Countering trust erosion with a CX focus | Mindy Chen and Brian Poppe

Episode Summary

Brian Poppe, SVP of Income & Wealth Planning, and Mindy Chen, VP of AI & Analytics at Mutual of Omaha, join forces to discuss how legacy systems are eroding consumer trust, and how insurers can leverage data and AI to build trust and drive efficiency from the ground up.

Episode Transcript

Dani: This is Trust Talks, an InsureTech Insights podcast hosted by Clearspeed. I'm your host, Dani Ng-See-Quan. Consumer trust in the insurance industry is waning, which translates to billions of dollars left on the table. How do we rebuild it? And is it possible to build a more trusted insurance ecosystem to support profitability. For this episode, we're joined by two industry experts for Mutual of Omaha, Brian Poppe and Mindy Chen. Brian's the SVP of Income and Wealth Planning. Mindy's the VP of AI and Analytics. Brian, Mindy, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Brian: Danny, thank you for inviting us.

Mindy: Thank you for having us.

Dani: Let's get right into some questions that I have for you. So, insurance is a for -profit industry, So let's talk about profitability. Where do you see money being left on the table and what can be done to address this?

Brian: Yeah, one of the biggest places that I think money gets left on the table is customer persistence. So customer signs up they say gosh, I want this policy It's it's very important to me to protect either myself or my family in doing this thing and then at some point in the next 6, 12, 18, 24 months they stop paying their premium or they tell us, "I want to cancel my policy." Part of that could be due to the trust factor that you're after. Part of that just could be due to some processes that we have not made easy as an insurance industry for those customers. But when you look at the number of customers that like to walk in the door and then immediately walk out the door, we are leaving a lot of money on the table.

Mindy: I think that we definitely have opportunities to get more affordable products into the hands of customers sooner. And on this slide, I think a lot about Generative AI and how it could potentially help us reimagine the customer experience and power associates and build industry leading solutions to get products into the hands of customers sooner. And this is so compelling to me that I tell Brian all the time. He feels like there's money all over the floor and I just don't have enough time and energy to go pick it all up but what's really wasteful about it isn't just the profit loss it's the opportunity to use technology to help us scale so that we can protect more individuals and families more than ever before.

Dani: Yes I think that that's a great response and if you know if we think about it that the consumer really is taking on a lot of the premiums rising, for example, the slow manual aspects of the processes delays them getting through the process faster. So to your point, how can we kind of rebuild that trust with the consumer, but also how can insurers in the same way kind of build a trusted relationship with the consumer where they can trust what they're getting? And obviously technology is a big part of that.

Brian: Yeah, well, I guess, Mindy, I want to explore that a little further, like, is the theory we think that products are, I don't know, not aligned to customers? Like, is that a theory that could be here or like, we've been selling the same types of products. We sell a 20 or 30 term, or 10 year term, or 30 year term. Is that the type of thing that's antiquated that you might want to change with AI? Like, where are we going?

Mindy: It's more about how they're delivered. - Yeah, it could be that too. And expound, please. It's more about how they're delivered, at least as far as I'm looking at it. We have a good breadth of product at Mutual of Omaha, and they do serve our customers well. There may be opportunities to help our customers better understand our products and how they work, but when we think about how they're serviced, I think there are definitely gaps in the efficiency and the experience that we provide our customers. And that's where I think Generative AI can really enable customized workflows.

Dani: Continuing in that thread with customers, I mean let's talk about the trust that consumers have in insurers or maybe that waning trust, you know, unfortunately that seems to be the situation. So how can we rebuild it? I think we're starting on a thread here about perhaps delivering the products in a different and better way so that there's better access perhaps, or people are more educated on what's available. But what else can we do to rebuild that trust?

Brian: I guess that's one that I, I'm gonna push back on you. Tell me more about the waning trust and what might give you that idea.

Dani: So I'm coming from the outside, let's say, as a consumer to say, do I really trust my insurer to deliver on the promise, for example. Unfortunately, there's an echo chamber that we've seen with social media and headlines and things like that. It's not the whole story, but there seems to be a perception perhaps that trust in insurers is waning or increasing. So I'm not saying it's the truth, but I'm saying there is that that does exist.

Brian: Well, in the major medical, which we do not play in the major space. But there's some a lot of convoluted incentives at play between healthcare providers, between healthcare insurers, between Medicare or the government pay type stuff too. So we'll set that one aside because again, there's probably bigger conversation than what we're talking about today. Within life and health, I think some of the things that we probably miss on are some transparency between the types of coverage you would ask there mentioned education maybe being as a gap types of things that the customer is buying and the positive stories of gosh this customer bought this thing and here's the the bit that like it paid off for that customer yeah and that's remember that's the reason why you bought it to begin with. So one of the things that we do well I think at Mutual of Omaha is we do have simple as easy to understand as we can make them policies and like that's one of our, one of income and wealth planning's key strategic values is how do we make, continue to make products that are simple, easy to understand. We realize that may not be helpful for some high net worth individuals. They may need some more complicated financial solutions in order to be able to do the things that they want to do. But for the large majority of our customers, that's one of the things that they appreciate about Mutual of Omaha, one of the things that we're committed to doing on an ongoing basis. Transparency, that's one of the things that I guess I've been trying to collect is more customer stories. So we had a customer named Diane who in 2022 had bought one of our critical illness policies. So she goes, gets a mammogram in 2022 because there's a small incentive, it's $60 to get a mammogram, we pay this $60 incentive for her, which is not life-changing money. It's just enough for her to not forget to go do the mammogram. So she goes in 2022, everything's fine. In 2023, everything's fine again. She debates going in 2024. She has no history, no symptoms, but she remembered the $60 incentive. Goes and gets the mammogram in 2024 and finds a 1 centimeter tumor deep inside her right criss. So she goes, gets it confirmed through biopsy, gets confirmed with an MRI and goes through treatment. Earlier this year she was declared cancer-free, but that is again exactly the reason and probably the type of story that insurers could do a better job of telling right. That's the reason why we offer the products that we offer to help. So Diane says that we saved her life but we I mean we didn't do the surgery, we didn't do the mammogram, we didn't do anything to particularly help.

Dani: Sure, but you're a facilitator in that process. And yeah, creating that opportunity for her to take those steps.

Brian: And that's exactly I think the type of thing that we as insurers can probably do a better job telling the story to help rebuild some of that customer trust.

Dani: Mindy, what do you think on the consumer trust side?

Mindy: Well, I can actually tell a story where trust is eroded.

Dani: I think it's great to hear both sides, absolutely.

Mindy: So I think that trust definitely gets eroded when customers do everything right, but they're still penalized. And so I had a personal experience of this. I've pet insurance, I submitted the claim in 90 days, like I was supposed to, but the insurance systems didn't register that claim submission until days later. Yeah, and so then the claim was denied because it was late, and of course I called in to the insurance, I was told I should have submitted earlier to account for system limitation. And so when I think about this, I think about the fact that the customer did everything right, but the system failed. And we need to stop asking customers to adapt to the limitations in our systems and start building systems that adapt to our customers.

Dani: I think that's a really great point and actually a good segue into the next question. And I think both points are completely valid. There's more that can be told to change that narrative. And at the same time, there's more that needs to be done to make those systems work for the customer, especially customers today. So, you know, what if there was a way, for example, for insurers to, you know, more confidently trust the information that they were getting where there is a better system, for example, where things could be faster for the customer in that way? Like how would that impact processes, people, business, profit, all of that. Like how could that look different for an insurance company?

Mindy: So I think a lot about how to enable exactly what you just said. - Yeah. - Like for example, in a claims context, you think about all the information that's submitted by a claimant, well, what if we could use agentic solutions to validate all of the information submitted with trusted data sources that then builds confidence in our claim, it reduces manual work to go look everything up and it reduces the burden for both our customer and our associates.

Brian: So one of the things that I think we're all kind of hitting on here is like in the past, insurers have built processes for insurers. And one of the things that absolutely has got to change is insurers need to build processes for customers. And once you kind of have that frame of mind of like, how do I make it easy for a customer to submit a claim, not have to account for system delays, which I think that's the first time I've heard you tell that story. That sounded incredibly frustrating. Hope you got it resolved and ultimately they covered it because otherwise I feel like a lawyer would help you out with that. We don't offer pet insurance, I can confidently say. You're not going to sue a mutual Omaha at least. But that feels like once you kind of flip that frame of mind back to the customer trust question, like that is certainly a way where customers will be like, oh, I do trust this company because I can see they've found it easier for me to do the things that I need to do.

Dani: Yes, that's the thing. And also for a genuine claimant, then they're not sitting there 30, 60, 90 days waiting for something closed when it was actually something very simple and also a genuine submission. 'Cause there is also that piece, I think, again, contributing to the erosion of trust around maybe that accepted lower, you know, 10 % of claims are fraudulent and that's just how it is. But it doesn't have to be that way for the industry either. And that's on both sides. It doesn't have to be, well, let's, you know, kind of put everyone through this rigorous process because we don't know whether it's fraudulent or not. And then also don't, doesn't have to be 10, could be 5 % instead with the right technology and a different system. Let me then ask you our last question to close it off. If there was one thing, you know, you would want leaders back who are listening to know or something you could kind of inform to folks in the industry, what would that be?

MindyL Start recognizing that what appears like a trust issue might actually be a technology or process issue. So my claim took too long to process. Well, that could be because the claims team is going through a new system migration and new workflows. But I have to explain my situation to multiple call center representatives and I call in to the insurer. That could be because we have disconnected systems that don't offer one cohesive view of the customer and all of their passenger interactions. So customers don't see the backend complexity. All they know is their experience and to them this could feel like insurers don't care about when in reality we deeply care about our customers. So I think one thing I would say to leaders in our industry is stop patching legacy systems and start architecting experiences for the people that we serve.

Brian: Midy's been a significant advocate for that at our team meetings. And boy, that's certainly what we're working on doing. Things from me for leaders. How might you shift from Building for stability to building for adaptability. Back to the insurers build things for insurer insurance purposes, right? Like they're trying to build a core system that is stable and doesn't change But that does not account for how customers want to interact maybe to the conversation we were having earlier of like gosh, if I think about building that process in a way that like gets the insured what they need, gets the customer what they need in as easy fashion as possible. And I account for like, boy, there's new data sources that might be coming online. Back to your question about like, can I reduce fraud? Probably, I mean, some of the ways that we check for health conditions today is we ask the customer. Well, there might be a better way It's easier on the customer, actually, that doesn't require us to ask the customer and then ask a bunch of follow-up questions. There's a data -driven way that might be able to help solve that problem, too. So really starting to think about how do I build a process for adaptability? And you end up getting that consistency, too, because there are reasons why we ask the health -related questions if you're applying for life insurance or for long-term care or health type of coverage. Then you and build that process in a way that still allows you to get that data, but in some sort of new fashion without having to put a customer through a bunch of hoops or file a claim early because the system takes three days to process the claim or whatever, right? Once you, again, start thinking outside in, it really helps shape that environment. So leaders should be thinking about adaptability and outside in thinking, and that'll help all of us collectively, insurance center street and us as customers, better work in a future world.

Mindy: Oh, I just really agree with Brian on the fact that the future of insurance is not just about selling policies, it's about building solutions that adapt to customers' lives in real time.

Dani: Beautiful, that is a great place to end. Thank you so much, Brian. Thank you so much, Mindy, for being here.

Mindy: Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Brian: Yeah, thanks for having us Dani.