5 questions: Will Lee, chief information and innovation officer, The Hanover

June 21, 2022 6:36 AM

Headquarters of The Hanover Insurance Group in Worcester, Mass.

Digital Insurance spoke with Will Lee, chief information and innovation officer at The Hanover, who has been with the firm since 2004 in IT and corporate development roles. With these experiences, he’s learned that the technology piece has to be considered as part of business growth strategies. The Hanover is managing the complexity of modernizing technology using a dual horizon operating model, in which current technology is optimized while it builds new capabilities for the future. Lee talked about how the company’s technology upgrades will improve on its interactions with customers. The following transcript is lightly edited.

How has your experience in departments outside of IT helped with issues and projects in your current role?

Willard-Lee — Willard T. Lee, The Hanover

We talk a lot about co-creating and collaborating with our business partners. It becomes so important that you can say you've walked in their shoes or understand what they do. For us on the co-creation side, the importance is, from the beginning, on helping them dream the dream, how technology can be leveraged but at the same time, talking about it in terms of being practical and making sense to them.

This is practical, about how you can leverage technology to make yourselves better today. That's really been a key strategic driver for us, building that broad set of experiences and skills that we need in IT. Similar to what I did building that through the team and getting that same sort of experience where hopefully you don't have to move seats to do that, we can bring some of those experiences to our people.

What are some of your near-term digital priorities?

We look at three areas – our agent experience, our customer experience and our employee experience. From the agent side, since our business model is we do everything through our independent agents, it's very important that we fit like a glove with their operations. So we spend a lot of time with them understanding what their pain points are, the workflows and so forth. Many agents today are trying to gain efficiencies with single platforms, where data is entered once, and then they want to get out to different carrier portals to be able to get quotes back.

That's going to be the future – doing it without homogenizing all our products, keeping our uniqueness. Part of this is getting creative in how we write policies at the local level. At the agent level, we see that as one of the large areas. From a customer perspective, it's 100% all about self-service. A lot of it is at the claims level being able to put in your own claim, track it and get your check all in a nice, seamless way.

From an employee perspective, a lot of it has to do with the hybrid workforce. For us, it's about how we keep our culture. How do we retain employees when not everybody's coming into the office as much as they used to? How do we build an experience internally where we get the best of both worlds? I love it that we can hire people in different locations, because from a diversity standpoint and from a skill standpoint, it opens up where we can find the best talent.

Partnering with customers or operations service providers, how much does Hanover outsource certain functions and how much does Hanover develop with partners?

There's certain parts of our development cycle that we have partners help us with on the development side. There are certainly data analytics partners that just have good data that we want to bring into our process. In today's world with some of these insurtechs, we're not going to try to replicate what they spent their time building. A key tenet in our own legacy transformation was making sure that we can plug managed services into parts of our life cycle or process. Understanding our strategy, what we’re doing and our distribution all has to come together in an integrated view.

There's a couple different lenses. From a risk standpoint, especially in today's cyber world, we look at it from a business continuity perspective of, if we're going to outsource a piece of the operation, how resilient is that organization? How do they comply to our standards of what we consider appropriate from the cyber perspective? There's also a piece to looking at them from a standpoint of 'Are they growing with us? Are we helping them?' Some of the insurtechs, are we investing in them from that perspective and helping them grow?

We've gone through a couple different scenarios where we picked different ways to approach things. But a lot of it is through a business continuity lens of, if this is in production and this is important to our own life cycle in today's world and the changing environment, if this thing goes down because of a cyber attack or something like that, what happens and what do we do? That's been the contemporary lens for some of the partnerships we've had.

Where do you see the biggest opportunities for insurance innovation?

More self-service to take the burden off customer support, so they can focus more on selling our insurance policies. We have seen efficiencies from platforms like Semsee and Tarmika for single-entry. That's an exciting place to go to, because that's another channel besides our own point of sale where an agent can interact with us and be very successful. On the customer side, personalized customers and small commercial customers are essentially converging on self-service of policies and claims. Even though one is a business and one is personal, when you're talking about a small business, it's typically a person. We found a lot of synergies that we're building out on the digital side in small commercial that can be used in personalized and vice versa.

What technology developments have yielded unexpected benefits for The Hanover?

Low-code platforms that build really robust, nice front ends quickly. You need data connections but we’re starting to tackle that. We obviously don't want shadow IT organizations all over the place but there is a place to ideate, build proofs of concepts, and test out theories and hypotheses. There's ways to do this without the full baggage of a resilient application that has to be built right away, especially if you're not sure.

That gives us a little bit of flexibility and agility to go and examine some things and test out some things before we put pen to paper. That's another area that becomes super helpful, because it really is tough on the insurance side to know exactly where the puck's going in many of these areas. The frameworks to be able to test and learn are important for us, because you can put 10 really smart people in a room and pontificate all you want, but at some point you have to start trying it and see if it actually sticks or not. These local platforms are a way to do that.

How would you rate The Hanover's digital environment to date?

I'd say it's progressing. About two years ago, we centralized a lot of the digital development. For a while, we had an app that does first notice of loss, for claims, but then we have another app that was handling endorsement changes and requests to see if policies could have a different feel or appearance. From a technology perspective, if you change it on the web app, it should propagate into the mobile app. It shouldn't be two separate things.

The last part is data from the digital experience. That's one of our foundational pieces that we're working to make sure is consistent. What an agency is, is what a customer sees, which is what our employees see, depending on the database. We’re also normalizing and creating common definitions around what some of the data means. We realized if you want a consistent experience, data is a big part of it. We are still seeking more similarity between the customer experience and the agent experience.