Company: John Hancock Financial Services, Boston, MA
Company Description: John Hancock's core retail products in the U.S. focus on providing financial solutions at every stage of our clients' lives. Our product suite includes life insurance, mutual funds, 401(k) plans, long-term care insurance, and annuities. We distribute our products primarily through licensed financial advisors, and through John Hancock Financial Network, a national network of independent firms.
Nomination Category: Support Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Support Team of the Year

Nomination Title: Shared Success

Tell the story about what this nominated team has achieved since January 1, 2014 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms.  TEXT REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION

John Hancock’s focus is providing clients with strong, reliable, trustworthy and forward thinking solutions for most of their significant financial decisions. Donald Guloien, the President and Chief Executive Officer, in his February address to the company in which he summarized the previous quarter’s performance, shared a success story that had been brought to his attention. A CFO of a company that John Hancock conducts business with, Scott Hartz, contacted Donald Guloien with a message that read:

“My mother-in-law passed away two years ago. Recently John Hancock sent a letter to her son informing him that they had a benefit due on a life policy she had taken out when she was 17...The family was unaware (that there was a benefit). John Hancock somehow learned of her passing and found her son who lives in Florida, she lived in New Jersey. Amazing, may all financial institutions be so good.” John Hancock’s commitment to its customers demonstrates the company’s willingness to go above and beyond the status quo.

In 2014, the John Hancock Shared Services Death Match and Thorough Search teams developed a comprehensive, efficient, and consistent approach to ensuring that beneficiaries received their benefits due. The Death Match and Thorough Search team were established to ensure John Hancock’s compliance with a Regulatory Settlement Agreement and to perform due diligence in attempting to locate beneficiaries. That same year the Death Match and Thorough Search teams became a Shared Service, working to service multiple different business units including Life Insurance, Long Term Care, Retail Annuities, and Fixed Products. Performing a service to our stakeholders the Death Matching and Thorough Search team worked diligently to identify, locate, and contact the beneficiaries of a policy after receiving notice that the Policyholder was reported as deceased.

The Death Matching team is responsible for ensuring that a reported match was a John Hancock client, and confirming the validity of the match through multiple sources. Death notifications were received from the Social Security Death Index Death Master File, and from a third party vendor. In 2014, the Death Matching team worked on validating more than 75,000 death records. This initial research was instrumental in determining the success of future outreach attempts. The Death Match team provided a standardized and consistent approach to a process that individual business units had previously self-managed. Consolidating these efforts allowed John Hancock to implement a uniform and scalable approach to death matching. Adopting the death matching process as a Shared Service enabled claims departments to focus on improving settlement rates, client management, and overall customer centricity.

The Thorough Search team is responsible for determining the correct beneficiary, and conducting the outreach process. Thorough Search was able to provide consistent results to stakeholder’s month over month. These results led to our team reaching beneficiaries that were previously unaware that they were due a benefit. Through conducting outreach attempts on almost 30,000 records, the Thorough Search team made more than 50,000 combined letter and phone call outreach attempts to beneficiaries. Thorough Search achieved an 87.8% contact rate with beneficiaries in 2014. Successfully reaching and notifying almost 19,000 beneficiaries, the Thorough Search team helped expedite the claims process and ensure that beneficiaries were able to claim their benefit. For those beneficiaries who could not be contacted, the Through Search team recommended that over 3,000 records be turned over to the appropriate states’ Unclaimed Property department.

In 2014, numerous process improvement initiatives such as improved work flow design, perfected research techniques, and management focus on enhanced productivity and quality were achieved. Through these efforts the Death Match and Thorough Search teams yielded high success rates, lowered and stabilized unit costs, and decreased expenses while seeing an increase in overall production and quality. As a Shared Service the Death Match and Thorough Search team have secured cost savings and sustainable efficiencies while continuously providing quality results and flexibility to multiple business units..

In bullet-list form, briefly summarize up to ten (10) accomplishments of the nominated team since the beginning of 2014 (up to 150 words).

-Working Together for the Benefit of our Clients. Enhanced customer-centric model through better client management and faster settlement rates.

-Created a shared service model to consolidate the activity of locating all beneficiaries of deceased account holders across all John Hancock product lines. Two functional groups emerged.

-Primary responsibility is proactively comparing our customer data to secure external sources to identify potential death matches for John Hancock clients. The group confirms the validity of the potential match through multiple sources.

-The Death Matching team validated over 75,000 death records.

-Primary responsibility is determining the correct beneficiary and conducting a thorough outreach process employing letters, phone calls and emails in order to make contact with the beneficiary in preparation for settling the death benefit.

-The Thorough Search team conducted outreach on approximately 30,000 records.

-Team executed more than 50,000 combined letter and phone call outreach attempts to beneficiaries