At The Hartford, we know staying on the cutting edge of innovation is only possible with the right people leading the way. Andrew Marsh, our head of product management for Employee Benefits, has more than 17 years of experience working in the benefits space. His focus is listening to stakeholders to chart the path forward. We sat down with him to discuss his work, market trends and what the future of employee benefits could look like.
What is your role at The Hartford?
AM: In my current role, I’m accountable for about half of our product organization, which includes supplemental health, life insurance and specialty business products.
I have two primary jobs: making sure our current product suite is as competitive as possible and identifying opportunities for us to innovate. My task is to ask what’s next for our customers and how do we position our products to help them succeed in the coming years? It’s a delicate balance of maintaining our current products and thinking about the future of our product suite.
How would you describe the work your team does?
AM: The product organization plays an integral role in creating the customer experience. Our job is to build a highly effective insurance policy between The Hartford and our customers. So, when an employee files a claim, we can respond in a way that matches or exceeds their expectations. My team makes that happen by combining our years of experience with customer feedback to shape products that can have a meaningful impact.
How do you and your team ensure success?
AM: It’s all about listening to the people we serve. I structure my schedule around collecting feedback from a variety of sources: internal partners, such as sales and relationship managers, and external partners, such as brokers and employers. In each of those instances, it’s imperative that we truly understand what those stakeholders are telling us and synthesize that information to find the core needs that we can address.
Once that feedback goes through my team and gets to me, I ask myself: where are the opportunities to give our customers, and in turn ourselves, an edge? How do we design a product that lends itself to the best possible customer experience? Identifying that goal and working toward it is how we succeed.
What trends have you seen in the industry and how has your team responded?
AM: Industry-wide, customers expect claims processes that are as close to seamless as possible. In response, we’re identifying and implementing the right technology with the right products to create that experience. Customers are demanding that we stay laser-focused on delivering an easy claims process, which means our products also need to be easy to understand and use.
To that end, we are finding ways to seamlessly connect our supplemental health products to our absence products. If an employee files an absence claim because of a broken leg, how can our product suite respond beyond that first claim to help both employer and employee? Is the employee covered for related supplemental health benefits that can ease their financial burden as they take care of their health? With our investments in HR technology and our commitment to innovation, we’re designing a claims experience intended to exceed expectations for our customers and their employees at every stage of the benefits journey.
What excites you about the future?
AM: The pace of innovation in the supplemental health space is exciting to be a part of. There are two main lines of change: the first is the claimant experience I mentioned before, but the second is the shift in what people are looking for from their benefits and coverage. Our products bridge the gaps left by their medical insurance, and we must be nimble in identifying how we can respond to those gaps.
This is where the feedback comes in: how can these benefits be more relevant to employees? As the designers of these products, our challenge is to listen carefully to our partners, tap into our own personal experiences and leverage the right technology. The result is products that serve people and families more easily and conveniently. As we look to the future, we will continue to evolve along with our customers and the market.
