Kendra Harbinson

Business Development Specialist , Sun Life

Supernova Award Category: 
Next-Generation Customer Experience
The Organization: 

At Sun Life our purpose is to help our Clients achieve lifetime financial security and live healthier lives. Anchored by our proud history, we continuously look for ways to bring innovative, insightful, and simple solutions to Clients, so they feel confident that they have a partner who cares about their well-being and that they can trust.

When we help Clients with their financial management needs and health and well-being goals, we enable them to gain the freedom to live their lives their way. We do what we do to give our Clients peace of mind for their futures and for their families’ futures – to make Life brighter under the sun.

The Problem: 

The Advisor Portal program was designed to improve Advisor and Client experience with new platforms: a new intranet and enhanced CRM, Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC). We needed to transition 4,000 Advisors and various team members to the new platforms as quickly as possible, while maximizing ROI.

Advisors found entering leads and opportunities cumbersome. We needed a platform to help us launch new features and accomplish other benefits, including:

  • Increase our Salesforce “Power Users,” who have 81% higher wealth sales and 56% higher insurance sales 
  • Improve the end-to-end Advisor experience, making it easier to navigate across platforms and “learn while doing”
  • Deliver creative solutions for technical and process gaps that would be otherwise costly to solve
  • Enable self-sufficiency, empowering the team to make changes quickly without dev teams
  • Leverage data and analytics for future adoption improvements 

We were also had to meet Know Your Client (KYC) regulatory requirements – without adding too many steps and shifting to a new financial planning software that’s fully integrated with Salesforce. 

We leveraged WalkMe to:

  • Accelerate onboarding with in-app guidance
  • Reduce costs associated with training and ongoing support
  • Increase sustainable adoption of existing and new capabilities
  • Free Advisors to focus on Clients, nurture relationships, and uncover financial opportunities
The Solution: 

To successfully accelerate onboarding and improve adoption of our platforms, we implemented walkthroughs, smart tips, pop-ups, onboarding flows, and a menu and search function using WalkMe. For KYC, we made heavy use of automation to reduce manual clicks, save time, and auto-populate information across systems to increase data accuracy.

This elevated the self-serve element of our three-pronged training approach, so we could focus on the other two elements: facilitator-led training and consultative support.

Using WalkMe enabled us to create a meaningful, relevant, and cohesive experience that helps Advisors spend less time looking for content and more time with Clients. We did this by improving user experience through easy navigation, enabling users to learn while doing, creating automation steps, and using data to understand user behavior and continually improve.

The Results: 

We shifted from formal scheduled training sessions to in-the-moment guidance, right in the platform where our users need it most. WalkMe has enabled us to implement ‘learning while doing,’ so our independent Advisors don’t have to be systems and tools experts to effectively use the technology they need to do their jobs well. 

This has improved their willingness to actively use new tools and capabilities. With WalkMe, we maximize our Advisors’ value by empowering them to do their best work for their Clients, while also maximizing the overall ROI on our technology investments by ensuring that they’re adopted and used effectively.

With WalkMe, it’s so easy to identify a potential training or adoption need, build our own solution, and deliver it quickly – all while ensuring a consistent, excellent end-user experience.

The result is a holistic user experience improvement for Advisors, which drives business outcomes for both their independent businesses, for Sun Life, and for the Clients we serve every day. 

Based on the success already realized, there’s great appetite to continue using WalkMe as a solution for driving Advisor productivity – and consequently, Client experience – such as serving up relevant, high impact opportunities to Advisors in the tool during sales campaigns.

Metrics: 

By leveraging WalkMe for the Advisor Portal program, we were able to:

  • Eliminate 2000 hours of basic training, historically delivered by 48 trainers, saving the organization $80K at launch.
  • Reduce support requests faster, allowing the team to refocus full time employee hours (totaling $110K for the year), resume run rates quicker, and support other initiatives. When the organization first launched Salesforce in 2016, support call volumes took 3 years to normalize. With the launch of FSC (using WalkMe), support call volumes were normalized within 9 months.
  • Minimize adoption risks associated with a transition to a new tool. WalkMe data showed that Advisors were engaged from day 1, and we leveraged analytics to quickly identify and manage adoption gaps.
  • Provide just-in-time training directly on the platform, enabling Advisors to focus on what matters most: building relationships with Clients. Advisors don’t have to wait for basic answers or rely on a trainer for support, WalkMe helps them through the steps in a simple consistent way.
  • Activate new features on the platform for improved adoption and client experience. WalkMe allows us to push the information directly when users access the tool.

For KYC, we reduced the number of fields Advisors need to complete by 40%, while increasing accuracy and efficiency – and enhancing the overall experience for both Advisors and Clients.

The Technology: 

We use WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform to provide in-app guidance, in the form of walkthroughs, smart tips, onboarding flows, menus, search, and automation, to drive adoption and change management across the business. 

By investing in WalkMe, we quickly transitioned our Advisors to SFSC, maximizing the benefits as a CRM tool with minimal risk to the business; WalkMe allowed us to successfully launch these platforms and a new way of working, reducing costs, time, and effort.

Disruptive Factor: 

Around 4,000 independent Advisors and team members use the platform on a daily basis, and WalkMe enables us to provide them with a concierge-like experience, learn from user behavior, and make changes quickly. No more waiting for software updates to fix issues or add new implementations. 

We have become so agile in improving the Advisor and end Client experience. We will leverage this forward-looking framework well into the future, to drive incredible productivity and continuously add value to Clients. 

For example, we can very quickly create and deploy WalkMe content, like a smart tip right in the platform to preemptively resolve user confusion, preventing hundreds of calls to our support team or delays in Client engagements.

We constantly strive to provide solutions that work for everyone. How do we streamline processes that we want them to follow, but still allow them to do their work in the way they choose? Since we have so many team members with varying levels of familiarity with different systems, this can be challenging.

Together with WalkMe, we made the process Client-first. We enable people to work the way they want to by connecting systems and making them universally easier to use. Ultimately, we’re laser-focused on freeing Advisors to be there for their Clients, instead of focusing on things like navigating to the right system and completing many fields that need to be filled out in order to provide value to customers.

Shining Moment: 

Beyond the cost savings, productivity gains, and positive feedback, the data reiterates everything we’ve built! Nearly 75% of Advisors continue to engage with our WalkMe content, most notably in the most valuable objects and functions. We’ve seen 2x the system usage year-over-year. We created solutions that strengthen Advisor-Client relationships and laid the foundation for driving incredible productivity for the business and for adding exponential value to Clients.

About Sun Life

Sun Life is a leading international financial services organization providing asset management, wealth, insurance and health solutions to individual and institutional Clients. Sun Life has operations in a number of markets worldwide, and as of March 31, 2022, Sun Life had total assets under management of C$1.35 trillion. For more information, please visit www.sunlife.com.