band recognizing when people start asking questions about, “Well, where’s the customer impact?” Or, “Where’s the channel partner?” Or, “How is that going to affect a given persona that’s been developed?” It’s about stopping, pausing, and recognizing that’s a new behavior, that’s a new skill, and needs to be emphasized that we are doing this and it is hard work, especially because Securian has many people who have been here for a long time.

And so as we’re doing things in a new way on one of them, it’s easy to fall back into those old traps. So I think it’s about having a team awareness of that, and really recognizing and celebrating when we continue to act the way that we want to act rather than falling back on old patterns.

Ben Telfer:

Thanks, Adam. I’m sure you could spend a whole new Webinar to answer that question. So next one here, are you doing any testing or any pilots planned with digital platforms on any other life insurance products? With the comment at the end saying, “Other life insurance products are likely to be more complex than this one.” So they’re just interested to know, is that possible? And are you looking at that?

Adam Taylor:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So the group term life and accident products are simple. And that certainly has been a benefit for us. They’re the most common products in our industry. That said, many employers are starting to look at some permanent life options and making those available as a complementary product that are part of the benefits offering. And as we have employers who are looking at that, we know that Benefit Scout’s going to need to be ready to provide some guidance and some recommendation on what those products may look like or how to reconcile a term product versus a permanent product or a mix of the two. As we would look at even more complicated products that would fit in the individual space such as index products or variable products, the needs of the customer at that point, I think, are much more complicated than something that this product would be well suited to do.

And so I think part of it is knowing the capabilities of what an application or experience like this can do, and what’s going to be better supported by other conversations. And so right now, we know that this experience couldn’t scale to all of our products, but we don’t think it’s limited simply to the group life insurance space. More is about that customer need and it may be about helping a customer understand that they have a need or a benefit for a more complicated product, and then directing them on how to engage with that.

Ben Telfer:

Thank you. Another question here. Did Securian look externally at acquisitions or new tech from inshore tech startups rather than developing this product in house?

Adam Taylor:

Yes, we did. So there was a brief search for that. One of the things that I think led us more towards that build option was the recognition that the space that we serve with employers is highly customized. Every one of our employer has a different plan configuration, has unique needs. And we’ve historically been able to cater down to very minute differences such as whether they call their employees employees, associates, partners, and we wanted to be able to ensure that the Benefit Scout product integrated and fit well within the existing tools that we had in the market. We also wanted to use this as a learning opportunity for us and to be able to build some skills internally. And so in this case, we made the decision to build. But in other opportunities, we are looking for partnership opportunities or even acquisition opportunities that are relevant.

Ben Telfer:

Another question, this is sort of a two-part question, Adam. How many people are working in your digital transformation office? And is the implementation of the projects the responsibility of digital transformation office? Or is there another department there in charge of digital transformation within Securian?

Adam Taylor:

That’s a great question. So the number of people that are currently working in our digital transformation office, I don’t have that number offhand. I would estimate it to be in the 20s. And currently, the way the product is structured is it was able to graduate out of the digital innovation office, but the leadership in that area continues to be part of the executive sponsorship for this. So at the highest level, this is sponsored by our CIO and by the head of the employer business unit, the affinity solutions team. Under that, we’ve got a sponsorship level that includes our digital officer who is in a new role as we’ve done some reorganization, as well as my leaders and the sales and service leaders within the group market.

And throughout that first 18-month build phase, the project manager and key project resources were from the digital office and part of the cross functional team building that. The team now is running as an operating unit within the core technology team that supports this business, but has members from our UX or user experience team who are connected up through the same digital office. And so it’s something that was started there, incubated there, and then was developed in partnership, and now is running as an operational program that has natural touch-points with them, but running as part of the team that supports the market in general.

Ben Telfer:

Thank you, Adam. I think we’ve got time for one more question. I’m trying to pull together two or three questions all in one here. Looking at Securian’s mutual values, question being, how are your mutual values coming through within this product and more generally in the digital transformation that Securian’s undertaken?

Adam Taylor:

Well, that’s a great question. I think for me, one of our core values is trust. And I didn’t talk about this, but in the Benefit Scout product, oftentimes, when you’re recommending something to customers, it could be viewed as self-serving. And so when we believe that you should purchase $750,000 of coverage, how did you get there? And I think our core value is that we show our math on everything. And customers can easily get access to all of the math or logic that we use for the recommendation. There is no black box. There is no hiding it because we want to ensure that we’re honoring the respect and trust they’ve placed in us and making that information readily available to them.

Ben Telfer:

Thank you, Adam for joining us today and thank you for everybody for participating. And hope to see you on upcoming webinar soon. Have a good day, everybody. Goodbye.

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