PegaWorld iNspire 2024: An Everyday App To Grow the Sales Agent Business for Great Eastern Life

Reimagine the sales agent’s experience on the Great Eastern Life Planner app. The objective was a smart, fast, and powerful on-the-go tool to meet the daily needs of sales agents from prospecting to post sales service. Join this session to see how the app’s adoption rate has hit 70% within two weeks of launch – surpassing all past records.

Transcript:

- Hello, thank you for joining us today. I'm Priya, Vice President Information Technology from the Transformation and Architecture Arm of Great Eastern. My portfolio has two distinct focuses. One is on developing technology solutions for our distribution force. The second one is on CRM and marketing solutions. As a Portfolio Director, my scope includes developing the solutions, delivery, and the day-to-day operations of these platforms. Christine and I are here today for the first time in Pega World and thrilled to share with you our journey. Over to you, Christine, on your introduction.

- Okay, hello everyone. My name is Christine. I've been with Great Eastern for close to 20 years and I'm happy to be here. I'm with the Group Customer and Digital Division. I handle the, currently I head up the Great Digital Advantage Platform which aggregates the digital applications for our agency force. And I'm responsible for the adoption of our digital applications for the sales force. So happy to be here to share with you our experiences.

- Okay, before we move on, a quick introduction of who we are. Great Eastern is a Singapore-based company. We were established in 1908. So as we speak, this year is our 116th birthday. We have over 100 billion assets and 16 million policyholders. We are a composite insurer which means we have license to operate in life, health, general and in group insurance. And the topic for today is on sales app for agents which brings us to the part on the distribution force we have, we have tied agents, we have financial advisors, we have brokers and banker servants. Over to Christine, before I pass it to Christine, I just wanted to give a quick summary of our journey with Pega until today. We came into Pega in 2013 trying to implement a CRM application for operations and a sales and activity application for our distribution force. And we implemented this in version 6.3 and 6.5. We had about three applications. One of the main key areas back then, like I said, we had a 100-year-old company, was the data as an issue. We didn't even have a single view of customer back then and that was one of the main goals that we set out to do. The implementation was completed but we fell short in terms of adoption. Thereon, we continued to use the platform. In 2018, when we started our digital transformation journey, we started to leverage on the single view of customer that we had established on the Pega platform. We started to expose the services out to the other digital platforms that we were enabling and that became very valuable for the customer. To give you an example, if someone purchased a policy from an online channel, we wanted to tie back that customer back to the same rep that he was with. That helped the business to avoid any kind of channel conflict and the customer, any kind of friction was avoided for the customer too. So then, the value of what we had done in Pega had become very visible. So that helped us to facilitate the conversation internally on future upgrades and we were very happy that we could get to do that upgrade in 2020. Post that, we have ramped up the use of Pega within the organization. We have moved on to implementing in Malaysia, in Indonesia and we also did this revamp of sales and activity planner that we're gonna talk about today. I pass it over to Christine.

- Okay. I don't know how many of you have been to Singapore. Raise your hand. Great. Okay. They call it a little red dot somewhere near the equator. Singapore is a relatively new, young nation. We had our independence in 1965. This year, we are celebrating 59 years old. This was on the topmost, you see a black and white picture of Singapore. Then in the year 2000, this is Marina Bay area. As you can see, it is quite bare at that point in time. Okay, 10 years later, the bottom, the picture at the bottom was what happened. The skyline is no longer bare, but it is now filled with skyscrapers and what we have is the prominent Marina Bay Sands, which actually house the convention center, just like this one. Maybe this is slightly bigger, but otherwise, we also have got a casino inside Marina Bay Sands. We are so proud that within 10 years, the nation actually has transformed itself. Why am I showing this picture? It's because that's the journey that we have taken as far as PEGA is concerned, implementation of PEGA. So today, we are gonna share with you a little bit about our journey on PEGA for one of our agent application called The Great Planner. Excuse me. You know, when we implemented PEGA back in 2013, it was probably one of the most powerful application at that point in time. It is our CRM. However, it's a little bit too sophisticated for our agents. Our agency for us ranges from the youngest 21 years old to the oldest 75 years old. They've got a wide range of experiences and digital literacy at that point in time. While it gives a lot of information, at that point, in those years, we don't have things like design thinking, no user experience. We're just providing the facts. For the agents, they are out there doing their sales. Therefore, when it comes to systems, they are a little bit lagging behind. As a result, there was underutilization. What adds on to the complexity was that business becomes more demanding, and then there's increased regulatory requirements. As a result, we added on a lot more applications. In year 2000, 2020, we wanted to go into digitalization for our agency folks. We took a deep dive into looking at what are the applications, how are the agents doing their jobs and to our dismay, to our surprise, the agents need to, oh, sorry. Agents need to access something like 10 applications just to get their jobs done. Every application comes with, because of security, the need for security, they have to log in with different password, OTP. As a result, the agents are perplexed with how to access different systems, what are the information that each system offers. So they resorted to only using a few key systems. Unfortunately, Pega was one of the bottom ones. Now, over and above that, the new agents, when they enter the business, the very foremost important thing is to learn about product knowledge, selling skills, and then they have to go to all the 10 applications to learn about it, and that takes a lower priority. Too many messages everywhere. There were many campaigns that we wanted to push out to the agents, but after a while, because of the laundry list of campaigns targeting at the same customers, they gave up looking at some of these things, while we offer them all the information that they need. We haven't been able to digitalize some of our processes. As a result, we do see papers flying around, and because it is paper submission, sometimes it can fall off the crack and then that kind of resulted in a delay in terms of the turnaround time. So we really needed to do something about this. So we were looking at the different application, what it serves, how are the agents using it, and then we need to look at how, whether we should reduce some of these duplicates, remove some of these redundancies in our data applications. So together with Priya, we were rationalizing our applications. And then we really wanted to transform our agency, and in a great, decent way. So in the year 2000, while the rest of the world was undergoing COVID in a standstill, the few of us, we were cracking our heads, going through meetings after meetings, trying to talk to management about how we should reimagine the agent journey. And today we have our great planner, which is what we're gonna showcase later on. This is a productivity app. For the agents, time is important. We don't want them to spend time looking at, searching at different applications to find the information. We want the information to be readily available, so that they spend most of the time doing the higher value job, which is to connect, to establish that trusted relationship. We want the great planner to be the everyday app that they can come in every day with ease to identify the tasks that they have to do. So what we've done is that we consolidated the features, we embarked on this methodology called Jobs to be Done. We have identified 13 jobs that agents need to do, and then looking across all the different applications and the features that would be available, we went on a consolidation approach. The first thing that we did was to consolidate two applications, which is our current phase. We have successfully consolidated two applications into a single application, which is a great planner, and in time to come, we're gonna add some more. We're gonna consolidate some more. So the outcome that we hope to achieve is that our agents, which is the phase of the company, we can be as great as the weakest link. How can we enable them to be that trusted, that intelligent agent for the customer? And of course, when they meet the customer's need, their own needs are met, we meet our KPIs, and everybody is happy. So I pass the mic now to Priya, who will talk a little bit about our journey.

- I'll break down our journey into four major steps. One was, of course, that of discovery, that Christine alluded to. We listened to all the feedback, we leaned in, we knew what the agents wanted. We were very clear in our goals that we wanted to shape the behavior of the agents. Our distribution representatives were already using iOS applications for their sales process, so that became a natural deployment approach. And the mobile app, therefore, was chosen as the deployment approach. In line with our digital transformation efforts, we had also embarked on approaching the entire requirements using design thinking. So we went into focus groups along with the agents, collaborating, co-creating, before we started to do the entire development. And mobile app, especially Pega Mobile, was something new for us. So once we decided that we will proceed with Pega, we were this close to deciding whether we wanted to go with Pega or not, and I'm very happy to say we agreed that we will proceed on with Pega. Once we decided that, we also chose our implementation partner. We chose HCL Singapore to work alongside our own internal Pega team. We did a prototype before seeking the project approval. We also had started to implement Agile in all of our projects and that was a mind shift change for users where they were so used to waterfall methodology, they give their requirements, they come back many months later only when we do the testing. But then all of that had to change. There were frequent show and tell. They got to see what we were doing. They were engaged in all of the testing much earlier. And finally, on the road to a go-to-market plan, we had successfully gone on to pilot approach in many of the other projects. And as in all applications, you have early users, early eager adopters, some laggers. We chose about 300 agents to be our pilot group. We ran the pilot for about three months. We got the early feedback, resolved all the feeding issues before we started to roll out for the entire agency force. So over to Christine on the details.

- Okay, for Great Planner, what we really wanted to do is to help agents build successful habits the Great Eastern way. So we identified four key pillars that this app must deliver. First of all, to be able to help our agents to plan their daily priorities, to perform, of course, pacing themselves to performance and success, that's a very important component for salespeople, commission-based, maximizing their sales opportunities. Our campaigns team spent a lot of time to identify the customers that are more or has got a higher propensity to respond to the campaigns. But some of these were underutilized. So how can we help our agents maximize these opportunities? And last but not least, at the center of it all, for the agents to be able to know their customers. So we provided a 360 view for the agents so that each time when they go to the customers, they are able to have an intelligent conversation with the clients. So what we have achieved so far, our first phase of our implementation, we managed to develop 180 features. And today, it is growing. It's still growing. Every two weeks, we are releasing new features. When we rolled out the application, thanks to the pilot users and the learning experience and the user design thinking that we had, we are so pleased that within the first month of our launch of the application, 70% of them came on board. We were hesitant. To be honest, I was a little bit hesitant because they were on the previous application for the last 10 years. Old habits die hard. But it took them half the time to come on board this new application as compared to our point-of-sale system. So we are really delighted with that. Today, 86% of them are using it on a weekly basis, but our ambition is that it has to be an everyday app. So we are still, jobs to be done, okay? There are still things that we need to do. And then, compared with the previous application, we are seeing a 27% usage more. Yeah? So let me just play a video now on what this app is all about. You can clap. Okay. So, agreeing on the four pillars that we have, let me just start off with the first one. Plan your daily priorities. So this is the landing page for the agent. What we have done is that we have put up widgets on the different tasks that agents need to do. And on the very first corner, you see birthdays. You know, in the Asian culture, birthdays are important. And it is not just about, you know, birthday. But it is, and the fact that, you know, birthday is coming means, you know, your premium gets higher because of age, right? But what we wanted, really, the agent to do is to be able to continue to build that relationship. If you remember my birthday, means you care about me, in that sense, you know? So we, in this application, not just telling the agent that today is your client's birthday, but can you send them a greeting card, you know, to continue to build that relationship and enable the end-to-end journey in strengthening that relationship. We also have got appointments, of course, that's important for the day, including an appointment with the underwriters, with the claims officers, and, you know, the clients, and agency meetings, agency events, and all that. New sales opportunities that have come on board. What are the currently campaigns that are running? The proposals that you are supposed to follow up. The claims that you need to follow up with the underwriters, with the claims officers what to submit, as well as the premiums due. What are the policies that are potential, that would potentially last? So all these are available in the homepage. And, okay. So we have taken something out of the box from Pega on the calendar to enable the agents to set the appointments. And what is it that we like about this is that, you know, not only are the event, the calendar sent out for the customers, but this particular event is locked against the customer 360. So the agents, I tell the agents, you know, no longer do you take your 555 book. You know, in Asian culture, we have a small little book that they handwrite, you know, the diary and all that. But now everything is locked in. So that each time when they interact with the customers, when they meet the customers, they can go back and say, "Hey, I met you on this day." Precisely, exactly what, even to the extent, what do you, what do you drink, you know? So that helps us a lot, okay? In building that knowledge bank with the customer, okay? The second thing that, of course, this is used to be, you know, in the previous application, one of the, at the homepage. But we have moved it, okay? And built a module on it. A performance pacing is important for the salespeople. And it's the most used module, okay? The module allows our agents to track their performance against their goals and against their peers and company-wide. What used to be, you know, our corporate colleagues will then, will generate a monthly ranking, you know, in the form of bulletins, you know? No longer need to do that. But the agents now can get to see the performance of himself, his peers, and where he stands in the company, all within a click, you know? That helps to pace them in terms of the performance. Not only does it help the agents, but the supervisors as well, okay? We operate on an agency three-tier structure, hierarchy. So the, most of the time, the manager need to look out for the production of the agents. So with the applications, not only the agent himself can see their own performance, but manager now has got the view, the exact same view, you know? And also, as a group, he's able to see the aggregated view. So that helps him in monitoring the whole group performance. Not just quantitative financial commissions, but also qualitative indicators, like your balance scorecard, the continuing CPD requirements and all that. Okay, maximizing sales opportunities. This is the one that, what used to be a long list, a laundry list of campaigns, you know, that we provided in a previous application, in a previous version, you know? So much so that agents gave up because just such a long laundry list. So with user experience, you know, we managed to kind of like break it up into several different modules so that every module has got this intent, the action that we want agents to take. Some of the opportunities are for engagement purposes. Some of the opportunities is to reach out to the customers because of a product promotion. So with the different actions that we want agents to take, that's how we have structured and separated some of these modules for the ease, so that the agent will be able to follow up with ease, with the customers, right? So of course, with a click on the name, you'll be able to see, again, the customer 360 view, and then at the same time, update the status. That helps them to keep their funnel tight, you know, the sales funnel tight, and do the necessary follow up. Last but not least, knowing your customers. This is a very important, that's the heart of all things, right? If they know the customers well, they will be able to gain that customer lifetime value, and make sure that they take care of the customer from cradle to grave. They never miss out on an opportunity with the customer, because on the left-hand side is the profile information, on the right-hand side is where all the opportunities and campaigns that the customers have been identified suitable for, okay? So when the agent meets up with the customer, they are no longer, I cannot remember which campaign you were targeted for, which one you were eligible for, but now, at the tap of the customer 360, they are able to see clearly, you know, what are the different opportunities available for the client. I don't have it in the slide, but the other module that was here that we have done is the segmentation, the filtering, I'm not sure whether you managed to capture during the video at the onset, whereby the agents are now able to segmentize their customers. What used to be our previous version, agents need to wait, in the initial years, they need to wait for the next day for the list, for the result list to come out. Then, of course, two years ago, we managed to reduce it to four hours, but with the new great planner, they can get it within seconds, you know? So we are so happy with the implementation that we have. Let me just quickly move to the change management, the go-to-market, as Priya has mentioned, you know, no matter how great a system is, how powerful the features you call it to be, but the agents don't know how to use it, is as good as a white elephant, you know? So therefore, it is important that our agents hop on to this new system and go alongside with us and leverage on the features that we have. So, awareness is important. Okay, first of all, we need to tell them that, hey, the older version, you know, is obsolete, we need to come on to the new version. So they have to, there's a need for them to have that mindset change, okay? So we did a lot of publicity, together with our marketing team, we did videos, you know, we bought, our pilot users became our ambassadors, you know, to help us to promote the new application. And then, post-publicity, we put up billboards, you know, to let the whole agency force know that they need to transit to this new application. And for, as far as education is concerned, together with our training department, we have come up with e-learning, you know, video-assisted learning, and face-to-face training, you know, to ensure that we leave no man behind, okay? And then, and of course, last but not least, you know, we are just into our first phase, you know, of our application, we are continuing to develop, adding more features, so that some of these other obsolete systems can be, you know, defunct, and move all, everybody into a single workbench, which is the Great Planet application. With that, my team conducts, you know, regular clinics, virtual clinics, you know, so each time when we roll out a new feature, we will have clinic sessions, you know, whereby we will tell agents how they can leverage on those, and we come up with video tips and all that to help them. Okay, essentially, you know, for every dollar spent, we want it to be able to produce the results that we desire, that agents become smarter, you know, they are accurate when it comes to customer policy information, and that they are the best representative of Great Eastern. So with that, I pass the time now to Priya, who will then take you through our technical approach. The slide.

- Moving on to the technical approach, you heard what Christine had about her audacious goals. I will break it down into five parts, data integrity and availability. As mentioned, we are a composite insurer, we are dealing with multiple policy admins here at Clay, leveling all of that data into meaningful single view is a Herculean task, which we managed to do. And creating a harmonized view of the customer and associating it with the right distribution representative is a major task for us. In addition, the performance is one big selling area for the agents, so getting that information in a timely manner. Every policy that goes through, they need to know then and there, they're looking at it, they're looking at it against their challenges, their contests. So getting that information was another critical area that we needed to look into. And the harmonized view is not a simple one. An agent could have two, a customer could have two agents, one for himself, one for his parent. We needed to keep that boundary, but yet he needed to know that this customer has this kind of a need. So that was a major work that we had to do. And we had to look at our data pipeline and API services, be very clear on which were the candidates for batch, which were the candidates for real time, in order to meet the outcomes. We had exposed 80 over APIs out of the platform for our other digital channels as well from Pega itself, which has helped us to ensure when we get a sale from another channel or we're assigning the customer to the rightful representatives. The next one being data security. We are in a situation of bring your own device. And we have in our organization, an MAM solution that we have implemented. This was one area that we struggled with during the implementation with, and we required to coordinate between Pega, our MAM provider, BlackBerry, and their partner, BlueSeda, to get it resolved. And we managed to push that through. Scalability, we have implemented Pega on our on-prem, on our own private cloud in a containerized manner. That required a shift of our Pega engineers. They had to upscale themselves. We had to bring on board some DevOps engineers onto the team. So that was one area to ensure we get that kind of scalability. The last was accessibility. Christine alluded to that earlier. We have worked with our MAM solution and our SSO to go with a passwordless access with a certificate issuance. So all that hassle of keying in the password and OTP is no longer required, but yet we comply to the two FA requirements. The last is modularity and maintainability. We have been very, very clear that we would not over-customize the platform. So whenever there is an ask for something that cannot be met within the framework, we push back, we look at redesigning. She's looking at me like that. Yeah, but we have to do that. Right? So we've been very clear on trying to use as much as possible out of the box. And that has helped us. And finally, we have integrated the platform to our CI/CD pipelines, our observability tools to get that kind of resilience that we need. I'll move on. So this is a simple view of what we are doing, right? We have multiple policy admin system, multiple channels and where Pega is sitting in front of all of this. So obviously we have exposed multiple microservices and APIs out of the platform. Not to go through in detail, but just to give you a flavor of how many systems are involved at play here. Our next steps, we are looking to move to Pega Cloud. I mean, I think any of them, any of you who are on-prem will agree with me, this catch up game is killing us. So we definitely wanna move on to the cloud to see how we can be on the latest and leverage on the upcoming features. We are going to enter into a POC or knowledge body, which will again help the distribution channels with so much of information on product campaigns or any of those circulars that we send out to the agents, which all required to be at the hands of the agent. And we are looking to explore personalization and shifting the campaigning capabilities the way we think and look at it. And we are continuing to consolidate all our applications. So our vision is on one agency workbench. We are already in the second phase of it and hopefully we get there soon. Before we end, we wanna share with you our recent win. We have won the digitization under the life insurance category under Singapore Business Review for this particular initiative. And whatever we did, whatever we say is great, but the proof is always in what the agents feel and how they look at it. So we leave you with the final video before we take any questions from the ground.

- It keeps me motivated. Every single day I actually log into the sales performance. I log in to look at my own FYC, look at my team FYC and also the R&R, the rewards and recognition. From there I have a clear view of what is the tier that I have already achieved and what is the shortfall that I need to work on.

- I really log in daily to like track sales performance or even manage my client database to see like when is their birthday, filter plans to see if it doesn't have a cash flow that I will try to attempt to actually text them or call them.

- I make use of the engagement opportunities and campaign to follow up with my clients on their maturing policy. This definitely has helped me to engage my customer.

- I have been using it to track my team member performance and activities and there's a lot of sales campaign, right? Which easily we can generate leads from there. So to be honest, I really feel that my productivity and my team productivity has increased by more than 30%.

- Till date, our result has actually boost I think maybe 30%, yeah. And I totally love it because it becomes very efficient as well. It's a one-stop solution where I get to navigate everything that I want in there in just one platform itself.

- Efficient, comprehensive and user-friendly.

- Okay, the three adjectives is great, dynamic, awesome.

- So we can, that's the end of our presentation.

- [Host] Yeah, any questions about Great Eastern?

- We were either too clear.

- [Host] So you talked about ones to come. Obviously you probably hear that some, but you created your own platform. So have you given any thought to maybe starting something like AI capabilities into the app, and some other tough things and some future points to start?

- Yeah, we are looking into some of those ideas, right? Like I said, I think the immediate one that we're looking at is the knowledge party aspect and the coaching. So those are two major areas we are looking at before we explore other parts. But I think what we want to do is to shift out of the cloud and think about where we can enable all those capabilities. So that's the focus that we're going with, yeah.

- [Host] Amazing, I have a question. Can I use the mic?

- Yeah, we can hear you.

- We can hear you.

- [Attendee] First of all, thank you for sharing. I think I'm very impressed with what you've done with Pega, coming from Pega. So thank you for sharing. I have one question. Priya, you mentioned that previously you were comparing citing between Pega and some of the systems, right? And it was very close. So I'm very curious to understand what was the tipping point? What made you decide to do that?

- I think there was a lot of internal... One of the areas that we had done was previous version was on Pega, right? We had invested a lot of information. There was a lot of... We have built our own single view of customer. Trying to go on to any other platform would also mean that we had to spend that additional effort. So that was one thing that I kept reminding my management. Are we ready? And do we have the appetite to do that? And if you look at it, between Pega and any other vendor out there, the features are always a catch-up game, right? I mean, if you look at it, that is where it is. We had already invested about good six, seven years on the platform. So to me, leveraging what is there and shifting out and upgrading, and then we can go faster rather than circling back to the point one again, right? To try to do the implementation in. We would not be here today or not see that if we chose another platform. So that was the convincing I had to do internally, including her.

- [Attendee] Hi, I have one question. You are doing customer service also on the platform, right? So if you have the challenge that you are using with the content of the customers what is the difference between Pega Mobile, for instance, that the customers are also longing for? For healthcare .

- No, the Pega Mobile that we're using is only for distribution force. So the customer service platform, I mean, in insurance, if you look at it, the customer service agents, so to speak, are the ones using Pega. And the customer app that we are using is our own Greenfield built app. But what we are doing right now, a lot of APIs that we've exposed out of Pega platform is all available even in all of these channels. So we've tried to build that ecosystem. So we have our online platforms coming through, we have our customer app, we have our channel, which is the distributions using Pega Mobile. But the central brain of where the data sits connecting all of this is right now using what we are having in Pega. So any kind of transaction that comes through or someone comes to our websites and drops and says, I need to know this, I wanna know more about this product, that's again sent to Pega. And if I know that you're my existing customer based on the data that I have in Pega, I assign back that as a lead to that particular agents that you're not bothered by somebody else. Or if you are not my customer, then we have a group of leads management agents. They would be notified instantly and they will reach out. And we also incentivize the agents to respond to that request quickly. If they don't respond within stipulated hours, we suspend them for getting future leads. Right?

- [Attendee] And you also have a very good

- Yeah, right, right.

- [Attendee] You're talking about an AI .

- When we were looking at Gen AI, we were more looking at empowering the agents even more. So that is the angle. See, if you look at it, I mentioned earlier, we have about 5,000 agents in Singapore, 25,000 agents in Malaysia. You can imagine the attrition. And she mentioned age group is from 20 to 72, right? So it's a wide range. And all the new agents who come on board, the earlier they become productive, the better for us. So we were looking at those capabilities to empower that agents to acquire that knowledge. So we give them the right tools to be better at the sales acquisition process. That's where we were going at the moment.

- [Attendee] One more .

- Sure, sure.

- [Attendee] You're also using the . Is there something

- Sales automation, CDH is another area that we're looking at. Sandeep is smiling, yes. Yes.

- All right, thank you.

- Thank you.

- [Host] Well all up.

- Thank you so much.

- Thank you so much. Thank you.