For Prudential's Joe Hayes, Customer Experience Is a Group Effort

[Bonus Coverage: Hayes Discusses What Technologies Employers Want from Insurance Providers.]

Like many insurance IT executives, Prudential's Joe Hayes is focused on improving the customer experience. But in the group insurance market, that takes on a dual meaning. Promoted in February from VP of IT operations at Prudential Annuities to VP of information systems and CIO of the Newark, N.J.-based life insurer's ($13.8 billion in assets under management, Q4 2011) group insurance division, Hayes has a mandate to improve the customer experience for both Prudential's institutional clients as well as their constituent employees. He spoke recently with Insurance & Technology associate editor Nathan Golia about how that dual goal is shaping Prudential's technology strategy.

Many insurance technologists are talking about the customer experience. How is the customer experience unique in the group insurance business?

Hayes: We have a couple of customer experiences that we're focused on — I'm even struggling a little bit terminology-wise, because for all of my career with Pru and before, I've been chasing the end consumer. Here, the person who's buying the product is the institution, but we're also focused on the employee of that customer. The institutional side is under pressure because benefits are expensive to provide. They want a lot of options and easy administration — they're looking to the carriers to make their lives easy.

On the employee side, the customer experience is around a good offering of product, but also making the enrollment process easy. We want to augment that with some educational activities. We have done some things around calculators that are really very simple but very powerful — it's really a definition of value-added services at the core, then delivering the services and filling needs with tech, but doing it in a simple way.

Recent research from InformationWeek (a UBM TechWeb property) indicates that the focus on customer experience is driving many CIOs and chief marketing officers to work together quite often. Is that something you're experiencing?

Hayes: I just helped our CMO [Jean Wiskowski] hire a director of e-marketing [Bill Kaiser]. That's the bridge to pull together IT and marketing, when you talk about the customer experience and the delivery. When you think about social media and pushing information instead of pulling information — there are so many ways to get content out there. One thing that institutional businesses like group insurance need to do is adopt a retail mind-set. We're very aware that we're starting to break into some new territory here, and partnering with marketing is key.

How do you balance the customer focus with the day-to-day, back-end work around running the business?

Hayes: Fortunately, we've focused over the past five or 10 years on relieving ourselves of some legacy systems — we used to be a health provider and divested ourselves of that business, but some of those systems were used for other group products as well. While we may not have a cutting-edge portfolio of apps, a lot of the heavy lifting has been done.

The ability to make sure the lights come on every day — capacity management — we're in pretty good shape there. The focus is all around data management and business intelligence. We're not as mature in that space, and we want to build some muscle around that. The demand [for BI] from business partners is insatiable. It goes to the tools, the data, the data governance policies.

Are you — like many other financial services technologists — focused on "Big Data" and associated analytics?

Hayes: It's the analytics more than anything. When you have employees who are buying multiple products, when you get all the way to the back end, the information about the same person may live in several places physically. That's the foundation we're laying — the single source of the truth. Then we'll take the step [of adding] the big analytics. In my last job, we focused on giving business partners the tools to do that as opposed to having to call someone in IT every time they needed a report or data pull.

[For more on improving the customer experience through consumerization, see related article.]

Nathan Golia is senior editor of Insurance & Technology. He joined the publication in 2010 as associate editor and covers all aspects of the nexus between insurance and information technology, including mobility, distribution, core systems, customer interaction, and risk ... View Full Bio