Key Takeaways:
- Relevance of customer choice in Insurance buying process
- Customers are demanding low touch point without compromising personalized experience
- Competitive landscape is no longer categorized by business models
Amyn Rajan (00:10):
Thank y'all for coming today. So our topic today is talk about how there has been an evolution in the insurance industry from rick and mortar to of course in the digital space. Stephanie, I can have a conversation about this. We're quite different, aren't we, Stephanie!
Amyn Rajan (00:31):
We come from, why don't you talk about yourself?
Stephanie Mascia (00:33):
We come from different worlds. My name is Stephanie Macia and I'm the Head of the John Hancock Vitality Program at John Hancock. I represent a Life Insurance Carrier, a very old institution, over 160 year old company, and we distribute our life insurance via brokerage model. So we don't have any captive agents and we sell our life insurance through BGAs, through producer groups, wirehouses, et cetera. And so that's a little bit about John Hancock, but you'll tell share more in a little bit. How about you Amyn?
Amyn Rajan (01:12):
My name is Amyn Rajan. I work for A-MAX Insurance Services, Inc. It's a brokerage agency that specializes in non-standard auto insurance. We are founded in Texas, but we are in several different states. We have over 200 brick and mortar locations, so we are still in that very traditional space. Slowly transitioning into the digital area. Like I said, our focus is in the non-standard space, so a lot of our customers tend to want to do business in person and they walk into our offices and we're trying to see how we can innovate and try to grasp that digital customer as well. So let's begin, Stephanie. So in your space, how do you acquire your customers?
Stephanie Mascia (02:02):
Well, a little bit about John Hancock is that the key to our customer acquisition is a very unique to the industry value proposition, and that's John Hancock Vitality. So obviously with life insurance there is a death benefit. That's the end of the road. That's the ultimate goal of life insurance. But with John Hancock Vitality, we have what we refer to as life benefits as well. What that actually means is a health and wellness engagement platform that is part of your life insurance. And this comes in the form of a mobile app that's very engaging with our customers and rewards them for the things that they do every day to live a healthy life. So things like taking a walk with a dog, buying fresh produce, meditating, getting a good night's sleep, et cetera. And this is the type of rewards, the way that we reward them is through a premium discount, up to 25% for participating in this program, as well as other rewards in down the road, such as Amazon Prime devices, like the Aura Ring I'm wearing today, as well as Headspace membership discounts and REI, etcetera.
(03:23)
But this is more than just a value proposition for us. This is our mission, our vision, our purpose. We're all in on our customer's wellness. So it is really the underpinning of everything that we do. At John Hancock, when we launched Vitality back in 2015, we offered vitality on a number of our products and it was something that a customer could elect, they could choose to buy, but it wasn't until 2018 when we went all in and said, this is what we are. This is what we believe in health and wellness and investing in our customers wellness and their longevity, that we really saw exponential growth in sales. When you think about life insurance, who is better poised to care about your living a longer life besides your family and friends, of course, but then your life insurer. So really it's more than just a value, a unique differentiator and value proposition.
(04:25)
Our mission, our vision, our values, everything that we do, and it truly is a shared value. So that's really how we work to acquire our customers and saw exponential growth, have seen exponential growth in the last few years as being all in on investing in our customers. And this also trickles to our advisors who are our first line of customer. Essentially, we don't have a lot of access to the customers because we distribute via a brokerage model. So we really rely on the agents and advisors, et cetera, to be able to carry that message forward. So we have all sorts of events for our producers where we're sharing the message of vitality, getting them access to the experience, getting them access to our world class partners, et cetera, so that they can then carry that message forward on our behalf. So Amyn tell me, A-Max has about, you said 200 brick and mortar locations, but as customers are moving more to the digital space, what are your strategies to acquire new customers? Yeah, in auto?
Amyn Rajan (05:43):
Yeah, so we felt like we built this mastery in attracting customers to walk into our offices for over 20 years. But we are seeing in the past five years that that's been a shift. Customers are more and more going online, especially during covid. We saw a huge number of customers who were starting their journey online, and as of today, about 80% of our customers actually do start their journey online. So we find them there. So we realized that we needed to do a significant amount of investment in digital marketing channels. So nothing new, but we had to learn what that meant for a non-standard space. Of course, everyone's going after the customers, but how do we get our customers to actually find us online was a big thing. Of course, we personalized and we realized that also in this high risk customers base, we deal with a lot of middle to low income tier customers, but we realized that they might not have access to laptops or desktop computers, but they all have mobile phones.
(06:47)
So we need to make sure that whatever strategies that we put forward has to be mobile first. So we found a way to get in front of them and once they engaged with us online, we realized that there was a need for consultation and they made their choices. They would either call us, they would walk into our offices, they would chat with us, and we needed to figure out how to continue to build those capabilities at every step of the way. What do they prefer? We still like having our customers walk into our offices. We still do have a lot of customers do walk into our offices because of the risk area that we work with. We do need pictures of the cars, we need to have those touch points. We had to validate their identity and we're slowly trying to solve for all of these areas for them to not have to actually walk into our offices and be able to do end quoting and binding online. But there are some barriers in that space, but we try to continue to build those solutions to get there. In doing so, it is been interesting. So just the same way that we have cracked the code of acquiring customers in our brick and mortar, we had also done quite a good job in engaging them when they came into the office as well. So after acquisition, we're still trying to crack that quote as to how to keep them engaged. I see. Somebody asked that question earlier, what happens after you buy the policy? How do you get the customers to give them the same level of service that you expected? How are you solving for that?
Stephanie Mascia (08:21):
So for us, engagement is all about personalization. Personalization is paramount. And listening to our customers, it's super important that our customers have feel like they have choice in how they interact with us and how they're engaging with us. So with this health platform, with this health and wellness platform, they have the ability to choose, maybe I don't want to share my Fitbit data with John Hancock because I just don't feel comfortable. I have a certain generation that aren't comfortable with that and others who are very forthcoming with that type of thing. So they're able to engage in this program in other ways with the educational content or maybe sharing a receipt that they got their covid shot and their flu shot, let's say. So providing our customers with choice in how they engage with us and then really providing a personalized experience. When you think about life insurance, typically with a standard life insurance policy, you're interacting with the customer maybe two times a year with a privacy notice and then a bill.
(09:36)
And often a customer has no idea even who their insurance carrier is. They might know that Bob down the street, their agent sold them the policy, but they have no idea who even the carrier is. By having this engagement platform, and again, this value proposition and this strong mission and purpose, we are able to engage with our customers upwards of 40 times per month is the average actually. So it's pretty incredible. And those are interactions where we're reaching out to the customer. They're also reaching out to us via the mobile app. So it might be something as they're logging a workout or they're, they're getting a chance to spin the wheel because they completed 10 workouts and they're earning a $5 Starbucks gift card, let's say. So it's also been really important for us to personalize the experience with digital nudges. So really leaning into data and finding ways to keep our members engaged.
(10:39)
An example of that is a push notification or an email that says, Hey, we noticed your Apple Watch data stops linking. Something to that effect. Or, oh, hey, congratulations on your achievement of platinum status and those types of things. So really having those personalized leveraging data to have those personalized reach out, those personalized nudges to our customers. I'd also say we don't do it alone. We have a very robust ecosystem of partners, of world-class partners that we leverage to keep our customers engaged. And again, with this wellness platform, we have the ability to partner up with or a ring with Apple, with Fitbit, with a Tuft School of Nutrition, with Headspace, et cetera. So we're, we're not doing it alone. We're also leveraging the power of our partners to keep our customer or draw our customers in and keep them engaged on a day-to-day basis. So Amyn, I'd like to ask you a similar question. How do you ensure that your customers are engaged and satisfied through the insurance process? Of course.
Amyn Rajan (11:58):
By the way, I'm loving drawing these parallels. I know large organization like yourselves who's been around for over a hundred years now, is doing this and building those large partnerships. I feel like we do all of that in a smaller scale, in a localized scale. So our partnerships look very different. Of course, we do try to leverage the locations that we have and those locations are strategically picked to be within the communities in which the customer lives obviously. So we try to build community partnerships. So we would partner up with a check cashing place, car mechanics, nail salons close by where we know that our customers are coming in and they're leaving and they are shopping in those areas. By the way, that data is out there. I mean you collect to see what those customer behaviors are and you're able to leverage that.
(12:51)
So we try to partner up with them and we create community events. We bring them into within their communities and try to see if we can create a picnic. We of course, try to also leverage cultural nuances. So we have a large presence in Texas and most of our customers come from Hispanic background. So we try to see how we can bring that cultural element into how we cater to our customers. We try to get really, really personalized in that manner. So this goes for all agents. We all know that connecting the customers, the number one important thing is to building that trust. And I feel that all the agents that work for us have been trained over and over again to see how they can personalize their experience with their customers, try to remember their names, their birthdays, their daughter's graduations or the new cars and celebrate that as you connect with them.
(13:49)
As the customers have started to move in the digital space, we continue to try to see how we can crack that code. And it has been in some instances, easy, in some instances difficult because there's a lot of data out there already. We know a lot more about our customers right now than we did before. So when we create digital nudges like y'all do, we also try to do the same thing, try to see what we can know about our customers and celebrate it with them by way of these nudges and those nudges then brings the customer back to us. I'm curious though, you said 40 nudges a month, that's a lot.
Stephanie Mascia (14:26):
40 interactions, So that's both, us interacting with the customer, then interacting back with us. So again, all sorts of from logging into the mobile app and completing a survey on our newsfeed or again, receiving a reward, meaningful content that we push to them or they respond to us, they might log an activity in our app. So that's an opportunity. I know everyone in this room can appreciate. Every opportunity you have to engage with your customer is golden. Just in terms of the value of the brand, recognition of the opportunity for future sales for, it's just golden to have all of those interactions. So having a platform like this really enables us to maximize on that.
Amyn Rajan (15:15):
I mean, another tactic that we try to leverage is C community giving. Of course we try to see what our customers value, what is it that they're engaging with and being able to build partnership with local schools, local chamber of commerce is and try to see where our community engage with and how we can benefit them. So that giving back in itself, although it's from the notion of altruism, but it also helps build this reputation within the communities. And for local agents like ourselves, that's extremely, extremely important and that also gives us a leverage that customers then start to interact with us and then they do business with us in that manner. So we have acquired the customers and we've engaged with 'em. Now the question comes, how do we scale our businesses and how do we grow?
Stephanie Mascia (16:01):
I actually want to ask you that first. I'm curious how you continue to grow and if you see any threats to the growth.
Amyn Rajan (16:09):
Yeah, so I think the competitive landscape has changed quite a bit and just sort of listening into this conference, I realized that representation comes from all different ways and all of us are in some ways competing to get that same customers. Agents back in the day would try to compete with the agents next door or within the same zip code, and that would be your competition and you have to see how you can outcompete them. That is no longer the case. Of course, we have direct to consumer models, which are really big carriers are going direct to the consumers. We have InsureTech models that have come in. They've figured out different business models of how we can interact with the customers. So one of the big thing is that non centered insurance stays within that risk category where the customers fall into certain risk categories.
(16:59)
User base insurance is actually narrowing that gap. So it's no longer whether you live in a neighborhood that has high crime, doesn't necessarily puts you in a non-standard category. If you're a good driver, you can probably get a good rate if you go with the user wage insurance, user base insurance as well. So the competition, competitive landscape has changed quite a bit. Also, these other companies that have come into the play, they come with funding and they can invest in certain resources to be able to get ahead of the game. So then how does a local agent sort of compete with that? And the way to do this essentially is number one, stay in the know your competition. If you know your competition, exactly what needs they're serving and see how you can come close. And secondly, really hone in on what you are good at, which is your own personalization, your own connection.
(17:50)
I mean, no matter how deeper we can go with digital personalization, nothing gets more personal than a handshake. So if you have the capability to be able to make it happen, then that should be your competitive advantage. So we try to leverage all of that to see how we can move forward with it. The next big thing I feel is you can't really do it alone. With the competitive landscape. There's a lot of private equity groups who own a lot of agencies now a lot of carriers have started to own their own agency models. So competitive landscape once again has changed. So now the local agents, in order for them to meet the customer's needs, they must partner with the carriers as well. The conversations have to change. The conversation should not be just limited to lost ratios and commission negotiations. I feel that there is opportunity to leverage synergies in technology enablement to be able to reach out to the customers.
(18:52)
The panel right before this was how much data do we have on the customers? Well agents have one set of data and carriers have another set of data. And sometimes we feel like we speak in isolation. If there is an opportunity to connect with each other and try to see how we can enhance our capabilities to cater to these customers, these conversations have to happen. So agents or carriers should welcome these conversations and actually have more and more opportunities at amex. We do try to do that very, very often. We built strong partnerships with IT teams, not just the sales team, but we've built partnership with the IT teams with several different carriers to see how they can leverage our capabilities and we can leverage theirs to combine together. We've built platforms that don't really exist in the market right now, but we've built it with one-on-one carriers. It takes longer, of course it takes resources, but that's needed right now. How about yourself?
Stephanie Mascia (19:50):
Well, to Amyn's point, I totally agree and in fact don't at John Hancock, we don't have a captive agency model. We're relying on our distributors, the agents advisors that we work with to sell John Hancock. They don't have to sell John Hancock. So our value proposition is extremely important part of that. But also we need to communicate with them. We need to make sure that what we're doing benefits everyone involved. And we often say when we talk about scaling, we often say, John Hancock Insurance should be easy to buy and fun to own. But we have to own that. We have to make sure that it continues to evolve and that it is easy to buy, continues to be easy to buy and fun to own. I think we all experienced in Covid that we needed to work in new and different ways, and that was a huge learning point for us and really a lot of our digitization in terms of the sale process, including the necessity for electronic applications and straight through processing and shortening the underwriting time period.
(21:00)
So leveraging technology such as electronic health records via companies like Human a p I, to be able to shorten the underwriting decision period by 20 days, for example. So really when I think about scaling and future growth, we just cannot be satisfied with the status quo. We have to keep innovating. Digitization is such an important part of that and we have to continue to explore data, the power of data and analytics, what we can do there, artificial intelligence, how we can better service our customers. So just not being satisfied with that status quo and continuing to iterate, continuing to evolve to be that easy to buy fund, to own. Again, we have to earn every sale. No one owes us a sale, we'd love that. So we really truly have to be easy to buy and fund to own in order to get those sales and continue to get those sales and continue our growth. So Amyn, when I'm thinking about what we've talked about so far today, I'm curious what you think the balance between brick and mortar and the digital world is.
Amyn Rajan (22:20):
Well, so I'm reflecting on our keynote speaker. Depas knows she made a big point about what customers want nowadays. They want faster, simpler, and more personalized service. And I do feel that with the digital capabilities, we could provide faster, more accurate and more convenient service for our customers. And although we do have digital means to personalize and build trust, but I do feel that if you have a luxury to have physical spaces like we do, then that becomes a headquarters for building trust and really personalize your experiences. So it's a really fine mix between the two that agent like ourselves can enjoy. What does that look like in your area?
Stephanie Mascia (23:11):
Well, I think digitization offers so much in terms of meeting the needs of our customers, meeting the needs of agents, advisors and continuing to evolve. And of course personalization as we talked about is so important, the power of data and digitization. But really we cannot lose touch with, cannot lose a personal touch with our customers. It's so important for us. And when I think about our parent company, Manulife, one of our values is obsessing about customers and myself and my team live that every day we have to be understood and understanding and super obsessed with what's the customer experience, what's the end game for the customer? And that customer is both, again, as I mentioned, the end customer, but also our producers, the agents and advisors. So I feel very fortunate that I work in an area where we have this shared value model where our customers have the benefit of we're helping our customers live a longer, healthier life. And what that means for us as a company we're not shy to say is that our health outcomes improve, our mortality improves shareholder value improves, and really everybody wins at the end of the day. So I'm pretty proud of that and I think there's definitely a role for digitization, but really we have to be ultra focused on the end customer.
Amyn Rajan (24:50):
Sounds good. It seems like a good note to end here. Any questions? Yeah, please.
Audience 1 (24:56):
So I mean you made the comment that you were really good at getting people to walk through your door pre covid and that was how you were acquiring a lot of your customers. Then you had to shift to more of an online model. So a very tactical question is how did you get people to walk through your digital front door? Were you investing in search optimization? So kind of a lead gen business acquisition question.
Amyn Rajan (25:20):
I realized there was no secret sauce to this, just very typical marketing practices, but I do feel like more of it happened organically. So we were working on going digital and trying to see if we can create buying online models, even pre covid. But we realized that the carriers in the nonsense space did not have a lot of appetite for this. The risks are so high and the chances of fraud are so big in non standard space that carriers are very uncomfortable allowing us to do end-to-end business from quote to buying online. But during Covid, because the traffic increased so much and we were able to advocate that case with the carriers, we were able to try to build that up. So honestly the problem was not a big problem, was not to get the customers to come through our digital door front, but more so carriers to give us those capabilities to cater to those customers. Hope that makes sense.
Audience 2 (26:22):
Thank you. Thank you for so much information. That was great. Just wanted to get your perspective on the Vitality program is a great program. Wanted to get both your perspectives of a hypothetical situation where we are using data points both from a program like Vitality, the kind of data points that you use to provide that customer experience and trickle that over to the P N C side or the auto and home insurance side of things. And how would that sort of translate, because we do have the telematics program, but it's not as robust and as thought out or capturing as many data points that we would want to. So how do you see that sort of panning out for the two industries, sort of amalgamating in that format?
Stephanie Mascia (27:07):
Well it's interesting. I think we're often described akin to a safe driving program first, since we're very unique in the life insurance industry, at least in the us, we're often compared to a safe driving program but for living benefits essentially. So your question is how could we leverage the data from a vitality program to property and casualty and vice versa? And vice versa. Yeah. So actually interesting that you mentioned that one of the pieces, one of the ways that our customers can earn points in the vitality program is actually safe driving. So they provide evidence that they are safe driver through one of the safe driving programs. There's several, as you probably already know throughout the us and so we actually award points per year based on a safe driving program. So that's actually already in existence in the vitality program. And on the reverse side of things, I think there's limitless or limitless potential on data and how that can be shared across industries. I guess I would challenge the auto industry to come up with a concrete idea on how to leverage our health and engagement data. But I do think that there is, in speaking with our actuaries when we were adding this benefit, I do think there's a strong connection between people that are living a healthy lifestyle and also drive safe. So it's interesting. There's a lot of interesting possibilities there.
Amyn Rajan (28:39):
Thank you.
Audience 3 (28:40):
Yeah, I think I can probably, I'll do it. So I am a vitality distributor and an owner of it too, of John Hancock. I bought it because of it and we're a life BGA, so it's awesome. One of the challenges we had, and for both of you is you talk about the customer walking in the brick and mortar or an advisor has to promote vitality. How do you get them to the actual agents to understand and align with the new digital ways? That's been our biggest challenge. It was our challenge for a long time, getting a life insurance agent to talk about a vitality program. Three sentences in, they were confused, right? It's awesome, it's life changing. If I have 9,000 steps by the end of the day I'm walking to get another thousand so I can get my benefits. It definitely impacts it. But how do you weave in that overall agent experience that is in that brick and mortar that needs to take maybe some analytics about the marketing from that you're doing in the local area?
Stephanie Mascia (29:36):
Yeah, do you want to start this one?
Amyn Rajan (29:38):
Sure. I mean, incentivizing is what we have. We have tried, we do incentivize agents for retention of our customers and they realize that it takes them longer for them to pick up the phone and try to get in touch with them. And they have to call maybe 20 times before a customer will answer. Versus customers are responding quicker on text platforms and text platforms are automated. So if agents are owning a customer and they're able to keep up with it and make sure the customers engaged with them in the digital platform, it takes lesser time for them and they're incentivized just the way just the same. So we've tried to crack the code that way is to align incentives with the customer behavior that we want.
Stephanie Mascia (30:22):
And first of all, thank you for your business. Absolutely can't do it without you guys. And I would say we also do, as you're probably aware, to have incentivization for a sale of vitality. That's not a secret. But also it can be a challenge to get, as I say, it's a challenge to get to the end customer, but even to the actual agent that's selling if it's through BGA and there's like multiple layers to actually get through there. So I think absolutely having that being all in on this is what we do, this is who we are. It's not just a marketing tactic. This is what we believe in, I think has been really helpful in saying vitality's on everything, it's not just selling vitality. You're selling vitality on everything. The customer has a choice whether they're going to engage or not. But also we have all sorts of events too that we try to engage with.
(31:20)
We have a BGA council, etcetera, but we also host a number of events at some of our partners. We were just at a biotech in California, well we are in California. We were just at a biotech in Menlo Park maybe two weeks ago that we invited a group of advisors on to share what we're doing with that biotech and get them to understand or help them understand the value prop and what we're trying to accomplish. So I think there's definitely that incentivization, but also just being all in on this is who we are, this is what we do, as well as trying to bring some of those folks along on the ride with us as well.
Amyn Rajan (32:00):
Alright, so we are right that time. Thank you all so very much for coming. Thank you.