Rethinking the experience of life insurance – Interview with Adam Weinberg of Haven Life

February 28, 2020

Today’s interview is with Adam Weinberg, the brand director at Haven Life, a digital life insurance agency that’s backed and wholly owned by MassMutual. Adam joins me today to talk about innovating in a very traditional industry, magic tricks, what we can learn from Haven Life’s experience and what are the main things that we should be doing to improve the customer’s experience.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – If you don’t ignore your customers and create a service culture then you won’t have to worry about the competition – Interview with Micah Solomon – and is number 333 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Adam:

Adam’s focus as brand director is about changing the conversation around the purchasing experience that people have with life insurance.
Haven Life’s belief is that life insurance can be something that you can both feel good about and celebrate.
They have a reputation for being obsessed with the customer experience and have an overall mission to make life less hard.
They have an NPS score 74 right now which is a clear 30 points above industry averages.
Some of the big things that they see that helps drive a higher NPS score come down to brand, CX and communication.
They describe themselves as a start up that is backed a large insurance firm.
Some of the things that they have done to make themselves stand out include:
- Handwritten welcome cards
  - They include handwritten welcome cards (written by their employees) as part their welcome package.
  - Given that they have such a diverse team of 200 (and growing) employees, they started this initiative by leaving stacks of unwritten cards around the office, with some loose guidelines, to see what would happen.
  - Sure enough and organically team members started to take the cards and write welcome messages on them. Some even organised their own little writing groups over lunch while others took some cards home and had their kids write the welcome messages.
  - One employee even created her own Haven Life related crossword puzzle on the card.
  - As a result, they ended up with welcome cards that were unique, thoughtful and kind of quirky.
  - The only incentive they used was a prize of pizza for the floor that wrote the most cards each week.

- How they have developed an ongoing relationship with their customers
  - There is research that shows that the majority of life insurance policy holders don’t know the name of their insurance provider.
  - So, in order to create an ongoing and lasting impression with their customers they have innovated and created services (in consultation with their customers) that include things like an award winning fitness app or another app that helps manage the symptoms associated with jet lag. All of which are inspired by their mission to ‘make life less hard’.
- Their Annual Report is mostly about their customers stories and not Haven Life’s numbers
  - They’ve added magic tricks and a deck of cards to their annual report.
  - They use their annual report to highlight and focus on what their community of policyholders have accomplished each year.
  - When compiling the report and collecting the stories from their policy holders many of them were described as magical.
  - As a result, they were inspired to include a magic trick and a deck of cards with the report to help their policy holders ‘keep the magic coming’ as it were.
  - Check out their Annual Report, it’s like nothing you have seen before.
- Adam’s best advice: Provide your customers with the tools that they need to be successful on their own terms so that they can drive their own journey.
- Adam’s Punk CX word: passion.
- Adam’s punk brand: Bombas [Did you know that socks are the #1 most requested clothing item in homeless shelters and Bombas donate one brand new pair of socks for every pair purchased].

About Adam

Adam Weinberg is a creative problem solver who uses authentic moments to improve customer experiences. In his role as the brand director at Haven Life, a digital life insurance agency that’s backed and wholly owned by MassMutual, Adam is rethinking the way people buy life insurance and how to build a better, more meaningful relationship with policyholders. Adam has more than a decade of diverse editorial, marketing, and brand experiences, including work on several award-winning campaigns.