Creating an omnichannel at Guardian: Dean Del Vecchio

July 11, 2023 6:38 AM

Guardian Hudson Yards NY HQ — Guardian's headquarters are at 10 Hudson Yards in New York. The complex is pictured here.

Dean Del Vecchio, chief information and operations officer at Guardian since 2013, focuses on seamless experiences for policyholders.

One such seamless aspect is keeping information consistent and synced for policyholders, whether they're being serviced by phone or online, even if they switch between those midway through a transaction. Another seamless experience Guardian launched in April, SafeGuard 360, ties together life, long-term care and disability coverages.

Digital Insurance spoke to Del Vecchio about how Guardian envisions its technology operations, its views on using GenAI and how it decides whether to outsource operational functions.

What's your strategic technology vision for Guardian?

It's taking much more of a consumer-centered approach these days. Over the past few years, we've been modernizing our platforms. We were on that journey quite a while ago and moved to cloud back in 2018. It's all about the customer, creating digital capabilities across all the channels that they would want to interact with us on. We've been building a multi channel experience, meaning if you want to use your phone, your mobile device or the web or a chatbot, all of those capabilities exist today.

Dean_Del_Vecchio_Guardian Life.jpg — Dean Del Vecchio, chief information and operations officer at Guardian.

Omnichannel is the next step. What I mean by that is, if you started to engage with us on your phone, and then got disrupted and then you were at your desktop and you started engaging through our website, it is a seamless pickup right from where you left off. Then if you call our contact center and speak to one of our agents, they know you were just on your mobile or on the website, they can pick up right where you left off and not have you go through the inconvenience of sharing all your information or the five steps that you already went through, twice.

We're getting to that true omni-channel experience and enabling the consumers to interact with us where, when and how they want, when it's convenient for them, at the time of day, or the day of week that they want to interact with us, and then make it easy when they do need to speak to an individual that they have that option as well.

We're no longer competing with your last insurance and engagement experience. We're competing with your last digital experience. The bar has been raised and the expectations by consumers have been raised dramatically over the last few years, especially during COVID, that they're expecting a lot more from a digital capability or just an overall experience capability.

What are the most important technology elements for these experiences?

From a user experience, having a really simple, easy to use, mobile experience is for starters. We've taken a mobile-first approach. As we create capabilities or functions or features, it has to work on a mobile device. That's how everybody interacts today. So we're there.

We've implemented deterministic AI as opposed to generative AI, such as ChatGPT. They can have a chat with a chatbot, but a natural language type experience. Behind the scenes, it can support claim requests, eligibility benefits and actually interact in more of a natural chat capability both through a chat experience through a computer or through voice interactions.

It's a full-fledged digital capability using technologies like AI, automation and machine learning, as well as mobile experiences. Making it so that's the channel of choice.

What’s good about GenAI? What aspects of it do you want to put in place?

ChatGPT has opened up everybody's view of what this could do for any industry. There's a lot of use cases that we're looking at. Our industry has a very complex language model. The policies are very complex. The products we sell are complex. We've embarked on a simple language approach to simplify the language of the policies. Some of it has to be done in a legal language.

However, could we use a ChatGPT-like model to go through and reword or revamp all of these so it can be much simpler for people to understand? Maybe during the purchase process or even after that, on how do they utilize the benefits that they just purchased?

Our contact center agents leverage knowledge management databases. They go to the knowledge database and they say, Okay, we've seen this before. How would we solve for that? You can have a ChatGPT sitting like a sidecar going through that knowledge database and searching through that for the agent. It could whisper the next best course of action or next best solution to provide and speed up that first contact resolution.

We would make sure that if it's going to produce a next best action, that somebody qualified can validate that as a next best action, and then put that model into production. We put all kinds of controls and guardrails that a controlled environment would need from a regulatory perspective before we introduce any of the models.

How has Safeguard 360 improved operations at Guardian?

The product provides holistic bundling of products, creating an environment where they can leverage the same form and not have to get underwritten separately for all three products.

The hardest thing to get underwritten for is on the disability side from the amount of information and all the things that you need. Allowing us to write multiple products off of one set of data, as opposed to in the past, this is all now bundled together as one single, seamless engagement with the consumer to have one interaction as opposed to three. It's reusing one set of information across multiple products, and simplifying the whole onboarding process.

What are your criteria for using a third party for a particular function?

If we think it's unique or differentiating for us, we do it internally to keep the secret sauce. If it's non differentiating, and we think it's a commodity, like the cloud, we decided to go with AWS.

The analysis is whether to spend time doing racking and stacking, building data centers and worrying about power consumption and disaster recovery, having fuel available in the event of a hurricane. Or do I want our people focused on providing the best digital experience or consumer experience products out in the market. We decided to spend the development team and technologists' time on wowing our consumers. Managing the best data center in the world is not going to differentiate us from another company.

What's the most challenging aspect when it comes to data or risk or both?

Probably almost every CIO would say cybersecurity is an area that's just a constant race. Fortunately, we feel like we have a really good program in place. We just got recognized for it as being the number 16 on the [Forbes America's Most Cybersecure Companies] list of top 200 secure companies. This was a nice acknowledgement of the work, the process, the policies and the effort that we put in day in and day out, to protect our colleagues and our customers' assets.