Merrilee Matchett has been with
As head of global customer service and operations for MetLife, Matchett oversees 10,000 employees — nearly a quarter of the company's staff. In 2022, Matchett's group served 166 million customers, handled 47 million claims transactions and 29 million calls.
Merrilee joined New York-based MetLife in February 2021 to help it restructure and combine its global customer service and operations teams.
"They brought me in to bring that together because we need to align around the customer interactions versus in synthetic silos within the company," Matchett said in an interview. "The customer will call the call center and the call center can either answer their question or they need to go through to operations. They were two completely separate teams."
Now the teams are aligned and customer satisfaction numbers have gone up as a result, she said.
Last year, to improve call handling times, Matchett led meetings with technology and call center teams every week to look at what was impacting average handle time. They came up with ideas to improve training and to rewire technology. They created recognition programs for call center reps who improve their times.
Now her team is looking at further business process re-engineering in the U.S. call centers. For instance, where people are not using self-service, they're figuring out why not and how to drive adoption.
One challenge Matchett has met with is a surge in volume of claims in Japan, due to the pandemic. Matchett quickly added 600 people to the local workforce.
"That was eight months of me on calls with Japan every Tuesday night, which was a very special eight months," she said. "The Covid surge impacted different countries around the world at different times. Last year was a super tough year for Japan, where they had successive waves higher than ever before seen. And that surged to volumes we've never seen before, frankly, in Japan, for Covid claims. And that just came like a tsunami on the whole industry, including MetLife."
Matchett was not able to hire 600 permanent people in the necessary timeframe. She brought in temps, vendors and permanent employees to meet the demand. She also worked with the tech and ops teams in Japan to develop straight-through-processing for Covid claims.
Matchett joined MetLife from Bank of America, where she was responsible for fulfillment and operations for global wealth management, private banking, and institutional and personal retirement businesses supporting more than $3 trillion in client balances. Before that, she spent six years at Westpac Banking Corporation in Australia leading global operations.
At MetLife, Matchett created an online learning initiative through which associates have logged more than 124,000 hours of training.
"We allocated the gift of time to operations and call center staff and we empowered them to choose" what courses to take, she said. "Yes, we all have mandated learning, we all do our fraud detection training and all those types of things, but people don't typically consider that learning. That's just a compulsory part of the technical part of the job. So we left it open to them." As long as reps meet their performance metrics, they can spend as much time on online learning as they like.
Some have taken courses around leading empathy-based conversations, a skill set that relates directly to their jobs. But others have gone farther afield.
"We didn't box it in," Matchett said. "I believe that fosters a lifelong love of learning when you don't make it prescriptive and you get a really good balance coming through."
Some of the courses teach call center reps to code.
"That sort of stuff is fantastic," she said. "Because that ultimately helps build into intellectual curiosity and career pathing outside of the traditional well-walked career paths."
Matchett's favorite course format, launched a few months ago, is what she calls "micro learning" – ten-minute installments.
"It's short and snappy," Matchett said. "It's trying to break down this psychological barrier that learning takes too much time."
Another effort Matchett has made at MetLife is she has championed a $20 minimum hourly wage for all staff. The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists $17.12 cents as the mean hourly wage for business support jobs. MetLife's CEO Michel Khalaf supported the idea of raising the company's minimum wage to $20 per hour.
Matchett has set up virtual best practices for hybrid
"We need to create a consistent drum beat around wellness, because when employees look after themselves, they're able to more effectively care for our customers and everyone around them," she said.
She holds meetings with all U.S. managers.
"The secret source here, it's half an hour, no slides, it's just me talking," Matchett said. She talks for no more than 20 minutes max, then takes questions from the group.
"That has had a disproportionate impact," she said. "No death by PowerPoint and just what's on your mind has really resonated and culturally helped us promote inclusion and belonging. Everyone's square on the screen is of an equal size. Everyone's voice is equally important. You're on the line, you've got a question, tell me what's on your mind."
When it comes to
"The co-pilot AI can give great insights," she said. "It can help automate mundane, repetitive tasks to enable our team to focus most on the moments that matter. So we've got a very clear view on that. We think AI is exciting for MetLife and for the industry, but we are very much in the exploratory phase. We are thinking through what could be enterprise use cases we may want to test and pilot and learn through. So that's sort of where we are as a company in our thinking on AI."
