Smarter Tech Use – Improved Client Service

Stephen D. Tarr, MSM, CLU®, ChFC®, CAP®, CASL®

All of us are being driven to change our behavior through the use of technology no matter what we do. With this in mind, I thought I’d interview several individuals responsible for providing timesaving technology to producers, clients and peers within the financial services industry. So I talked with Tom Shea from New York Life, Deborah Giordano-Manno from State Farm and Susan Gueli from Nationwide. All hold different responsibilities within their companies

We start with Tom Shea,CLU®, ChFC®, from the agency department at New York Life

Tom, could you tell us about your work with New York Life?
I am a first vice president in the agency department, and I am the person in agency charged with procuring or managing the technology we provide to our agents and the recruiting team, which includes the software, the illustration system, the planning tools, the communication tools, e-mail and the networks that attach our general offices to the home office.

Last November, New York Life announced that agents and managers could use social media —several companies have been standing on the sidelines on this. Tell us your company’s position on this and what is going on.

We announced—I will call it an expanded pilot for our agents and recruiters to be able to use social networks—including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. We had been holding off, too, like many of our peers, because of the compliance concerns surrounding SEC and FINRA rules that say that you have to index, archive and capture permanently the electronic communications of registered reps and have to make those indexed communications available to regulators on request. Certainly there have been long-time rules from the SEC about how you have to treat advertising. So, in the insurance and financial services industries, many of the carriers were concerned about whether they could capture that material as required by regulation, inasmuch as these were not on their network. Last year we identified a company in Austin, Texas, called Socialware, that had developed a technology process to, in effect, sit between the producer and the social network and capture the communications. In addition, this tool allows one to monitor the kinds of communications that are taking place and to block certain kinds of things that might take place on a social network if it is appropriate to do that.

Give me an example.

We wanted to make sure that we had granular enough control over the kinds of communications that they placed so we could meet our own compliance requirements, as well as the requirements of our regulators. And you didn’t ask this, but the other side of this is it also had to be a technology that was simple enough to deploy so that it didn’t get in the way of the producer in their normal use of these tools. So, if you normally would use LinkedIn or Facebook from a human perspective, from a social perspective, and now you had a whole lot of technology that was staring you in the face and making it difficult to use, that would not have been an acceptable situation, either.

Do agents have their own Facebook page for New York Life, and then their own personal Facebook page?
They could. They could have their own Facebook page, and up until we introduced our expanded pilot with Socialware, our rule was that they could not use social media for business purposes. We didn’t say they couldn’t use social media for their social purposes. So, if they wanted to have a Facebook page and talk about their picnic with the kids and interaction with their neighbors, that would be fine, but once they put on their New York Life hat and started talking about our products and the services that we offer as a financial services company, that became a different thing. We have an obligation on the back end to review this communication, and the regulators say that there are certain rules of thumb that one might apply to looking at this material, just like one would look at e-mail. In any case, if some regulator comes in from the SEC or FINRA or a state securities department, we are able to turn that material over to them, as may be required.

Was it strictly because of the software, or did you get a lot of feedback from the field saying we would really like to have the ability to do this? What brought this change?
A couple of things. First, we did, indeed, get input from our agents and recruiters. About a year ago we actually had our agents advisory council and our managing partners advisory council both tell us that we ought to be moving forward with social media. Recruiters and agents were using these tools as social beings, and they saw the opportunity to increase their networks, to offer their services to the people that they were communicating with to build their own personal brands in a nonthreatening way. Separately, we had an initiative in here to take a look at social media and what’s coming up generationally, and the change in how people interact with one another. All the research we looked at said that the social media space was going to be the place to be for many years to come.

What have been some of the challenges?
Making sure the technology works is of course the key ingredient, and that you test it and that it does in fact work as advertised and it’s simple to use. Education is a key component, so our agency communication team and others in the corporation needed to help put together templates and educational materials for agents on how they could use this tool appropriately. The securities laws require that we educate our producers and our recruiters about how to use these things in a compliant manner so we had to put together a training course. In fact, one of the requirements for people to be in our expanded pilot is that they have to take a compliance course and pass it.

What have been some of the issues you’ve had to deal with?
We really have not had any yet, and I’m knocking on wood. We’ve gotten feedback from agents and from recruiters. Agents have made sales, recruiters have made hires and people are anxious to learn how to use it. It’s a little equivalent to what the learning curve might be as people started setting up their own Web pages. You need to know how that’s done, you need to get the technology in place, you need some guidance, you need content—content is king—and you need the infrastructure to support you when you’re not sure of the next step.

Do you monitor social networks to see if New York Life’s been mentioned and, if it has, how are you dealing with that?
In our corporate Internet department particularly, because they are interested in all things Web, they do go out and monitor the public topics out there, and obviously New York Life’s presence is one. It’s very easy, by the way, to check what’s happening; you just go on Google Alerts and set it up and say New York Life. Every day you’ll get an e-mail saying here’s what we saw on the Web. We are paying very great attention to how the brand is represented. There’s a lot of good work going on there that I think is being noticed. And that brings people back to our Web site, and if you go to the New York Life Web site you’re going to see that on virtually every page there’s a suggestion that we can connect you with an agent. As a result of that activity we’re actually getting thousands of potential leads to our agents every week.

Is there anything in particular that has created a lot of activity?
We have planning tools, we have a whole retirement planning section, we have channels for senior citizens, for ethnic markets, for baby boomers—we have tons of content that’s New York Life content as well as pointing people to the best sources of information in the marketplace. At the end of the day, we recommend to clients, to prospects and to people who come to the Web site that they may need the help of a professional when they’re evaluating these important financial topics, and we give them an opportunity to click on a box and say, “Yes, have an agent call me.”

Have you done much work on how those come through in terms of actual sales?
We do. The lead comes in and it gets put into our contact management system that our agents use online. That system says what you did with this lead and expects that the agent will tell us how they followed through.

Let’s talk about technology in the organization. What are some of the things you’re thinking about or working on?
I want to just talk about one of the tools that we implemented last year, a tool called Rightbridge. Rightbridge is a tool that skims through an agent’s book of business, uses our data warehouse and other sources of information, and looks for opportunities for the agent to make a call to a client. It could be anything as simple as the client’s birthday or policy anniversary, and the agent should be scheduling an annual review. Maybe they need some more life insurance because the tool says they don’t have enough based on the model. It’s all geared toward what you should be talking to people about, how I can provide greater service. The more information we get, the better we can make a recommendation that’s particularly attuned to your client’s needs. You walk in in the morning, and there on your portal is a list of opportunities that you might call somebody about with the recommendations in priority order. It’s data mining your book of business to help you do a better job with your client. And unlike the typical contact management system, which we have as well, it doesn’t force you to run a search; it does it for you.

What other ways do you see technology being used for field associates?
I think anybody that has looked at a technology magazine or a television show in the last month has heard about the extraordinary growth of all sorts of mobile devices. Clearly we’ve seen, in our agent population and in our recruiter population, tremendous interest in using mobile devices, smart phones and tablet devices of all sorts to replace the PCs and laptops that they’ve had. We have made a real strong commitment to take these tools that normally sit on a Web site and make them available on the mobile device of the agent’s choice. That means it has to be able to fit in a browser and work on Chrome or Safari or on Firefox or in Internet Explorer, and not just on one of them because, otherwise, you are telling the agent, “Use my device instead of the one that you would choose to use.”
Now we’ve had a tool we call the Policy and Account Information Requester. It is a way for an agent in real time to make a request to our back-end policy administration and investment systems and bring back information regarding the policy that they’re interested in. It potentially brings back hundreds of fields of data. So, for a life policy, it brings back client contact information, the death benefit, the cash values, the premiums, the premium history—lots of information. But in addition, this information requester gives the agent opportunity to print output that they can hand to a client. When they do an annual review, it’s a perfect tool to say here’s where your policy is that I sold you a year ago or five years ago, and you can press a button and it will send a request to our service organization, to change a beneficiary as an example. Press another button on that tool and it will kick off an in-force illustration. It’s like a Swiss Army knife of product information for an agent, and at the end of last year we turned it into a mobile device that would appear on an iPhone. We had a study group of agents in here and I showed them the URL to get to this. They all had their iPhones and they were looking at their e-mail, and they were looking at this information in real time. Now, I’ve got to tell you, it knocked their socks off.
DEBORAH GIORDANO-MANNO
Next up is Deborah Giordano-Manno,from State Farm, who has been testing a way to communicate with associates hundreds of miles away to save time and travel costs while keeping those contacts as personable as possible.

Would you give us a little background about you and how long you’ve been with the company?
Sure. I’ve been with State Farm since 1988 in a number of different roles. I spent ‘88 to ‘95 working as a team member for a State Farm agent. I opened my agency in 1995 and I spent about five years as a personal producer then as an agency field consultant to help with team member training. And then I was asked to go into the agency field executive role. This time my work is completely focused on our new agents.

Let’s talk about the special project that you were involved in using technology in the field through the use of webcams.
With the amount of time we spend in cars and driving, if we were able to use technology, it would be really helpful. My leadership group and the agents I worked with at the time were part of a pilot. The technology has been adopted enterprise wide.

What about the learning curve?
It took about a half an hour. It is really user friendly. I think a lot of people are accustomed to using this type of technology. Skyping and video cameras are pretty much a part of our normal personal lives. So the switch to utilizing them at work really wasn’t a big leap.

What would you say you learned most from this project?
As comfortable as all of us are with technology, seeing the people that you’re communicating with still makes a difference. It’s not necessarily going to take the place of all of our face-to-face meetings, nor do we intend it to. I conducted a review this morning using the webcam. It wasn’t exactly the same as my being there, but it made a difference that we could see each other. We are a very relationship-driven organization.

One of the points you made, and I think it’s important, is it’s not 100 percent, but somewhere in that 75 to 95 percent range, isn’t it?
I don’t want to be the virtual executive. I want there to be times when my agents see me and they understand that it’s important to me to get out there and see their offices and meet their teams and have that face-to-face interaction, as well. I want them to know that I’m out there in the field and I’m available, but at times it’s just more efficient.
SUSAN GUELI
Susan J. Gueli is a senior executive who has worked for more than two decades in the IT field at Nationwide, so she’s got an insider’s perspective on the technology tools being utilized today.

Tell us about your role at Nationwide.
I am CIO for Nationwide Financial, and with that responsibility I support the IT delivery and running of our IT applications for our financial services businesses, which includes retirement plans, individual annuities, life insurance business, and mutual funds and our broker dealer.

How many folks do you have in your area?
In Nationwide Financial, I have just under 800 associates. We also employ some variable staff as well.

What are you doing about leveraging technology and helping agents and consumers?
If you look at the mission of Nationwide Financial, what we are very focused on is building around our advisors, so helping our advisors help their clients plan for and live in retirement. From a Nationwide perspective, our strategy is centered around an exceptional customer experience at a competitive price, so I’m going to give you both of those dimensions on how we deliver technology from an advisor standpoint as well as from a customer standpoint.

Wholesalers are a big part of our sales and service strategy. So, we equip our field wholesalers with mobile customer relationship management applications that run on their BlackBerry, and it really does link our field wholesalers to our sales desk so that we have a team of specialists in the field that interface directly with our advisors. That’s been a very effective piece of technology that helps us as our wholesalers are interfacing directly and personally with advisors. I would also talk about one of the tools that we have delivered, Retire Sense, which is an advisor-based tool that helps financial professionals complete some of the process of income planning. It utilizes some pretty interesting and innovative investment and drawdown strategies that help investment professionals, which aligns with our mission—address individual needs of their clients.

What about the iPhone and the Android, from both an agent perspective and from a consumer perspective?
The higher level of activity on the iPhone applications has been in our property and casualty company. Nationwide was one of the first insurance companies to develop an iPhone application that simplified the claims process for customers. Our mobile technology has been targeted at wholesalers and advisors on the financial services sides, and we’ve also seen some activity with the Nationwide Bank, as well.

What is the field asking for?
Their clients desire to be more actively involved and have more frequent touch points with their advisors, so they want the professional advice of an advisor, but they also want to be more actively involved than they ever have.

What are your consumers asking you for?
They love to have easy access to their account information. We have been very focused, too, on delivering a variety of tools that help them plan better and be educated on retirement planning. One of the new tools that we have recently launched is an interactive retirement planning tool, an on-your-side, interactive retirement planner, which is very focused on the customer. It’s a tool that can help our participants actually set goals, track progress to their goal, find out if they are on track or may need to make some adjustments, and it provides them with some ability to make some offline connections to retirement specialists or advisors, if they may need to, and have some additional questions that are not answered online. Similarly, we’ve had the ability for consumers online to do things like our retirability check. It’s a retirement readiness score that consumers can get based on their particular circumstances.

What are your predictions for the next five years?
I think that pace of change has gotten faster and faster over these last several years and I don’t expect it to slow down. I think it is just going to get even faster, and IT organizations are going to have to be flexible and maintain a strong awareness of all of those dimensions that have an impact on what we do and how we do it.