Created with Customers in Mind

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Pat:
You can have the best CX program design on paper, but ultimately it's the people that make great customer experiences happen.

Jenny:
Just because we're a financial company that's been around for almost 150 years, that we know everything and we are the experts on all things financial security, this was truly co-created with customers in mind, and we had a team of people just as passionate as I am sitting here in front of you today saying, we are going to pivot if our customers say this is not a feature that I will use or buy or want to engage with, and we did that.

Pat:
We're taking a look into what makes the CX Team of the Year. On this episode of The CX Leader Podcast.

Announcer:
The CX Leader Podcast with Steve Walker is produced by Walker, an experience management firm that helps our clients accelerate their XM success. You can find out more at walkerinfo.com.

Pat:
Hello everyone, I'm Pat Gibbons, I'm your host today for The CX Leader Podcast and thank you for listening. It's never been a better time to be a CX leader, and we explore the topics and themes to help leaders like you develop great programs and deliver amazing experiences for your customers. You know, managing your money is already a stressful task, and it's sometimes difficult to intentionally think ahead about what happens when we retire. Luckily, there are some very smart people in the world of personal finance who can help us with that aspect of life. But what does the customer experience look like in that field? Well, we've been fortunate to have an opportunity to interview winners of the 2023 US Customer Experience Awards, and the CX Team of the Year just happens to be the experts in financial planning that we're talking to today. Jenny Schmidt is the vice president for strategic initiatives at Prudential Financial, a global financial advisory and planning firm. Prudential's CX program won several awards at the 2023 US Customer Experience Awards, including CX Team of the Year. Jenny, welcome to The CX Leader Podcast.

Jenny:
Thank you Pat. It's so great to be here today.

Pat:
Well, I'm excited to to talk to you today, not only because you guys have won some really great awards, but also because you have a really innovative program that is just even structurally different than the way most of us think about customer experience and how it's traditionally implemented. So yeah, this will this will be a fun discussion, but let's start by learning more about you. Tell us a little bit about your background, the role that you're in, how you got there.

Jenny:
Sure. So I'm currently the vice president of strategic initiatives for our direct to consumer business here at Prudential Financial. But I do have a pretty extensive background that kind of spans different parts of Prudential, from operations to customer experience, and was actually reflecting on how did I really get into customer experience, even though now I'm on more of the traditional business side, and this was back in 2015, 2016, and I was managing a team in our life insurance operations division, and I'd been doing that for a couple of years, and there was this internal opportunity to apply and participate into something called the Life Insurance Innovation Lab. And what I would do is step out of my day job full time. That team would still manage without me. I wasn't losing my job, but I was able to move into this innovation lab for six months, and that was my first experience designing new concepts, new thinking, new product ideas that we could bring to market and create more relevancy for Prudential in the next five, ten, 15 years. We did design thinking. We talked to real people, we did customer interviews, prototyping, testing. We looked at financial business case development. And by the end of that six months, we pitched our cases, which was really exciting, and I just sparked a whole new passion that I didn't even know I had. And I was a little nervous to go back to my regular day job after that. And so around that same time, Prudential was, which I didn't even know, was standing up, their very first dedicated customer experience team at the company and a position opened up. I applied with it just coming out of this lab, knowing this is something I'm actually really passionate about, and I became a strategist within our customer experience organization, and I was in that organization for many years. And then two years ago or three years ago now, I moved into our direct to consumer business, and we really bring the best of kind of both the business distribution meeting customers needs and that customer experience expertise that I find so exciting.

Pat:
That is a great background. You know, it's always interesting to hear how people ended up in CX whether they were kind of assigned to do it or they aspired to it, but I love how it just it lit a passion within you and set you on your way. And your enthusiasm is definitely contagious. So that's wonderful. So these awards – let me let me go down the list and, and then we can talk about them. So first of all you got a bronze award for customers at the heart of everything. You got a silver award for best digital transformation, a gold award for the best CX in financial services, and a gold award for the CX team of the year. Okay, that's pretty impressive. How did you do that and how did you decide to enter? Give us a little bit of background.

Jenny:
So we certainly didn't set out to just win these awards. Our story is a unique one at Prudential. We spent all of 2022 deciding that we wanted to really expand access to financial security and reach millions more people than Prudential has been able to reach before through our more traditional sales distribution channels. Think about, you know, meeting with a financial advisor in person, face to face. That works really well for a lot of people. But, you know, only so many people are going to have the confidence or feel like they have enough money to do that. And we said, you know what? There is this extremely fast growing need for financial advice. There's millions of people out there that are really underserved in the marketplace. How can we create more accessibility? And so born was this idea that we would just build a brand new direct to consumer business, and that means reaching people, starting digitally and giving them more choice to how they might want to work with somebody like a financial professional. And we said, okay, we're going to do this the right way. So we're going to forget our internal expertise and really focus on the people out there and what their needs are. Um, we, you know, ultimately launched. And I need to explain this first to to backtrack for a second. But we ultimately launched Prudential Stages for retirement January of this year.

Jenny:
And this is meant to be a online digital platform to help people navigate through pivotal life stages with more confidence and access to people for advice and solutions if they choose. And our vision is to certainly help people across all of the life stages that we go through. But we first started with a very complex and emotional life stage of retirement, and our research shows, well, that is one of the fastest growing parts of our population today. Um, the Urban Institute think they list something like people reaching ages 65 and older is going to more than double in the next handful of years and reach something like 80 million people by 2040. So this is a dire need now, and it's just going to keep growing over time. So if we're focused on confidence within a life stage, let's really start with retirement. And we said, okay, well what are people worried about in retirement. Let's let's not make these assumptions and we really grounded all of our decisions into our customer research and our design thinking. We talked 90 minute interviews. I'm saying with people in retirement or planning for retirement was actually on the other side of the zoom screen listening into these interviews. And we wanted to know, how do you plan for retirement today? Are you doing Excel spreadsheets at home? Are you bookkeeping? Are you going online? Are you using apps? What companies? But most importantly, what are you most concerned about? What are you most excited about? And didn't really matter if you were in retirement or not. Most people had the same answer, which is A) I don't know if I've done enough, and B) I don't really have a good picture if of what my financial picture looks like.

Jenny:
So I might have a 401 K over here and an IRA and savings and investments. But like, there's not really one place that tells me what this looks like. And therefore I'm just not really sure. And I'm supposed to be looking forward to this moment. I've been working my entire life to reach retirement, and now I'm coming at it with a lot of fear and anxiety. So we said, okay, we need to create an experience grounded in these specific customer challenges and start there and let's, you know, put in a couple prototypes and and see how people react. And if those go well, then we'll actually launch them into market. And that's what we did, leveraging an extremely talented team of people with great expertise, from our product owners and our development team to our experience designers, our UI designers, our journey mapping expertise. So we really made sure that we had the right background across Prudential to come together and focus on solving this specific business problem.

Pat:
Yeah. Wow. Okay. There's a lot there. So we have to unpack some of it. So the product again is Stages, right? And retirement the first stop on it which I think makes sense. All the statistics you mentioned. You know without revealing my age I can tell you that I understand those things that, you know, it is it's an interesting dilemma when just having seen family members go through this, you know, you get to that point and like you say, you've anticipated it. You look forward to it. And the last thing you want is the stress of the unknown. And so obviously a key societal issue, one that is common to a lot of people. So a good place to start. Then, tell me a little bit more about then how you just how you gathered all, all this information and kind of put it all together to really identify those priorities that you wanted to work on.

Jenny:
So we think I mentioned this. We truly acted as a startup venture at Prudential. So we had to build this from scratch. We had to ask for investment along the way, and we had to continue to get buy in in order to go through each of our phases and actually launch into market. And think that was really smart, because who wants to invest potentially millions of dollars into developing something that will fall flat and not be successful into market? And so we really divided into three main phases. And the first phase was really all about what we call discovery. And that's where a core of that customer research started to happen. So we did those interviews. We started to uncover their challenges, really hear what they care most about. And then we brought in our amazing design team to start to say, okay, this is how we could start to solve for that. Leveraging the expertise at Prudential from a technology perspective, a financial solution perspective, how this would hook up into our infrastructure and started to get that ongoing feedback. And then that we paused. We actually met with our venture board. We said, here's what we've learned, here's how much it'll cost to build. Here's our confidence that this is going to meet consumer needs. And what do you say we got the green light. So then we moved into our first phase of development. We developed all of our minimum viable product feature set for our online platform and started to, you know, figure out the pipes to the operation side of this as well. And we said, you know, we're ready to kind of get our first, you know, alpha experience into market. And so we did some more testing and that came back very positive.

Jenny:
We paused. We went back to our board and said, all right, you know, we think we're on to something here, but we want to do one more check in and release that last round of funding. We need to finalize our development and actually launch live into market. And so we were able to make our business case again. And so all of that really led to a very thoughtful and phased approach to building Prudential Stages. And, you know, I think one of the reasons why we won CX team of the year is because we really approach this so differently with such a wide variety of expertise to do this the right way and to let go of the reins, that just because we're a financial company that's been around for almost 150 years, that we know everything and we are the experts on all things financial security. This was truly co-created with customers in mind. And we had, you know, a team of people just as passionate as I am sitting here in front of you today saying, you know, we want to we are going to pivot if our customers say, this is not a feature that I will use or buy or want to engage with. And we did that all throughout the process, and we were able to actually showcase those examples to our venture board to say, here's how we're evolving what we originally thought, because our people are telling us, you know, that's not something I would use. Let's do it differently. And so it's just that constant diligence around putting the customer at everything that I think is why we're now where we are today.

Pat:
Yeah. So, well, tell us a little more of where are you today? Because it the solution is launched. Right? And tell us when it launched and how that went and, and I'd be interested if you're, you know, you don't have to share any trade secrets or anything. But if you had bumps along the road, how did you address them?

Jenny:
So we launched officially nationwide in January of this year. And what, you know, the experience is really simple. You can come to prudentialstages.com. And the first step is actually you have to sign up as a customer. It's completely free. But we do need a, you know, you to register your email and a password. And then after that you're going to answer a handful of questions. And that's really to help us understand where are you in this retirement journey? Are you already retired? Are you five years out, ten years out? It doesn't matter. You know where you are, but we need a better picture of who you are and what you care about. We're also going to collect some financial information about you, so we can help to start to pull a better holistic picture of your situation together. And after you go through what we call that customer onboarding experience, we're going to return back to you your personalized retirement confidence score. Now, this was a feature that truly came out of the research because not only did people say, have I done enough, how do I know? But they said, I think that there's a lot of different aspects of this that I really, you know, care most about. So this confidence score is something that helps people benchmark where they are. And we built it completely from scratch. We even had it validated by a third party that was completely unbiased to Prudential. There was no payment for that review. It was just to make sure that we're really grounded in putting the best interests of people as we build this methodology, and a lot of our competitors out there can give you a monte Carlo analysis around how much assets you've accumulated to expenses that you project over time.

Jenny:
We're not doing that. This is a much more robust confidence score. And it's measuring your. Um financial stability as well as your non financial stability. So we ask things like do you have a will? Do you have a power of attorney set up? Do you have a trust in mind? Have you named your beneficiaries? What are all of those things that you might be too busy for or is on your to do list? And we're telling you, if you haven't done these things, then you're not as prepared as you might feel like you are. And we give you an overall score. And we also break down each of those key drivers for you. And so you really know where you're feeling really strong and where you have some room to improve. And a lot of that was set up based on our research to give people access at their fingertips. A lot of people are like, I'm a DIYer. I want to go online. I want to play around, you know, don't be a salesy, you know, company at me. Um, but people, retirement is very complex and emotional like we've been talking about. And people are like, I want to go deeper with somebody that actually is an expert in this field. And so they can schedule time with our team of virtual advisors who are all around the company, kind of on demand to be there for you and can go even deeper in your areas of concern.

Pat:
Yeah.

Pat:
So you launch, you get things going, you start having activity. What what were some surprises or things that either maybe it didn't operate the way you wanted, or maybe it operated better than you thought. What did you come across?

Jenny:
I would say we are obsessively looking at our data every single day, every single week. We come together as a team to actually run through the financials end to end, which is really exciting all the way from marketing through our digital experience down to our sales numbers. And, you know, we really try to set expectations at the company level to say we're a brand new business. We have a lot of confidence that this will work and scale over time. But, you know, we want to be focused on really what we call our top of funnel activity first and say, are we even attracting people to our experience? Are they coming? Are they signing up? Are they getting their confidence scores? And what was really surprising is not only were people coming, but we started to hit our sales targets earlier in the year than we even projected because people were actually wanting to talk to our advisors, and that was leading to them, you know, recommending certain solutions to meet their needs. And I think it just really shows, you know, two things in our data that was really interesting. One of all the people that have come worked with our advisors and actually purchased something, 83% of those are brand new customers to Prudential. Never worked with us before.

Pat:
Yeah.

Jenny:
And two, 80% of them are in the massive middle market segment. So we actually are attracting people that we expected to attract. So I think from an unexpected thing that was certainly unexpected for us, that it actually was resonating. And then from things that, you know, weren't going so well or some bumps in the road, we have some interesting and kind of funny stories about things like around our registration that we we had one assumption and the data told us something completely different, and we built a whole A/B test and ran that into market. So, I mean, it's just been a really fun experience to actually tweak the, you know, the front door, so to speak, and actually see how that impacts the bottom line.

Pat:
Yeah. Now and your team, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your team. But at Prudential, they have a corporate CX team that many of our listeners would be familiar with. In a big company, you've got a center of excellence, but you're separate from that. And and I would say that your team, while it's got a lot of CX and UX type people on it, it's not kind of the traditional setup. So tell us a little bit about your team and how it fits into the corporation.

Jenny:
Yeah, I love that question. So yeah, we we have a dedicated customer experience team at Prudential and that's made up of of different areas of expertise like design experience, journey mapping, customer research. And they really kind of come guess each of our different businesses, we have our dedicated life insurance, business annuities, business investments. We are the distribution side of the business. We would typically tap those teams on an ad need basis like, hey, we kind of want to learn something about X, y, z. And they would kind of lend one of their experts and, you know, maybe do a temporary project for many weeks or months, and then they would go back, um, well, we said, no, we want to do this differently. We want to make sure we're truly keeping the customer at the center of everything we do. What would it look like if we actually embedded those people on our team full time? And that's what we did. So each one of our domains that are managing our digital experience, they have a product owner. They have developers sitting on their team full time. They have a designer sitting on their team, a copywriter, an experience designer, and then we have a journey mapper that kind of floats across depending on what the needs are. So they are fully embedded in the business, which I think is really exciting, and we are collectively looking at the data every single week and actually ideating and iterating that much faster because they're saying, hey, we see drop off in this experience. What if we designed a new way to ask this question differently? Let's test it, come back and then see if the business results change. And that is what is giving us extreme acceleration. Yeah.

Pat:
That's great. And I'm curious, you kind of got your own bit of a laboratory going on in your portion of the world. What's the rest of the company at Prudential think of you guys?

Jenny:
Yeah, it's definitely very different. And I think we're starting to turn some heads in a really good way. Um, we have had to tell our story and explain why Prudential Stages is doing things differently and what we've learned from doing things very differently. And it's been really positive reception across the board. In fact, a lot of other parts of the company are starting to kind of steal some of our best practices or embed resources on their team because they see the value of having customer experience, a part of the business units, you know, more embedded full time. And so, you know, it took a little bit to kind of share out what we're doing. And once people realize, no, this is actually working and there's something to be done here, I think it'll just have a ripple effect at Prudential.

Pat:
So I'm thinking back to the use of data. Obviously it is critical to what you use. Can you give me an example of how in your data meetings and everything, you took a particular piece of data that you were getting and you made a change and it was something that you noticed and made a change and how it unfolded.

Jenny:
I mean we are obsessed with data, and I think that's been a really important muscle that we've been flexing since we've launched this business. And it's not just the leadership that cares about it. I'm talking about the teams who are, you know, tweaking the experience or coming proactively with their ideas because they're looking at the data as well. And so each week we have what we call our metrics call, and we go through how many people are coming, how many steps are they getting through the experience all the way through sales? And one of our product owners said, you know, I'm really noticing specific drop off in a couple areas, but we have a couple of ideas that we think will address and help us get more customer throughput and more conversion. You know, from sign up all the way to getting their confidence score and wanting to work with our advisors. And so they took that back and they came back after a couple of weeks and they said, okay, we are ready to release three changes into the experience. They're small, but we think these three will actually add up together. One of them is relevant to this conversation. We actually started to promote our awards on our initial registration page, to bring more credibility and kind of excitement to the experience, create that trustworthy factor so more people will sign up and then start the onboarding process.

Jenny:
The second one was another very simple one, but they actually reordered some of the onboarding questions to make a little bit more logical sense for the flow of the questions. And we started to see more people getting through all of the steps with that reordering. And then the third change they made around the same time was actually showcasing part of the confidence score before they get to the very end. So you actually get to unlock pieces of that along the way. We realize not everybody wants to answer ten questions before they get their score. How can we do a higher value exchange throughout the process? These are great ideas. They were all launched and developed in the same time frame. And after I think like five weeks of data, we just looked at this last week. Collectively, we've seen a 10% lift in people from the moment they register, getting all the way through and getting their retirement confidence score.

Pat:
Wow, isn't that amazing? Sometimes it's the little things and the way that your team teased that data out to say, you know, we notice the little hiccups here. What if we try something different and lo and behold, you know, great progress. Well, we have gotten to that portion of the of the podcast where we ask every guest the question we call the take home value question. It's kind of the hallmark of The CX Leader Podcast. We ask for one tip, ideally, something that is very practical and can be put to use right away by any of our listeners. So, Jenny Schmidt, what is your take home value?

Jenny:
All right. My one tip that I've learned through launching stages and watching it in market is. Never assume and test everything and have a story that really backs this up.

Pat:
Oh, let's hear it.

Jenny:
We were a team divided the moment we got into market. As I've explained, the very first step of the process is asking people to sign up as a customer. It's free. There's no you know, you don't have to pay for it, but you do need to create a username and password. Then go through the experience and get your confidence score. You know, we did that for a variety of reasons just to get into market quickly. But we assumed like, that's not what people want. Nobody wants to get to an experience and feel like they need our help, and they're just going to immediately leave because they have to sign up first. And so we had been in market with our original version for a few months, and we said, I think it's really important that we test putting registration at the very end of the experience. So what if customers answered their questions, kind of gave us more of their data, and then right before they see their confidence score, that's when they are asked to create an account. So that was a very big development lift. They basically had to rebuild everything that we just built into market and then run a true A/B test. So we sent 50% of our traffic to our original version A and then 50% to our new version B, and I'm telling you, we were all like, version B is going to be the winner. People want to register last. That's going to definitely increase our quality and conversion. Boy, were we wrong. Not only did our original version of market outperform in every category, but it gave us a 95% confidence in the outcome that the data told us. So it was completely worth testing that assumption. I think you can never just assume just because we think something will work, that people will actually do it that way. And I'm so glad that we took the time to run that type of test. So don't assume and always test.

Pat:
Great advice, great advice, and it certainly worked for you. Jenny, I appreciate you sharing your story and the examples are great. It's really a neat example of a very intentional process that is really focused on the customer. So after hearing all this, I'm not overly shocked that you got such great recognition. So congratulations.

Jenny:
Thank you so much for the opportunity. We're so excited to share our story and hopefully we'll we'll talk again in the future.

Pat:
Great. We would love that. Jenny Schmidt is the vice president for strategic initiatives at Prudential Financial. If you want to talk about anything you heard on this podcast or how Walker can help your business customer experience program, feel free to email us at podcast@walkerinfo.com. Remember to give The CX Leader Podcast a rating through your podcast service and give us a review. Your feedback will help us improve the show and deliver the best possible value to you, our listeners. Check out our website cxleaderpodcast.com. You can subscribe to the show and find all our previous episodes, our podcast series, a link to our blog and contact information so you can let us know how we're doing. The CX Leader Podcast is a production of Walker. We're an experience management firm that helps companies accelerate their XM success, and you can read more about us at walkerinfo.com. Thank you for listening and remember, it's a great time to be a CX leader. We'll see you next time.

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