Anthony O'Donnell: I'm Anthony O'Donnell and this is Life Accelerated, a podcast for life insurers striving to achieve digital transformation. Unum, a Fortune 500 company with a remarkable 175 year history offers a wide range of insurance products, including disability, life, accident, and critical illness coverage known for its innovative approach.
Unum integrates advanced technologies to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction in order to stay ahead in this rapidly evolving market. Dora Clements is a leader at Unum with an inspiring career path that took her from legal expertise to the forefront of digital innovation. Her extensive experience in operational strategy and deep understanding of technology provide valuable insights on merging traditional insurance practices with cutting edge technology.
Today, we discuss how Unum is leveraging digital technologies to transform the company's operations, enhance customer experiences, and stay competitive in the ever evolving life insurance industry. Here's my conversation with Dora.
Dora, Unum is a company with a long history. Tell us a little bit about its place in the market today.
Dora Clements: Yeah, so you're absolutely right. We are proud to be a 175 year old company. We actually celebrated that anniversary just recently, which was really exciting for us. We are a publicly traded Fortune 500 company with about 11, 000 employees.
We sell both through our Unum and our Colonial Life brands focusing on disability, life, accident, in addition to critical illness, dental and vision, and some other new partnerships. We recently launched our pet insurance partnership as well. We're excited about that. In addition, we're also looking at our leave and absence management support and behavioral health services.
So a wide array of products, but we really are focused on providing income protection to the working world. We try to tie everything back to our mission around helping that working world thrive through life's moments.
Anthony O'Donnell: Tell us a little bit about the company's distribution strategy.
Dora Clements: The Unum brand distributes through our sales force, our W2 employees that are across all of our field offices in various states across the nation.
And our Colonial Life distribution is an incredibly strong force of independent agents that are also across the country. And both sides of both brands do a fantastic job and really are pillars in their community of understanding the needs of those individual communities.
Anthony O'Donnell: Well, let me first wish Unum a happy 175th birthday.
Dora Clements: Thank you so much. I think we look good for our age, right?
Anthony O'Donnell: Yeah. And we always want to hear about how our guests came to be where they are today. And I don't mean to embarrass you, but I think you're a great example of how we're taking new talent from sometimes unexpected places with sometimes unorthodox backgrounds, or at least the backgrounds that we might not expect.
To be used, but we're using the insights of people from various backgrounds to help make the transition from the traditional incumbent companies that we know and love to more customer facing digital enterprise. So tell us a little bit about how you came to your role at Unum.
Dora Clements: I grew up in what I consider Unum's backyard.
So I grew up in the Portland, Maine area. Unum was, and is, a huge employer in that space. I actually laugh because I grew up as the child of a Unum employee, and my mother worked here for 39 years before me in our human resources department, and I knew it as the place that my mom worked, right? But never really thought that I was going to end up in insurance or at Unum.
I went to law school, and I was focused on entertainment law specifically, and living in Los Angeles. but really missed Maine and wanted to be back near my family. And so I thought, Hey, I'll apply to Unum. I'll go to our legal department and the rest will be history. I'll stay there. It'll be great. And when I applied, they offered me a different job and they said, "We have this role leading a team in our operations, leading our new business contracts team, and would you be interested in doing that?" And, you know, I thought that's a great way to get your foot in the door at a big company, and I'll learn our business, and I'll learn what we do, and then I'll go to the legal department, and I'll stay there forever. One opportunity led to another, and I honestly look back, and it was the best thing that could have happened to me, because I never would have thought that I wanted to go down a path outside of legal, but as I learned our business and more importantly, as I got to learn our technology alongside that business, I just became really passionate about it.
And I got really interested. I was offered an opportunity about a year into my career to move to our Ireland office, which was at the time, almost entirely technical developers and technical resources. And I lived there for a couple of months. And the amount of grace and time that they gave me to teach me about architecture and the way our systems work and the way data flows.
And I was hooked and the rest is kind of history. I decided that that was really the career path that just got me the most excited. And I still feel like I get to use my legal background, my risk management, critical thinking skills, that sort of thing. But I get to apply it to how we're transforming our company and the types of solutions we're giving our customers.
And so I candidly think I have the most fun job at Unum and I'm very fortunate to be in it.
Anthony O'Donnell: Yeah. You know, it makes me think that Unum is pretty skilled in cultivating its talent since they took your education and you as a very well developed person and put you in a different track than you might expect, but one of the things that I recall you telling me is that you took a course in organizational psychology or industrial psychology.
Dora Clements: So after a couple of years in what we call our digital transformation space, what I realized we were doing was really trying to change the way we work and the way that we approach what we're doing. And I wanted to be better at that. And so thankfully, Unum does support its employees incredibly well.
And through our tuition program and the support of my team, I actually went back and got my master's degree in industrial and organizational psychology. It's really the science of how people work. It's how to build high performing teams. It's how to help people through their change curves and to really coach talent.
And that's so much of what we do. You know, change is hard. If it was easy, everyone would already be 20 steps down the road, but it takes effort to get there and understanding how to bring people along and build strong relationships along the way. It can't be understated the importance of that. So I'm very fortunate.
Anthony O'Donnell: Yeah. Well, and I bring it up because it's so relevant to what you do, and it'll come up later in our conversation. But I thought we might now proceed with just some of the details of your job, what your job description is, what your duties are, and also what you're expected to accomplish.
Dora Clements: So several years back, it's been probably almost a decade now.
We started what we call our customer journeys. And really what that is, is a disciplined way of looking at how we're going to transform and how we're going to support our customers at the moments in their life cycle that matter the most. So as part of that, we really established kind of this three legged stool model.
We have our operations teams and leaders that are running our day to day business. We have our technical partners, our actual software developers, kind of that more traditional IT. And then you have the folks that are in my type of role, which we call our change or transformation teams. Think of that more as product management.
So your product owners, your voice of the customer folks, operational readiness, the way we're building business cases and tracking value. That's all the things that my team does. So I've been fortunate in my time at Unum. I spent quite a bit of time in what we call our client focused space, everything for our in force block of how do I make the day to day lives of a plan administrator easier when they're working with Unum Benefits.
I then transferred and spent a couple years in our benefits and contact centers space supporting how do we make the claimants. life easier and make it so they're not worried about getting paid or worried about covering their income while they're having a difficult point in their life. And now most recently I've spent almost a year now in what we call our enterprise digital capability space.
And that's really looking at things that touch the entire life cycle of the company. So think about our insurance product portfolio and how we develop and implement those products, our user experience. research development and our designers and then things that touch, as I said, the whole life cycle. So our data programs, some of our enterprise authentication and some of our products that are newer to our portfolio, like dental and vision, pet insurance and that type of thing.
So it's a little bit of a mix of things that are in my portfolio now, but I think that keeps it exciting. And I get to focus on a wide array of different technologies.
Anthony O'Donnell: Dora, I see how the three legged stool analogy works because those three different functions definitely work together, but it also seems that what you're doing has a very strong element of being in kind of an intermediary, right?
Working between the business and your technical partners. Maybe you could describe how you work together, how you get things done.
Dora Clements: You're absolutely right. I don't know if everyone's familiar with the Dr. Seuss book, The Lorax. He says he speaks for the trees. I always try to say I speak for the business or I speak for IT, and we're trying to translate, we're trying to speak the language of everybody and meet in the middle.
You'll hear these funny anecdotes about what someone described versus what got built and that sort of thing. We want to avoid any miscommunication or misunderstandings about how we're building, how we're developing. And that's really where my team comes into play is to make sure we're really going to hit the mark in doing that.
So. The other thing I would point out is we're trying to get really away from saying, oh, well, they're on the business side of things, or they're on the technical side of things. More and more where this industry is going, we're all on all of those sides. So the business is technical and it's very much how we're selling.
It's how we're going to market and it's how we're meeting our customers needs. So we absolutely are focused on building the relationships between those running our operations and those doing the actual development. But more and more, we are seeing really good conversations from each leg of that stool coming to the table with a more in depth understanding of what we need.
Anthony O'Donnell: You know, I love Dr. Seuss but I have to admit that the young person's fiction that came to mind was the show Dora the Explorer
Dora Clements: I've heard that before and I'll take it.
Anthony O'Donnell: I mean that in the best possible way.
Dora Clements: Absolutely, absolutely.
Anthony O'Donnell: Yeah. Well, I thought about your Ireland travels, but also that there's a kind of exploration that's going on here. And like I said, we've had several people that have come from different places and they're breaking new ground and exploring things that haven't been explored before. So I definitely mean that in the best possible way. It's very exciting to see.
Okay, so you were talking about understanding your title has both transformation and digital in it. I thought we could talk a little bit about how Unum understands those terms and how they're being embodied in ongoing initiatives. What is Unum transforming into?
Dora Clements: We are transforming and we aren't transforming.
And what I mean by that is what we aren't transforming is our mission. And what we're setting out to do. We want to make our benefits, accessible to anyone and everyone that needs them. We want to make it easy to administer, easy to access. And our mission is to, as I said previously, make sure that employees are supported when they need it.
So we're not transforming that. What we are transforming is how we meet that objective. And I think that's continuing to have amazing customer support and amazing people who are going to be there for our customers, but giving them the right tools and the best tools to be able to do that. And then also giving great digital tools and capabilities into the hands of our customers and our partners along the way. So much you'll hear folks talk about, we used to have insurance companies that had technology. Now you have technology companies that have insurance. And we really want to be the best mix of both of those because we know that when we, whether we're talking to brokers or we're talking to plan administrators, or we're talking to claimants, they have expectations of how they interact in their day to day life in the digital world, whether it's going to Amazon or Googling something, whatever it is, they're simple experiences.
They don't need their insurance to be the complicated experience, right? They need it to feel just as easy, just as integrated. And so that's really what we're focused on. And so it's doing what we've done for 175 years, but doing it in an even better, stronger, I think, easier way for our customers.
Anthony O'Donnell: As we discuss digital specifically, we've just talked about transformation.
Your title doesn't just say digital, it references digital capabilities. So let's talk about the kind of capabilities that Unum sees as constituting a digital experience.
Dora Clements: Some of the things that I've been really fortunate to work on are our self service portals for both our employer clients, we sell our benefits through the workplace.
So those employers that are administering the products for their employees, as well as our portals for our end user of those benefits. We call those both on the Unum side of things, MyUnum. So we have my Unum for clients and my Unum for members. One of our early journey initiatives was we stepped back and we said, Hey, we really feel like we aren't doing as much as we could in that employer space to allow them to administer their benefits in an easy way, especially when you think about the smaller employer who probably does not have a robust technology suite or a benefit administration system that are expensive at times to pay for. And so how do we give those employers a tool to make benefit administration really simple and rather than reskin or upgrade our current experience, we built from scratch and that's really exciting and it was a really fun experience. And what I loved about the way that we did that was We did not release anything until we had put it in customers hands until we had tested it with them.
The amount of focus groups, feedback sessions, design reviews that we went through and sometimes it was great and they loved it. And sometimes they said, no, I don't really love this. And that hurt. And we went back to the drawing board and we redesigned, but ultimately when we released. It was really something that resonated with employers and continues to resonate with them.
And we're seeing now some of our highest customer satisfaction scores from that portal, which is something that we measure really diligently. And I'm so proud of what that's doing in the marketplace now. So...
Anthony O'Donnell: Yeah, let's elaborate on that a little bit. I got the impression from a conversation we had that you're taking a different approach to measuring customer satisfaction than you had in the past.
Dora Clements: Yeah. So customer satisfaction is really what I would call one of our NorthStar objectives. So we want to make sure that our customers are, and whoever that customer is, whether it is that employer when we were working with them or whether it is that end user of our benefits when they're experiencing the use of their benefits, we want to make sure that that experience lived up to their expectations and hopefully even exceeded.
Those expectations. And so as part of that, not only do we communicate frequently with our customers, whether it be through those focus groups or through councils that we've established, we've also embedded into all of our digital solutions, real time customer surveys and feedback mechanisms. So whether it's the free form, give us feedback, which we have on all of our portals or the, "Hey, rate us. How is this experience for you? How is it going?" And we expect top scores. And if we get anything that is not one of those top scores, we consider it that we've failed on that survey. And we go back to the drawing board and we really try to figure out how to redesign. So, you know, it's something that we're just constantly monitoring.
I will say it's dangerous to give me a dashboard that I can refresh and watch throughout the day. Uh, because I do, I watch how those scores are moving. We'll release something and then I'll watch it the next day and see what's happening. And that's it. It's guided us to much better solutions. And we react far more quickly when we've missed the marker, when we hit the mark, and I think we're a better digital enterprise for it.
Anthony O'Donnell: I see a lot of this has kind of an intuitive aspect to it where you're simply listening to the customers and seeing what they say makes them happy or makes them feel like they've succeeded in what they need to get done. And of course, that applies to both the employers and the employees, right?
You've got different approaches for both of them. But I wonder also about just the use of data in digital transformation at Unum. What's your data management strategy as it bears on transformation?
Dora Clements: Data is something I am incredibly passionate about and something that we are very focused on is, as you can imagine, being 175 years old, we have grown in many ways through mergers acquisitions.
We have legacy systems that are out there and different technical debt. So having data spread across that enterprise, it makes it challenging sometimes to move as fast as we want to move and to deliver all of the capabilities we want to deliver. So. We are taking a really meaningful approach right now to ensuring that we have the, I'll call it the integrity of the data that we're looking for.
And so that means we are doing really robust scraping, cleansing our data. We're reaching out to customers and saying, Hey, it's been a while since we've updated certain attributes, whatever it might be, because we want to make sure that we have everything that we need and that it's accurate for that customer.
When we go live with some of these digital solutions. You can't hide your dirty laundry if you've connected your end to end, right? So you're going to start exposing if that data was wrong, customers are going to see it. And we don't want that to be the case. We want them to have a lot of confidence in what we're doing.
So we're focusing on those cleanup efforts. We're focusing on really ensuring that we have a modern data architecture in place. And that's not easy work. And it's going to take time, but we continue to try to not boil the ocean, but piece by piece build toward replacing elements and upgrading elements as we go that meat.
The actual use cases that the business has at a given time. So something I'm super excited about and I'm glad to see that we're putting some discipline toward.
Anthony O'Donnell: If we have adequately cleansed data, suitable data for processing, then that kind of leads to a question about how you're using analytics to improve your digital capabilities, both for the client and employee experience and otherwise to interpret and drive business results.
Dora Clements: Yeah. And I'd say we're doing that both for how do we serve our customers better, but also what do we put in the hands of our customers so they can run their businesses more effectively? I always say garbage in garbage out, right? So if you have bad data that goes into your analytics, you're going to get poor analytics that come out of it.
And so getting the data right, making sure it's as accurate as it can be, which we're feeling really good about. That is the first step. And then we're looking at where the analytics, for example, I'll start with our customers. That we can put in their hands to help them run their day to day business more effectively.
So when you think about the reporting that a customer wants to say, tell me about my leaves, who's on claim right now? Who can I expect to be out of work in the next couple of days? Being able to give those robust insights to an employer really helps them. And so. Getting our data in a good place to be able to do that and do that in a way where we can provide it in a pretty cool visualization and dynamic reports that they can customize the way that works for them, that's an exciting day.
And that's a lot of what we're focused on right now. And I'm thrilled to see what the team's been developing there. And then internally for our own employees, I talked about customer satisfaction, we're constantly looking at how do we tie that with some of our service data to say, can we see trends? Can we reach out to a customer and say, I saw that you made this change and I want to see, think, try to think in two steps ahead of, does that mean this and this or whatever the impact to them might be, we want to make sure that we're trying to support them in the best way.
And doing some of those advanced analytics are going to help us know when they might need an intervention from us. And so that's really how we've been using and looking at it. In addition, just trying to run as efficient of an organization as we can.
Anthony O'Donnell: The next thing that occurs to me is that if you're looking at the maximum value you can get out of analytics, the hottest topic today is AI.
Is AI and Gen I on the radar for Unum? Are you exploring this technology?
Dora Clements: It's definitely on the radar. I think it's what everybody is talking about. Any conference you go to, any article you read, that sort of thing. Everyone is wondering how it's really going to show up in our industry. And it will, it's going to, I would say we're in the exploration phase right now, though.
And the biggest piece is the data. That we're focused on is we want to make sure that we are approaching it in a responsible way and a way that's going to make sure that we are preserving the processes that we have and the way that we want to run our business. So we won't do anything until we feel really confident about how we're going to apply it and the outcomes, but we're definitely looking at it.
And it's something that I do think has the potential to do big things in this industry.
Anthony O'Donnell: Yeah, I mean, it seems like a really good tool for making the complexity of benefits management and life insurance simpler for both the clients and their employees.
Dora Clements: Absolutely.
Anthony O'Donnell: All right. So transformation means not only change, but fundamental change.
So change management is a perennial topic for the Life Accelerated podcast, but given your background in industrial psychology, I thought we could approach the change management question from the standpoint of talent or personnel and how to cultivate high performance teams and how to guide them through change.
Dora Clements: I kind of think about it in two different ways, but they're very similar and related. So there are the people that are in my organization and organizations like mine that are driving the change. And how do we build those teams? What's the right profile of folks there? But then also how do we help guide the organization through the change of actually doing their work differently?
And so when I think about the folks that are driving our change, when we first started this work, We went and we said, okay, these are the highest performers in their spaces. So of course they're going to be great at driving change. And that isn't always the case, right? You could be the best at doing the thing, but that doesn't always mean that you want to change how that thing is done.
And so we did a lot of work to coach and find like, who are those great change agents that are sitting across our enterprise in or out, but I think we've really homegrown a lot of them within our enterprise, which I'm super proud of. And how do we empower them to operate in what is. Admittedly a very ambiguous and gray space, right?
As you're building something, as you're figuring it out, you need folks who are going to ask the right questions. They're going to challenge, why do we do it that way? And could we do it differently? And you want them to be really bold and courageous in doing that. And so I think a huge part of it is creating a space that is a psychologically safe space for employees.
I think it is about making those employees feel like they can fail and that's okay. A lot of what we're trying to do is testing. And sometimes the test isn't going to go well and I would rather figure that out in the test than when we scale it to the whole enterprise and so getting comfortable with failure and that sometimes you learn more from that failure that you can move forward with, then if you had not tried it at all, and then just really making sure.
That they feel supported and empowered. And I like to try to bring a little bit of fun to the workplace as well. I think that if you really like the people that you're working with, if you feel like you are empowered and energized about it, the content of what you're working on can change day to day, but you're going to be excited to be there and you're going to give it your all Be a more engaged employee along the way.
So that's very much how I think about my team. And then I think as they bring that to their partners across the enterprise, that energy is infectious. And I think our enterprise is also really excited about change. Like they're hungry for it. You know, every year we have more projects than we have the capacity to do.
Right. And so there's no shortage of people raising their hands and saying. Please come over here and look at this and couldn't we do these cool things and so getting to work in that energy is exciting but it's, you know, you're always going to have change curves you have to manage and walk people through and I think it's being respectful of those hearing them adapting to them, and then figuring out okay how do we collectively turn this ship in a way that's going to bring people along with us as opposed to telling them that you just have to do something differently now.
Anthony O'Donnell: Dora, what would you regard as your three or four most important initiatives or most indispensable initiatives?
Dora Clements: Yeah, and I'm going to speak broadly about our enterprise, not necessarily just the ones that I'm working on, but connectivity is such a huge, huge part of our industry right now. And what I mean by that is employers more and more.
Have a technology that they are connected to that they feel very strongly about that they use day to day, we need to be able to very seamlessly integrate and connect with those technologies. And so we are doing a lot of work in a couple different forms, but to say, we want to be the simplest carrier to plug into whatever technology you have, and it's just going to work and you're not going to have to really Think about benefit administration.
You're not going to have to think about evidence of insurability. You're not going to have to think about your billing. Cause it's just going to work and be correct. And the information is going to flow. So I think connectivity is one of our biggest things that we're focused on there. I think data that I've already referenced.
If we don't get the data, right. If we don't really fiercely protect our data, if we don't think about how we can continue to modernize the use of our data. I think we'll fall behind, but I'm happy that we're really focused and moving forward there. And then I think just experience, customer experience. At the end of the day, what we do is sell a promise, and that promise is that we are going to be there when you need us, we are going to support you, and you're not going to have to worry about Getting your claim paid and going through a really complicated claim process.
And so we are just continually looking at how do we make that experience as easy as possible. We're putting a lot of effort into our leave space right now. There's increasing complexity with all of the new emerging state laws, corporate leaves, and that sort of thing. And so how do we continue to make that easy for everyone involved to manage that process? So those are probably the three I'd focus on. I could probably give you a list of a hundred, but we do try to stay really disciplined and be good at the things that we want to be good at.
Anthony O'Donnell: Well, Dora, thank you for being a guest on Life Accelerated.
Dora Clements: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.
It's been great.
Anthony O'Donnell: One of the things I found most interesting in my conversation with Dora was her achieving a master's degree in industrial and organizational psychology. After she joined Unum, that field of study is, as she said, the science of how people work, of how to build high performance teams, and how to coach talent and help people through their change curves.
Another important aspect of Unum's approach to managing change is what Dora called the three legged stool model. The legs are the business operational people, the IT organization, and the change or transformation teams where Dora herself sits. She acknowledged that another way of understanding the relationship of these three parties might be that the transformation people act as a kind of intermediary to the business and IT, marking an improvement in traditional efforts aimed at the alignment of these parties.
Dora talked about customer service as a North Star objective, involving an intensive focus on gathering customers feedback on their experiences at every opportunity. She also addressed her passionate commitment to data quality. Dora's leadership at Unum exemplifies the company's commitment to innovation and excellence, driving transformational change in the insurance industry and setting new standards for customer centric digital solutions.
If you'd like to learn more about driving your own digital transformation, visit equisoft.com/lifeaccelerated.
