David Whitehead:
From a distribution standpoint, had we not implemented the new distribution management and policy administration platform, we could not be working with the institutions and the advisors that we currently are working with. It opened up a lot of additional opportunities so that we could support their needs as far as and support the changing regulations of the financial advice industry.
Olivier Lafontaine:
I'm Olivier Lafontaine and this is Life Accelerated, the podcast for life insurance leaders focused on driving meaningful change through technology, process and partnership. In this conversation from Reliance Standard Life, I'm joined by David Whitehead, Senior Vice President of Retirement Services Sales and Marketing, and Kyle Ryan, Vice President of Retirement Services Operations at Reliance Standard Life. Together, they've helped steer the company through a major modernization effort that reshape how business is done across the enterprise. We explore how Reliance Standard Life transforms policy administration systems, streamlines distribution management, and welcomes new technologies. David and Kyle both share the lessons they've learned from guiding a multi-year core conversion, building a culture that balances speed with stability and using lean empowered teams to keep progress moving. They also discussed the role of AI in customer care, the importance of a strong data foundation, and how to align digital initiatives with the company brand at large. Let's get right into it. Okay, so good afternoon, Kyle and David. Welcome to the show. We're going to get started right away. Why don't we start with a little bit of background from both of you? Let's say we start with you, Kyle.
Kyle Ryan:
Kyle Ryan. I'm Vice President of Operations here at Reliance Standard Life. I run the back office for everything from new business agency licensing, policy admin and our call center. We work closely with the sales group. I've been with Reliance Standard for about eight years now. Prior to Reliance Standard, I spent the bulk of my career in the consulting world with PricewaterhouseCoopers and Ernst & Young doing some system implementation work, technology assessments, et cetera, which ended up leading me to Reliance Standard as they were embarking on their policy admin journey and digital transformation.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Good, and I heard, I think in our preparation, that you in your free time do a little bit of triathlon and golf and skiing, but triathlon in particular, I'm curious about given that you do policy administration, that it seems to me like it's somewhat related in a certain weird way.
Kyle Ryan:
Certainly would've call myself a triathlete, but as a bucket list sort of item, I grew up a swimmer and kind of always heard from folks that did it that the swimming's the hardest part, so I figured if I had the hardest part down, I could figure out the rest. That's a fun way to stay in shape and certainly a fun experience. I think golf and skiing are probably higher on the list at this point with young kids running around trying to get them involved in those hobbies as well.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Yeah, playing golf with the kids is a little easier than convincing them to go running and swimming, I suppose. Right? Maybe swimming.
Kyle Ryan:
Yes.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Swimming's okay. So Dave, you're Senior Vice President of Retirement Services Sales and Marketing. So you want to talk a little bit about your background?
David Whitehead:
Yeah, so I've been with Reliance Standard for a long time. I initially joined the company as a group benefits wholesaler and then in the mid nineties I pioneered our company's retail annuity marketing initiative and I've been leading the annuity distribution since that time, currently leading our efforts to support our distribution relationships and set the strategic direction for our distribution. And I've been working with the annuities over the last three decades in RSL and enjoyed that immensely.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Good stuff. And any triathlon for you or running or what about?
David Whitehead:
I swam competitively when I was younger. I swam in college and was a Division Two All-American and swimming teaches you a lot of resilience when you're in a swimming pool going up and down a black line for a couple hours a day. So I continued my swimming. I've done a number of open water swims. The two biggest events that I did, I joined a couple of my college teammates in the Tampa Bay Marathon Swim, which is a 24 mile swim from the opening of Tampa Bay all the way up the bay and as part of a relay. Then individually I swam the great Chesapeake Bay swim that's about a four and a half mile swim, and I did that in approximately one hour and 55 minutes. That was about a decade ago, so it's been a while. The last open water swim I did was about two years ago in South Jersey. That was about a mile and a half and that took me about 45 minutes. So it's good. It keeps me, it sets a goal and it makes me focus on the training that you need to do to perform in those events.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Well that's good. And I can't say I can swim more in probably I want say 10 minutes, but I'm very impressed. You guys are very resilient. So I think that do translates a little bit, I'm sure in the career and in setting your goal and things like that. So anyways, if we move on to business a little bit more, let's talk about your company for a minute and tell me a little bit of the history. I don't know who's best to start with that.
David Whitehead:
Since I've been with the company longer, I think I'd be best to do that. Reliance Standard was founded in 1907 as Central Standard Life Insurance Company domiciled in Illinois. In the sixties, that company was acquired by Reliance Insurance Group and the administrative offices were moved to Philadelphia and the name was changed to Reliance Standard Life. And then in the mid eighties we were acquired by a company that ultimately went public and the main catalyst for our growth was the acquisition in 2012 by Tokio Marine Group and Tokio Marine Group as one of the largest, if not the largest P&C carrier in Japan. And they were looking to expand internationally and we fit their profile. More recently, we have organized ourselves in the two main business units, our group benefits business segment and the retirement services business segment and retirement services comprises annuity distribution operations and our investment services group, we've grown significantly. I think Tokio Marine acquired us in 2012 maybe. We had 5 billion of assets and at midyear this year, I think we were over 28 billion in assets. So we've grown fivefold. So that really was the significant change over the last decade or so that put us where we are.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Would you say that Tokio Marine changed the way the company operated? Did it push marketing or certain aspects of the business more than others?
David Whitehead:
Yes, I believe it has. Prior to the acquisition by Tokio Marine, we had an A rating from AM Best. Our bonds were split rated. I think Standard and Poor's had them investment grade, Moody's had them non-investment grade, and when Tokio Marine acquired us, they provided us with significantly more capital at a much lower cost and that we are now a double plus rated by AM Best. We've got an A1 from Moody's and A plus from Standard and Poor's. So the acquisition with Tokio Marine has increased our financial strength and stability and has allowed us to continue to expand on both the group benefits side as well as the retirement services side.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Good. And what would you say, what's the mission, let's say of the company? What would you say are the main things that the company is trying to do?
David Whitehead:
We're trying to serve the current and future retirees who are looking for safe and conservative options for their funds. Not everybody wants to be a hundred percent exposed to the S and P 500 when 40% of the exposure is in seven stocks. And our parent company, which is Delphi Financial Group, has expertise in asset management, especially in the fixed income sector. And that is very complimentary to our annuity business, which is a spread based business where we receive deposits from our customers and take that money and invest it institutionally and try to earn a higher yield than what we're paying out to our customers.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Okay, good. And if we switch to Kyle, let's say we move on a little bit more to what we typically talk about on this podcast, which is the modernization journey, digital transformation investment and technology to improve outcomes per customers. So if we were to switch over to what modernization means for Reliance Standard, how do you see this, Kyle?
Kyle Ryan:
So back in 2016, 2017, I came on board to help with some of the change management and help with the end user training so that when users got up onto the system day one, they were ready to go. And within that you kind of embed some, you do a little bit of train to trainer, and so you have subject matter experts in there to help users adopt the system and really get to know it so that they can get up to speed as quickly as possible. So during that time 2017 timeframe, we were on what was called LeverEdge PolicyLink for quite a while, and the workflow associated with that was mostly manual, a lot of stacks of paper. I think there was a drawer full of stickers that you'd use to label cases. So that's how case numbers got assigned. So when I first started, and from a modernization perspective, it was really just digitizing the workflow day one, kind of getting everything into one admin system, try to get everything down to one screen, a couple of tabs, and then try to get all of the tasks and workflow and things like that all onto the admin system.
So our modernization journey really started with how do we get from multiple tabs, multiple screens, stacks of paper, moving from one side of the desk, a to-do bucket to a done bucket, and getting that all into an admin system so that we could be more web-based. So that really set the foundation for the future modernization. So having that core admin system in place, having a user group that was confident using the tool, optimized on the tool was really the focus for the first couple of years. In parallel to that, we started our conversion journey in 2018 as well on getting off of the legacy system onto one admin system really helped for multiple reasons, one so that we could sunset the legacy system and reduce that cost. Two, we could stop the user group at that point it was split between multiple systems. So we were able to, once conversion was complete, get users all into one system, which helped just from a user experience perspective, employee satisfaction, and then from an onboarding experience, trying to onboard and train folks on multiple systems is inefficient to say the least. So...
Olivier Lafontaine:
Let me understand it again. So the first part you did is the workflow piece, like task management only. Did I get that right?
Kyle Ryan:
Yeah, so when we went live we had a new business and policy administration up and running, but I think the big win from a modernization perspective outside of the UI was getting that workflow from paper and manual stacks of paper into a digital workflow.
Olivier Lafontaine:
And that was part of the policy admin that was part of the platform. Did you purchase a new system or was that something? Okay.
Kyle Ryan:
Yeah, so when we brought in the new admin system, the workflow was built into that tool.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Okay. And you had to migrate then. How many legacy systems did you have then at that point?
Kyle Ryan:
I think it was just the one, right Dave?
David Whitehead:
I mean we had the one legacy policy administration system, we had other electronic software packages that we use to support different aspects of the business, but it was really only one legacy system for policy administration. And I might add Kyle, I think one of the other things that we worked on with the new system was integrations with both external and internal systems, which we may cover later on, but I think that was a big lift and we also used the system to handle distribution management. I don't know if we're going to get into that later, but I think that was a big lift as well in that it enabled us to manage our sales hierarchies more effectively.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Did you see an impact then, Dave, from your perspective? How did that impact the distribution channels? Were you able to note what was the outcome of that?
David Whitehead:
I think the outcome of that is that it made it easier to work with the sales hierarchy. As sales hierarchies were moving from one organization to another in the old system, we would have to code somebody completely new to add them to a new sales hierarchy. With the current system, we just transfer the agent from point A to point B, so it's a lot less keystrokes, a lot less data entry. And when we looked at the new admin platform, the new DM platform, we did a significant volume of cost-benefit analysis, but there were some productivity enhancements that we couldn't have even imagined.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Is distribution management or was that included in the system that you bought? Is that what... It was all part of the policy admin and that's what modernized it?
David Whitehead:
It was resident in the system. We had to do a lot of configuration and development.
Olivier Lafontaine:
As part of that, how long did that take? You said that you started this, did I get this right? You started in 18 or when this transformation start?
Kyle Ryan:
So it started before I joined RSL, but the rough timeline is I think vendor selection around 2014 started the implementation in 2015, went live in February of 2017, and then we were able to complete conversion in August of 2018. So it was a few years to go through selection, go through the foundational configuration and development phases. And then once we went live, it was about 18 months to get conversion done, which I think all things considered was a major win in new world of conversion. This can be painful versus relatively a lot of work but relatively smooth.
Olivier Lafontaine:
It's a little easier I think if it's one system. Some companies try to migrate from several different systems. Nevertheless, this is a really impressive timeline to be honest. So congratulations to you guys for achieving that. And at the end of the day, so did you include, you mentioned I think the agent portals, was there a portal type or a digital interface to the advisors or to the agent or to the broker, I dunno how you call them to dealers? Is that part of the program as well or was that separate or how did that work out in the end?
David Whitehead:
We did have a web portal that our agents could log onto and get information regarding new business and so on. But one of the decisions that we had to make when we were implementing the system was how do we develop commission statements? And the initial thought was we would send paper out, but knowing that over the course of the last couple years leading up to 2017, we had gotten numerous requests to fax commission statements to email commission statements. So I made the decision, I said, we're not going to send paper statements out anymore. They're going to be available on the web portal. So we would develop one set of commission statements and agents would have to go on the web portal to access them. When we implemented that system for new business, we stopped mailing commission statements out in February of 2017. When people would inquire, we would send an email or a marketing piece saying, Hey, this is how you log online.
And we didn't have to generate paper statements. And subsequently when COVID hit, we didn't have problems with the mail room. So it was those types of things that you really can't envision as you're working through the process, but as attack each objective. And our goal was pretty focused in getting live with new business first. Before we even thought about the conversion. I mean we certainly considered factors related to the conversion and that was our ultimate goal, but our goal was to go live on new business and we didn't spend an inordinate amount of time on conversion until once we went live with new business and our environment was stable, our production environment was stable.
Kyle Ryan:
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I think you covered it there. I mean part of the conversion experience as well is with the new business up and running, there's certain admin tasks that need to be in there for day one. There are certain other things around like annuitization for example, that could kind of wait for a day two, but that was required for conversion. So post go live, it's get stable, clean up some bugs, and then make sure you're building out the transaction types. You'll need to support that legacy block of business once you're ready for conversion.
David Whitehead:
And then another thing I might add is we are fully integrated with the DTCC and a lot of the development centered around generating outbound DTCC files as well as ingesting inbound application, subsequent payment files.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Obviously a lot of work as well. You'll need to test a lot to make sure that all of that is working well. So let me explore that a little bit more. So you say you had a day one as many companies as opposed, did you do a day one, try to get out with the things that were critical and then the nice to have do it in day two? Is that how you approach that?
Kyle Ryan:
For the policy admin side of things, we used to have kind of the lightning round of prioritization we would call it. You pull up the whole backlog and every day it got larger and larger. But effectively we just had a day one, what we need to issue a contract and any sort of transaction that could happen basically in the first month includes claims. And then day two were those transaction types to support conversion as well as some things to help optimize the user experience. Once we had gotten a little bit of experience, had been in there for a little while, kind of realize that, hey, we need this data field or we need this button here to help execute some things. So there's that post go live prioritization that happens. I want to say we were looking at prioritization basically weekly when we had daily standups for probably far longer than we needed to, but for quite a while we had daily standups triaging production issues and things like that. But we operated off a day one and a day two list.
Olivier Lafontaine:
And I've done a number of policy admin projects myself and I always feel like, I mean that's a pattern that we used a lot. I want to ask, did you face any challenges with the business colleagues, the operations colleagues, and how to manage the policy in day one versus day two or that went out pretty well in the end that the team knew why we were doing this or knew why you were doing this, approaching it that way? Was there a little bit of challenges there and trying to distinguish, oh, is this day one or is this really needed for day one or can we wait for day two? Did you get into those types of conversations at all?
Kyle Ryan:
Yeah, so I think Dave and I can both have a comment on this. So we had a pretty small leadership group focused on prioritization. And for day one, I think there was, and I could be wrong, but I think there's a bit of fatigue that happens with the long transformation. But I think to Dave's credit, we really focused on what do we need to issue a contract and what's going to happen in the first month and let's get into production. We didn't focus on some of the nice to haves and we really focused on just what we need MVP to get into production and we had a small committee of decision makers, so we didn't really get too tied up in any sort of bureaucracy or too many chefs in the kitchen. We had a small group of decision makers and we made them fast.
David Whitehead:
I would just reiterate that I thought that having a very small group of decision makers making intelligent decisions, if we hadn't gone live might we have pulled the plug on the resources at some point and said, this is kind of an open project that's never going to get finished. So we realized that we had to get live and we had to get live by February of 2017. So we worked toward that goal and did we go live with a couple of things we knew? I think we always, when we found an error or an issue, one of the things we always talked about was how do we recover? Okay, how do you recover if something happens? And we would have those discussions if there was something that might happen once in every 500 transactions, how would we recover from that if that happened before we got around to it? So I thought that was very important in trying to address some of the less urgent priorities.
Olivier Lafontaine:
I usually like to ask what are the lessons learned or recommendations you would make to other executives that want to do a modernization like this? But I'm guessing this is part of it, right? The small committee for decisions. And then I love the advice of, correct me if I'm wrong, I think you're saying preparing for what happens if things go wrong in production, so to speak, and how would you recover from that? Those sound like two really good pieces of advice. Anything else you would say that was important?
David Whitehead:
I think empowering a small group to make decisions. Then I also think you certainly do need to have participation. There were afternoons when I would walk up to the new business department and say, Hey, how do you do this? Just to kind of gather the current state before we would go into a development meeting and try to figure out how do we eliminate keystrokes, how do we make it more efficient and not how do we incrementally approve, but how do we transform that process?
Olivier Lafontaine:
In terms of, so you mentioned Kyle, a bit of transformation fatigue or project fatigue. Did you have any tricks on how to deal with that or how did you approach that as takes a long time? And so how did you approach that then? How did the company?
Kyle Ryan:
It's one of those things that if you sit down, you might not be able to get back up, so you just keep running. But the one thing I talk to my team a lot about is hitting singles. It's one of my favorite things to do is just getting those quick small wins, small victories. So we did focus a lot on that and in those early days you do need to be listening to the users because you may be thinking of things more at the macro level and maybe not quite in the weeds on how to do a certain task. So something might get missed, but just sitting with the team kind of hearing their pain points or Hey, you guys might not have thought about this, but we need X to complete our task. So get that into the development, get it prioritized and get that win. So then the team, they feel they're part of the process as well. So it's certainly engaging the team, making decisions quickly and getting those quick wins because it's many, many years. I mean you could still say we're in transformation mode 10 years later, the industry continues to grow. So I really focus on those small quick wins that hopefully helped build up to the bigger wins.
Olivier Lafontaine:
And I think that goes back to what Dave was saying also, like you said it Dave perhaps, and you say, we're going to have to do something for that date. And at least you can say, okay, we have a W here for the team and we can get going for another couple years. As you said, sometimes it feels like it never actually ends, right?
David Whitehead:
So we've been regularly enhancing the system and there will be times where we go live with an enhancement, but one piece of the enhancement maybe didn't get finished or tested properly, so we'll go live with it because it's not impacting anything else. And then we'll continue to work on that instead of delaying the production date, right? Because then if you delay the production date, then all this other stuff gets brought in.
Kyle Ryan:
You get scope creep real quick. If you move that marker too much new priorities start to pop in, oh, we have an extra few weeks, lemme get this done.
Olivier Lafontaine:
If you leave enough blank space, then it will get filled very quickly. That's a very good point. Alright, that's great input. And what about if we switch gears a little bit and talk about, obviously you've heard about AI and GenAI and all of that, and I am sure you have meetings also to talk about what do we do? Are we doing something, when is the right time to do something? What's the general mood, let's say at Reliance Standard around AI? Or is it something that you're deeply involved in or monitoring a little bit more to see what it's going to mean or where do you stand at the moment?
Kyle Ryan:
So as far as AI goes, I still see it as it's in the hype cycle. I went to a conference last year and I think it felt like there were 1500 AI companies there. So there's an overwhelming amount of content and literature out there around AI. So from where I sit and in the operational area, and you talk about AI being able to handle transactions for you and things like that, there's a couple of things I'm looking at. One, is there one solution that's going to come in and help me from top to bottom to be able to do everything? I think the answer is no there. And then two is which platforms are we looking at? Are they being smart about AI and are they embedding it within their workflow so that as we onboard new packages or are we upgrade our admin systems or look at different tools?
What's their usage of AI and how are they embedding it? So letting them bring those solutions to us versus trying bringing a solution and trying to find a problem for it. You know what I mean? So it was still sitting back a little bit. We do have some internal users using an AI search tool. So what we're doing there, we piloted it, we are piloting it for our customer care team. And what the team did is they took in all of our standard operating procedures, all of our training documents, contracts and our application, things like that. Basically anything that would be a source of information for a question they might get asked. So the team is able to use it now, and at first it was a little slow in, the response was a little hard to implement it to a live call, but they have improved the performance there and the call reps are able to search within that. If there's specific questions they're not sure about, get the answer back, get a link to the document to help facilitate a call. So I think we're early stages there, and I know Salesforce and others have different tools that they're embedding within call centers because that seems to be the popular use case within an operation. So we are piloting it internally and we're also working with vendors to understand how they plan to embed it within their offerings to help us.
Olivier Lafontaine:
And Salesforce is things like sentiment analysis, and I think that's one of the use cases that I hear in insurance companies, which is exciting. So you can tell a little bit in advance whether this customer is a bit frazzled coming into the call or is feeling very happy about their products and things of that helps the customer support, customer service perhaps, or a more appropriate tone for the situation perhaps. Good. That's exciting.
Kyle Ryan:
One other comment on that, and I think from a data perspective, we have some work to do there to bring our data into a singular data lake or database so that we have all of the data there for a 360 view of the customer. And I think that's where a lot of folks are struggling when they go to execute on an AI-related initiative. Once you get into the weeds, the devil's in the details and you realize the data is not quite as structured or it's not, it's kind of all over the place that it kind of reduces the efficacy of the AI solution.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Yeah, so true. And so do you have some projects around that? What stage would you say your, I'm going to call it beta readiness. Are you in analysis and thinking of ways to do it? Do you have some projects going on to pull all the data into lakes and use vendor technology? There's lots of vendors. Some of the vendors are actually just about consolidating the data. Anything at the moment or you're more in analysis phase at this point?
Kyle Ryan:
We went through a data transformation a few years ago, primarily focused on our admin data. So that data has been moved and migrated to a lake. So we do have an enterprise data warehouse there. We are missing pieces of that data within the call center, so our service tickets, our call data and things like that are not included in the lake. So that we are in discussions now to move that over so that we can kind of get that full view of the customer because it's one of the struggles we have is if someone calls in, we aren't able to pull up recent transactions or pending transactions or prior tickets and things like that may help us with understanding why they're calling can lead to an okay customer experience. And so we are focused on that kind of going into the next year or so.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Okay. And maybe if I shift to Dave, how do you feel about maybe more of the market perspective around this, the shift to AI? What does it mean from a financial guidance perspective perhaps? What do you think is going to happen there?
David Whitehead:
Well, from a financial advice standpoint, both FINRA and the SEC have been reluctant to AI and the banks and the broker-dealers and the institutional distribution and even independent agents are somewhat reluctant to lead on any significant different process. So I think you really need a disruptor to come in and to create a better mousetrap so that then all the broker-dealers and all the banks and wealth and financial advice and wealth management firms need to implement some of that process. Most of what I've seen from our distribution partners is really kind of peripheral meeting prep, putting outlines together, scheduling, that type of thing. I think from a financial advice standpoint, you still need a human handling. The collaboration, certainly you can augment their processes through the use of AI, whether it's summarizing meetings, providing more concise outlines for customers or communications for customers. So I really think that unless until FINRA and the SEC change their tone or a disruptor comes along, I think it's going to be a little bit slow.
Olivier Lafontaine:
On the side. And perhaps customers, what about customers seeking? I mean, you can't really prevent them from going online and searching for stuff. There's probably a place where the very least making sure that the AI models out there have a good opinion of the reliance standard perhaps, and trying to see what happens there.
David Whitehead:
If you segment that market out, I'm not sure you've had robo-advisors and then they captured the small sliver of the market that was comfortable using robo-advisors and then they started actually integrating with people firms. So I think you'll probably see something similar to that play out. So I tend to agree with you, although I think it will be incremental change in the distribution of financial advice.
Olivier Lafontaine:
That makes sense in our preparation. So we talked a little bit about technology and your brand promise, so how does that translate for you, the Reliance Standard brand and technology?
Kyle Ryan:
Yeah, so I think since we've spoken, there's been a lot more momentum around digital-first initiatives. And that's one thing that we're focused on in partnering with the right vendor to help us from an integration perspective. So from an operations and technology perspective, I think being strong integrators is going to be critical because it basically will enable that experience for the advisor or the bank or the broker-dealer to be able to engage with us how they need to. And it's pointing towards we need to be able to handle the front end, get the data to you and not worry about printing out PDFs and mailing them or faxing them or anything like that. So the customer acquisition side of it I think is ahead of the post issue transactions as far as APIs and integrations go. But I do see a shift in the focus now to some more of that post issue transaction. So as far as the brand goes, yeah, so we are focused on integrations being a strong integrator so that we can meet the customers where they are, whether that's the agent, the broker-dealer or the bank or the policyholder themselves.
David Whitehead:
Net. I think we want our operations and our digital experience to rival our superior financial strength ratings to complement them so that it's an entire package of superior financial strengths, good digital experience, and excellent operational experience.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Excellent. And if we were to give closing comments for, or advice for your peers in the market, what would you say any final word on things that you wouldn't want people to take away from your experience with the modernization that we talked about earlier or what you're seeing in the market and your experience managing or navigating through these interesting times where things are changing pretty quickly? Maybe if we start with you, Dave, on that.
David Whitehead:
From a distribution standpoint, had we not implemented the new admin and distribution management and policy administration platform, we could not be working with the institutions and the advisors that we currently are working with. It opened up a lot of additional opportunities so that we could support their needs as far as and support the changing regulations of the financial advice industry. And I think if we still had the old system, I think we would probably, if we were still in the business, we would be writing probably 10% of what we're writing now.
Olivier Lafontaine:
That's good. Kyle, about implementing it or running it? Any final word, final advice?
Kyle Ryan:
We touched on some of it earlier, but I think as you're getting ready to approach it, there's a couple of different ways, and obviously it depends on your budget, but bringing some of your stronger resources into the project team, your subject matter advisors, experts, get them embedded in the team so that they can focus on putting together that best product for their peers. But in planning for that, you need to start backfilling for those resources if you need someone in production. So really get those strong team leaders embedded into the project early on to help with the product. I think focusing on your internal users as well. Obviously the external customer experience is top of mind, but if you focus on the internal user experience, your individual contributors, your managers, and making sure you're putting that product together in such a way that they can do their job as effectively and efficiently as possible, will that'll translate to a much better customer experience at the end of the day.
And lastly, as you modernize, as we've gotten further along in this, and we've talked about these integrations, those integrations bring tremendous efficiency and we've been kind of looking at it from the perspective of really deploying the technology to the process and then deploying your people to the customer so that some of those more mundane things, data entry, things like that, are now all handled via integrations and data extraction and things like that. So the folks can be kind of the frontline for working with your customers, your agents, et cetera, and helping them have an improved experience.
Olivier Lafontaine:
Thank you, gentlemen, it was a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for your time. Anything else you want to add?
David Whitehead:
No, I appreciate the opportunity to have the conversation.
Olivier Lafontaine:
This was great. Yep. David and Kyle shared how Reliance Standard’s transformation has been driven not just by technology, but by discipline and clear decision-making. What stood out to me was the way they kept projects moving forward with small empowered teams, a focus on quick wins and a mindset of continuous improvement from exploring modern technology and integrating distribution management. They demonstrate that modernization succeeds when you balance strong systems with practical leadership and commit to the customer experience. Thank you so much for listening.
