The Opportunity

Coverpath users were previously unable to recommend policy and product changes to their clients once the offer was approved and ready. In the industry, we describe this as “Case Design”. Without the ability to edit offers approved by underwriting, customizing the case required intervention by our customer support team and potentially a delay in getting a policy issued.

Starting with Term Life (July 2019)

To start to solve for this opportunity, it became apparent that we needed to put the advisor (not necessarily the client, underwriter, or our support team) in the driver’s seat to make changes. We pursued an “advisor first” model to support editing offers so advisors could best support their clients. We conducted user interviews, reviewed prototypes, and evangelized the importance of giving advisors this flexibility across MassMutual operations and underwriting teams. We launched the ability for advisors to edit Term Life offers in July 2019, observing that our Term application volume was growing 10x year over year. These were the critical changes we decided to support for our first version of the Edit Offer (formerly Edit Policy) tool:

• Face Amount (increases and decreases)
• Term Length (10 – 30 years)
• Payment Frequency (monthly and yearly)
• Removing Applied for Waiver of Premium

In addition to designing a screen to let users modify the offer, we added capabilities to let the advisor approve offers before they are sent to the client, “Hold” offers and easily see a list of changes previously made. We also redesigned the client’s experience so they know about the changes their financial professional made and how to get help to make more changes. 

Clients also have the ability to eSign the policy amendment forms digitally

Since releasing the support to edit Term Life offers, we’ve seen over 1,500 offers edited by advisors and their support staff for clients. Editing the face amount is clearly the most popular amendment on our products, which accounts for approximately 50% of all offer edits. It’s our perspective that giving advisors this flexibility has dramatically improved their ability to help their clients get coverage. We’ve seen our application to issued policy rate trend up substantially (by industry standards) to the tune of 10%, comparing early 2019 results to where we stand in 2020.

Editing Offers Today (June 2020)

This month, we built on a solid foundation to support more advanced case design. Our learnings from supporting the editing of Term offers brought great insight into the design of our Whole Life offer editing tool. Whole Life and jointly applied for Whole and Term offers now support an incredible amount of flexibility:  

• Change the Whole Life Product Type
• Adjust Face Amount (excluding Juvenile, which requires underwriter review)
• Adjust Payment Frequency
• Drop Term Life from a Joint Application
• Drop Whole Life from a Joint Application
• Remove Waiver of Premium
• Remove and edit the RTR rider amount
• Remove and edit the GIR rider amount (excluding Juvenile, which requires underwriter review)

Future Plans

We see the future of “Edit Offer” functionality on Coverpath to meet a simple vision: “make editing offers as flexible as creating quotes.” Our long term plan is to allow advisors using Coverpath to add riders (not applied for) and change product categories (singular Whole Life application to a Term Life application). We see a huge opportunity to let advisors first get the approval from underwriting “in hand” then build a coverage and customer case for the client with full confidence. 

FOR PRODUCER USER ONLY-NOT FOR USE WITH THE PUBLIC.