F&G Annuities executive Catherine James helps focus on "moments of truth"

Catherine James, a senior vice president at F&G Annuities & Life Inc. in Des Moines, Iowa, manages retail operations for the life insurance and annuities provider. She is one of the honorees being recognized by Digital Insurance as part of its 2023 Women in Insurance Leadership program.

James says she prefers to consider decisions on adding new technology through the lens of customer experiences and desired outcomes. When she started at F&G in November 2021, the retail operations team was trying to tackle too many issues all at once, she says, so she implemented a “moments of truth” perspective to focus their efforts. The team selected the five critical customer experiences as the moments of truth — instances where “you’ve got to meet the customer with your best” or the company could potentially lose the customer. 

The five designated moments are: new business, including underwriting and suitability — when first impressions are key for both the customer and agent; commissions — when the agent’s paycheck is delivered; resolution — the recovery from a problem that has arisen; policy value and status — when a policyholder is kept informed; and disbursement — when the company acts on its promise of payment.

With a focus on those moments of truth, James then takes an outcomes-based approach when working with IT on adding new technologies, she says. “I’m going to come to them with outcomes that our team wants to get out of those moments of truth, and we rely on our technology team to say: OK, this is where an application of that could occur.”

The outcomes approach also helped drive F&G’s new technology for annuity case management and life case management, which James helped implement. For example, an outcome sought on the life insurance side involved exceptions-based processing for underwriting decisions, where an underwriting engine can handle generic decisions and a human underwriter gets involved only to handle the “exceptions” — the decisions that require their attention.

“There are times when you 100%  absolutely have to go to an underwriter, but there are times when you don’t have to, so how do we make that more exception-based?” James asks. Previously, the life case management was a manual review with a human underwriter personally examining all of the information. 

One of her priorities for the coming year is to apply the exception-based processing concept to other areas. If an application in a business case management system is deemed to be in good order, under exception-based processing that application should be able to continue moving through the system without being “touched” by a person. “We want to be able to have our people and operations catching the things that are most important,” she says.

James also helped implement a “wizard-based” approach in automating the annuity and life case management systems. Previously, the company had implemented digital applications by simply filling out PDFs identical to their paper form predecessors. Under the wizard-based approach, digital forms for the case management systems are filled out automatically while the user answers questions in an order that makes sense, she says. F&G has now switched over to a wizard approach for nearly all of its applications.  

As F&G grew rapidly — doubling its annuity and life insurance applications and corresponding sales from 2021 to 2023 — its NTT Data-managed call center needed technology to help keep up. James helped implement skill-based routing in the call center with interactive voice response technology. With the company’s rate of growth, it wasn’t practical to expect newly hired call center employees to be fully versed in all aspects of F&G’s life insurance and annuity products. “It wasn’t the most elegant or efficient way to do that, so we worked with them on how they trained, the skills and then routing the calls,” with IVR directing calls to the call center employees with the specific knowledge required, she says.

To expand continuous improvement concepts, James built a continuous improvement department for retail operations to question basic assumptions about each process. “Do we really understand the base process? Because you don’t want to automate a bad process,” she says. Automation can come after the desired outcomes are determined and the right process to accomplish those outcomes is established.

The idea is to extend the continuous improvement process throughout the company, covering every channel. “As we’ve grown and as we go through the channels and get to know the channels better, we’re always continuously improving our processes and how we interact with them,” James says.