John Hancock's Susan Roberts brings care and customer concern to tech strategy

HEATHER BARR R

Susan P. Roberts, head of U.S. strategy, transformation and continuous delivery at John Hancock Life Insurance, found that crowdsourcing innovative ways to work with technology could also be applicable to charity efforts outside the company.

Roberts, who joined John Hancock in 2018 and has over 25 years experience in the insurance and financial services industries, co-founded "100 Women Who Care - Boston," in which 100 women each contribute $100 every quarter, and choose a charity to receive a $10,000 grant.

"My career has been built around transformation and a spirit of trying things. Let's innovate, let's see what works and learn from there," she said. "It's very similar to how I work at John Hancock, which is bringing together the best and brightest, rallying them around a problem and then together we execute."

Roberts' role began with strategy and transformation, adding continuous delivery in 2020 when the pandemic led John Hancock to pursue that as a useful discipline to serve policyholders. Her work there began by thinking about the strategy for John Hancock's products in the market, and the experience for their policyholders. She said it was about "balancing not only the external, but also some of the internal [functions], like how we should be operating – really defining that strategy." 

Before Roberts and John Hancock began emphasizing continuous delivery for products, the carrier launched about 10 new products per year. Now continuous delivery makes it possible to develop and launch about 20 new products per year, according to Roberts. John Hancock's continuous delivery is using AI to achieve the quicker claims processing and confirm accuracy of claims information. 

"We're able to react much faster," she said. "We're really thinking about speed to market."

This is achieved by reorganizing the carrier's efforts to "reflect the customer journey," she added. John Hancock's customer engagement teams begin with "top of the funnel activities," then pass their work on those functions to claims operations teams. This ensures that new products have considered the customer experience holistically, according to Roberts.

"If I'm launching a new product, what's the servicing experience going to be like? What's the buying experience like for the advisor when they're working with the end consumer?" she said. "We talk about everything through the lens of the customer. And we deliver considering that experience. That really has transformed the way we work and helped us to really identify a lot of things that maybe in the past, we would have missed."

The carrier's continuous delivery team and its "business agility" efforts to respond to changing customer needs are not unique in business, but they are for life insurers, Roberts added. "Insurance organizations tend to move slower," she said. "That's no longer okay. We need to be able to move with speed. We need to be innovative and harness the power of the expertise that lives within our firm to drive results."

Roberts found that continuous learning is necessary to achieve continuous delivery. "My style is bringing together colleagues and driving collaboration so that they can leverage each other's expertise, very much empowering teams to try new things and to innovate, and sometimes to fail," she said. "It's making it a safe space to fail so they can learn."