“Most employees aren't insurance professionals,” said Joi Tillman of Sun Life Financial. “They're focused on their own areas of expertise. It's up to us to provide a better, more seamless customer experience.” (Photo: Charles Garnar/ALM)

“We've made insurance products incredibly complex, and it doesn't have to be that way,” said Joi Tillman, vice president, Voluntary, for Sun Life Financial U.S., Tillman was speaking about “The Intersection and Evolution of Benefits and Technology: How can we best serve the customer?” at the 15th Annual BenefitsPRO Broker Expo in Miami, Florida. “Most employees aren't insurance professionals. They're focused on their own areas of expertise. It's up to us to provide a better, more seamless customer experience.”

Abigail Albright, product evangelist for Maxwell Health, Tillman's co-presenter, agreed that the whole experience should be greater than the sum of its parts. “We need to blur the lines between insurance and enrollment technology,” she said. “Better” comes from this, but it's not unique to insurance. Technology has injected itself into other industries to better connect the product to the customer.

Tillman asked the audience, “Are we really trying to make this better? Think about this from the insurance perspective. I'm being compared to something else they've shopped for online, not for the way they shopped for insurance.” It's generally unspoken, but clearly in the customer's mind is the shopping experience on websites like Amazon.