Pacific Life enhances customer engagement across its U.S. retail businesses.

The insurance and wealth management industry is on the cusp of significant, disruptive change. This is due to a perfect storm of emerging business challenges. Accelerating technological advances have led to increased competition from new product offerings and businesses entering the market. At the same time, financial professionals and consumers expect more from the organizations they do business with. It’s no longer enough for businesses to have a great product. They also need to be able to deliver seamless, personalized experiences.

Faced with this new reality, Pacific Life Insurance Company started a transformational journey to digitize its business, enhance customer experiences and drive operational excellence. A key challenge being addressed is the need for a unified platform to improve visibility over customer interactions across the company’s U.S. retail businesses.

Pacific Life is one of the leading life insurance and retirement solutions companies in the U.S., with more than $158 billion in assets. The Fortune 500 company provides a range of products, including life insurance, annuities, and mutual funds, through a network of independent financial professionals — the company’s customers — who sell these products to their end customers.

In 2018, Pacific Life celebrated 150 years of success and was keen to ensure the future looked just as bright. Recognizing that superior customer experience — for both financial professionals and consumers — would emerge as a key differentiator in the market, company leaders turned to Salesforce for help to develop a whole-of-business solution. “Our path forward will be guided by the needs of customers,” said Rob Goodman, Assistant Vice President and CRM Program Owner. “And we are opportunistically leveraging strategic partners like Salesforce to provide next generation capabilities, and transform our customer engagement model and our technology infrastructure.” “We believe the next 10 years will see more change than the whole 150-year history of our company,” said Adrian Griggs, Chief Operating Officer. “The effective integration of channels across marketing, sales, and service activities is critical to delivering a positive, brand-reinforcing experience at every touchpoint in the customer relationship.”

With evolving technology and changing customer expectations driving demand for improved digital capabilities, Pacific Life needed to modernize how it leverages technology to deliver rich and personalized experiences.

“Pacific Life has been progressively adopting more cloud-based infrastructure, platform and software as a service technology in recent years,” says Meetali Agarwal, Pacific Life’s Director, Customer Data. “We realized we needed an integration platform that would provide us with the ability to connect across cloud and on-premises systems — and across a variety of internal, partner and vendor systems — in a fast, flexible, secure, scalable, easy-to-use, and easy-to-maintain manner.”

Using the MuleSoft AnyPoint Platform, Pacific Life has been able to tap into a diverse ecosystem of partners to better serve its customers. The company created a central customer data hub to connect to Salesforce. MuleSoft can facilitate a real-time data exchange between this hub and a variety of third-party applications. MuleSoft also allows the company to easily create and use application programming interfaces (APIs) to digitize its insurance products, and integrate with partners to distribute its products via a range of digital platforms like insurance marketplace Blueprint Income. This allows the company to reach new customers.

In this new climate of changing technology, Pacific Life realizes the importance of learning through innovation. Recognizing that employee buy-in would be vital for the success of Salesforce’s solution, the organization ran an internal campaign to encourage employees to embrace the new technology. This is aligned with its overall strategy of embracing new ways of working and new technologies.

“Providing value to the customer is vital, both at the point of the initial sale and over a customer’s lifetime,” says Griggs. “We believe exceeding customer expectations by understanding, anticipating, and fulfilling their needs through tailored offerings is key to our success.”