MANILA, PHILIPPINES — In any product category, marketing and communications require a delicate balance between business focus and human sensitivity, with both demands seemingly at odds with one another. This is all the more true in the insurance business, with products that market on very real, and usually very sensitive, human experiences such as sicknesses, accidents, and deaths, to name a few. With this, adobo Magazine sat down with the Global Chief Marketing Officer of Manulife, Karen Leggett, to discuss what it takes to be a market leader in the insurance industry, and how it all goes back to forward-thinking, customer-centric marketing.
Right off the bat when I met Karen — when I entered the board room in Manulife Philippines’ Makati office and found her standing by the floor to ceiling windows, watching the traffic below — there was an unmistakable sense of leadership and confidence to her stance. Despite being on the other side of the world from her home in Toronto, Canada, and being a mere few days into her Philippine visit, Karen looked very much at home and at ease where she is. I immediately knew that I’d be having a conversation with someone who knows what she’s talking about.
Pandemic pivots
Karen is currently on her 12th year in the marketing industry, having worked at some of the biggest insurance and banking firms in Canada, and heading everything from distribution to strategy and artificial intelligence to large-scale technology transformation. With an illustrious and pretty extensive repertoire of marketing disciplines under her belt, she shared that her favorite thing about working in this industry is zoning in on the customer. “What I really love is that marketing really organizes around the customer and [in the case of Manulife] around our advisors that support our customers, and it’s bringing to bear all those capabilities,” she opened up.
This need to rally around Manulife’s customers and its advisors was really heightened during the pandemic, and understandably so. And for Karen, who joined the company in February 2020, just nine days shy from lockdown, this was an immediate, if not urgent, demand. “It’s not like I came into the role prepared for that to happen, and prepared to not ever meeting my team in person, or prepared to completely rethink how marketing gets done in a lockdown situation across the globe … It was a real pivot that we had to undertake,” Karen recalled.
From the get-go, Karen’s journey with Manulife really entailed a lot of opportunities and demands to pivot. First, it was making sure each employee and advisor is well-equipped to work completely remote and online; then, it was changing the way they worked together as a team to serve one another efficiently despite not meeting in person for months; and finally, it was completely transforming how they supported customers during an unprecedented time, which has evolved into a never-ending pursuit as more and more changes happen in the industry that continue to redefine customer needs and expectations.
Thus, Karen’s goal as Global Chief Marketing Officer of one of the biggest insurance companies in the world was solidified during these critical times in the business: “How can we take what we have and enhance it to better serve our customers? And how can we bring together the different individuals and teams throughout the organization to accomplish this?”
The answer puts the focus on what Manulife has accomplished even before the pandemic, but what was emphasized and highlighted through this unprecedented time: Innovation before the industry demanded it, and personalization before the market expected it.
Where investment pays off: Digital innovation
Manulife has been preparing to go digital way before the pandemic. So when the world closed down and everything moved online, the insurance company was prepared. “One of the big things we did was having global leadership who was really looking at digital transformation. We had already made significant investments on our ability to digitally sell our products and digitally service [our customers]. And we just continued to further those investments so that we can enable our advisors to continue to work with our customers, and our customers to continue to have access to that protection and support. May it be through health products, savings products, or life insurance products to protect them through the very real situation that Covid engendered,” Karen shared.
“That was really how we pivoted. It was also about helping customers to be able to access content about health and nutrition, and really personalized content, to support them through that period.”
Karen underlined the role of Manulife’s early investments on technology in strengthening the company’s position as a leading insurance brand. For starters, it quickly became Microsoft’s largest insurance client in the world as it completely scaled its team digitally upon lockdown’s enactment. It also improved and further developed its mobile app and customer website for easy access to information and content.
Manulife has also invested heavily on understanding, and eventually integrating, artificial intelligence and Gen AI into its operations and services. Its quick digital adaption has resulted to it being among the top AI leaders in the financial services and insurance industries. This is powered by over 190 data scientists globally who are deeply embedded in its businesses and markets, looking into developing AI models to further enrich Manulife’s digital prowess.
One of its main objectives in investing in AI is to train its employees to work with it, so that they feel excited and part of the change, instead of fearing it might take over their jobs. One significant initiative was Manulife’s own internal version of ChatGPT, called “Chat MFC,” which stands for Chat Manulife Financial Corporation. This is a fully secured, internally focused and data safe platform that allows advisors to quickly access information about the products they’re offering, which further expands their customer servicing capabilities.
“We’ve rolled that out to all 38,000 of our employees globally because we want to democratize innovation and we want our employees to be able to engage with AI, and Gen AI in particular. That is where productivity improvements can come from, as people look at their role and get excited about what Gen AI can bring into their particular job, what it can bring to how they interact and service customers, how they interact and help with our agents and advisors to service our customers — it really becomes very powerful,” Karen stressed.
The program was launched internally in May 2024, and Karen shared that the feedback has been incredibly positive. “We’re seeing a huge uptick in the variety and number of our employees who are actually engaging and using Chat MFC,” she happily reported.
AI has also been instrumental in Manulife’s contact centers in documenting conversations so call representatives can put their focus on fully helping and servicing the customer. “What we’ve done is as we migrate all our contact centers to a new contact center platform, we’ve been able to enable what we call ‘call summarization.’ And so the AI will listen in on the conversation, and actually does the summary so the representative can devote 100% of their time and attention to you and your issue. To make sure I’m listening, I’m understanding, I’m reading into what your concern is, and I’m able to address it in a timely and effective fashion — while the summary of the call gets done with a 100% accuracy,” Karen explained.
Sales agent enablement has also been significantly impacted by investments in technology and AI as it created a new model that allows agents to go through all the data they have on a customer, augment it with other existing data, and present opportunities on untapped and unmet needs that the sales representatives should be talking to the customer about, and matching it with Manulife’s various products. This is further enhanced by “contract lookup,” another internal AI tool that quickly analyzes the specific provisions of a contract, especially group benefits as is commonly found in employer-employee agreements. The call representative or sales agent can enter the prompt on the platform to find out if “[Caller name]’s husband is covered and qualified for a specific medical drug, according to the contract under Company A,” and within a few minutes, give an accurate answer to the caller’s concern.
“That has been tremendously successful because it allows the AI to be able to go through all the data and isolate and identify what those opportunities might be, and equip our advisors to even better serve the needs of our customers,” she added. “[For ‘contract lookup,’] it makes for a much shorter conversation, provides the answer much more quickly, as well as help the employee feel more confident and secure. Especially if they’re a new employee who may not know all the provisions of these contracts, and now they’re able to answer with confidence and accuracy.”
Thus, while the rest of the industry and the world’s biggest companies were organizing themselves to navigate the new normal, Manulife’s foresight to invest on digital early on gave it an incredible advantage to quickly pivot and innovate ahead of its competition, and more importantly, in time to service its customers’ transformed needs.
“How did we navigate Covid so well? It’s because of all the investments we made on our digital transformation and being able to leverage those and take advantage of those. On top of that, because of the additional investments we’ve made on Cloud, in data and data lakes, and harnessing all that information regarding our customers — that’s what actually allowed us to take advantage of generative AI. Many companies are still trying to experiment, struggling, and piloting, haven’t actually rolled anything out because they don’t have their data in the shape that it really needs to be in order to harness that,” Karen remarked, sharing that because of its talented global team of data scientists, the company actually has 350 vetted ideas that may potentially be delivered soon, and use case studies that will be launched to more markets in the months ahead. This is a remarkable testament to what research, data, and forward-thinking customer service can open up for organizations that are taking a proactive approach in innovation.
Personalization for human-centered design
Ultimately, Karen stressed that Manulife’s investments on data and technology all boils down to its commitment to serve its customers better through personalization. With robust AI models to gather and analyze data, it empowers its employees and sales representatives with the tools they need to fully support their customers. And in an industry that tackles such sensitive topics like finances, critical illnesses, deaths, etc., Karen underlined the value of personalization to ensure their marketing remains respectful, empathetic, and human-centric.
“The other area where we’ve invested heavily, which is part of my mandate, is what we call ‘human centered design.’ So we have teams and deep practitioners in the area of HCD all around the globe — from Canada to the Philippines — who are really there to help us take a step back and understand the human experience of how people are going to want to navigate all the new capabilities, new tools, and new platforms we roll out: How would they want to navigate the app so it’s intuitively designed to easily find what they’re looking for for their specific need? How can we reduce the friction to understand how a form is used, in simple and non-legalistic language?”
“That’s another way that we are orchestrating and architecting [our services] to keep the human, or the customer, at the center of it all, and build around that,” she explained. “We want to bring hyper personalization to them, so that they really feel like the data they share with us is now played back to them with value, and they can benefit from the sharing of that data.”
Among Manulife’s core values is “obsess about customers,” and it’s one of the main principles that drive its mission — make decisions easier and lives better — further into reality. This is also Karen’s main benchmark in terms of being a successful leader, especially in marketing: Has she led the team to “obsess about customers” in a way that ensures customer satisfaction in everything from agent-customer relations to online user experience?
“Every quarter, we will go out and survey customers in a double blind study so they don’t know who’s asking questions, and we measure how they feel about Manulife. And I’m pleased to say, in the Philippines, we are the number one in the market in terms of relationship net promoter score. And so we’re very proud of that, and it’s an area that we want to continue to earn the right to have our customers say that about us because it’s so important. For a customer-centric organization, that is really the most important metric: understanding how our customers feel about us.”
Going back to her goal, has she successfully rallied her team to provide for their customers?
To that, Karen said: “I’m very very proud of the progress that we’ve made. We are leading in so many aspects. In 11 of our 16 markets across the world, we are leading or co-leading. That, I think, is the ultimate test, which is what our customers say about us, and whether they believe that we are there for them and that we are a leading brand. And our customers are saying: Yes you are! That’s the ultimate yardstick from how we should be measuring ourselves and the success of our brand.”
Learn more about Manulife’s customer-centricity at https://www.manulife.com.ph/
