- Unum Disability Insurance: The Ability to Understand Disability
THE CHALLENGE:
When Unum, the world’s largest disability insurance company, wanted to gain a better understanding about the important issues surrounding disability insurance, it turned to Synectics.
THE PROCESS:
The expert panel that Synectics gathered included:
- An amputee who scaled Mt. Everest,
- A disability organization lobbyist,
- A nurse specialist.
The Synectics-led team worked on their development process, employed team-on-team presentation, and staged a skit to highlight the key issues, which included:
- Medical needs,
- Psychological problems,
- The impact of disability on families,
- Re-entry of the claimant into a different job .
The powerful insights that emerged from the sessions suggested improvements to:
- Overall service,
- Counseling,
- Information sharing, including providing a pre-approved list of disability-related organizations and services,
- Improvements to the Unum website,
- Communications, including chat or similar services.
THE RESULTS:
With that new understanding of the important issues and invigorated by the power ideas that emerged from the Synectics-led team, Unum created a new and innovative business model.
Today Unum, a Fortune 500 company, is a leading provider of employee benefits—including disability, long-term care, life, and voluntary insurance—serving one in five U.S. employers who provide group long-term disability benefits. More than 40 percent of the Fortune 500 do business with Unum.
