Boston Mutual to streamline customer journey with new department
Boston Mutual Life Insurance Company has announced its new department of customer experience, innovation, projects & technology (CxIPT) strategic business center (SBC) to offer its customers an updated and more efficient service experience.
Jennifer Helms, Boston Mutual’s executive vice president, will lead the department, which has combined the strategic project management office, innovation lab, operations and the IT teams into an integrated department with one common goal: to streamline the customer journey, not only policyholders but also for their producer and broker partners across all distribution channels. This would entail offering higher levels of service and interaction models for producers that provide support in distribution and connecting Boston Mutual to its policyholders.
Jennifer Helms
Boston Mutual Life Insurance
“We’re embarking on a lot of transformational change at Boston Mutual in regards to our technology platforms – looking at the requests from our customers of what kind of services, or ability to interact with us, are happening,” Helms explains to Digital Insurance. “Things are changing, the customer market’s changing, the way the world wants to interact with us – it’s changing.”
While the department is not yet ready to share exact plans for improved digitization or the exact direction of technology it will move forward with, there are countless opportunities for improvement with customer interaction.
One of their initial goals is to reduce software vendor count – to streamline their user interface, from a support model perspective, to bring their overall application count down. In terms of streamlining the customer’s experience, Helms adds, “We’re looking for ways to better provide service to our customers in the way they want to interact with us. Terms like ‘omnichannel’ or ‘multichannel’ come to mind… How does our customer want to interact with us? And what is our customer’s view of what that service looks like?”
Re-imagining the customer experience and assessing how exactly customers wish to interact with Boston Mutual is key – would a customer prefer to chat with a Boston Mutual employee through an online chatting system, or a more interactive and digitized form through the website? Or would a customer rather pick up the phone and speak with a representative? These are a few of the questions that the department plans to address – how to adapt its service model and deploy specific technology to best meet customer needs.
“Something that we’re piloting at this time is having the ability to find and fill out and submit more of the forms that are required in our industry, through our online interactions with our customers… that is an example of where the combined department brings us a lot of value, because we’re, of course, looking to meet our customers — how they want to communicate with us,” Helms says.
In the future, the department also plans to create technical strategies and partner with leaders in the fintech and insurtech spaces. Helms notes that the department hopes to review how data is standardized and how to securely transfer information in a digital format.
“Looking at that entire end-to-end view from a customer experience perspective, and how that works for our innovation and technology teams and the back-end operations for the organization at the same time,” Helms adds. “And implementing it in a streamlined fashion is an example of the wins that we’re looking for here with this combined department.”
