Lithys 2018: Transamerica - B2C Community Innovator

Lithys 2018: Transamerica - B2C Community Innovator

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Company: Transamerica

Company background: Transamerica is a 114-year-old B2B financial services company, focusing on retirement, insurance and investment products and services. Shaking the last 3 decades of traditional marketing efforts and growth by acquisition, our team decided in 2016 that our brand needed a do-over. This time, we would focus on our customers and become a purpose-driven brand.

In 2018, Transamerica launched its new brand identity: Wealth + Health. Our aim is to educate and empower consumers about the interconnected nature of their financial and health habits. Alongside our new brand, the Transamerica team launched a new digital ecosystem encompassing 5 new platforms.

Contact: Janice James

Title: Community Manager

Related URLs:


Lithy category: B2C Community Innovator

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1. Describe the innovation(s) and how you settled on the decision to innovate (user request, Lithium suggestion, internal idea, etc.)

In 2018, Transamerica launched a new brand identity: Wealth + Health. The brand aim is to educate and empower consumers about the interconnected nature of their financial and health habits. To assist with this outreach, the Transamerica team launched a new digital ecosystem encompassing 5 new platforms.

While there are many Financial Services companies that are B2C focused, such as banks and retirement or investment planning companies, Transamerica does not work in the B2C space. Our main audiences are financial planners, advisors, and employers who offer employee benefits.

An integral element of our industry, the heavy compliance and legal rules imposed by the SEC and FINRA and other governing bodies, generally work against innovation in this space. Coupled with a very traditional internal compliance team the simple goal of providing consumer (not even customer) platforms seemed an almost impossible task.

In our role at Transamerica, we found that revolutionizing communities did not come from implementing functionalities or tricks on a platform. Rather the B2C Community Innovation comes from being the first to try something new, pushing compliance comfort zones, and catering to a traditionally taboo audience (consumer) for a B2B company. All while being surrounded by competitors who “follow” not “lead” in the digital innovation sphere.

To our surprise, after the initial release of the Wealth + Health Community, we found that even financial professionals (our B2B audience) adopted the platform, primarily to share with their clients.

One year after the initial launch we weren’t done innovating. We embarked on a long process of compliance negotiations and in early 2018 launched our first User Generated Content (UGC) blog content. Our UGC team consists of unpaid experts who contribute topics about health & wealth to the community blog.

To continue breaking barriers, in July 2018, we received full compliance approval to add a support board where we could assist Transamerica customers with basic inquiries. This may seem like the place most organizations begin, but for our highly risk-averse compliance and legal team it took almost two years, and 5,000+ customer service issues resolved on social media before all negotiation hurdles were overcome.


2. Tell us about how you made it happen Did you stage it first, who got an early look, how you drove adoption/use, and any iterations you had to make to get it right.

The Wealth and Health Community soft-launched April 1, 2017. We focused on a 3-month internal testing and feedback cycle as our initial task. We contacted a handful of employees and requested them to be “founding mothers” to the community by being active in the discussions and guiding new members through their first experiences on the community.

For the rest of 2017, we started promoting community content through organic social posts to fans of our Facebook page. This provided a minimal uptick in traffic and adoption, but we were fine with taking it slow and learning from our fans and followers’ experiences.

In February 2018, our team finally launched the new Wealth and Health brand to the public and we revamped the look and feel of our community. As part of this campaign, the community was promoted to advisors, as a resource for their clients. At the same time, our social media team started to place some paid social media ads into the consumer market, mainly on Facebook, to drive awareness and adoption of the community.

Our latest release phase started June 2018, when we began including community blogs and conversations in customer communications, mainly in our retirement plan participant audience group.

We have seen amazing results and are looking forward to continuing to innovate and push the boundaries as long as it serves our customers’ best interest.


3. What were the results? Tell us how it impacted your customer experience or the outcomes you seek as a business.

While Transamerica is a large company, we have very little brand recognition in the public's mind. Since Transamerica is not a foremost B2C company, we don’t typically engage with the consumer audience, unless we are dealing with customer service issues.

The W+H community has however served to impact exactly this target audience and mind share the most. Our goal was to enhance brand recognition, highlight our thought leadership, and make an impact on consumer’s awareness about the quality of their life today as well as in the future.

We measured our success for the community and our innovation within our industry by tracking the adoption of the community and the year over year results from member sign-ups, time spent on site and consumption of content. To that end, we feel that these statistics are compelling to show our success:

YoY results:
o Mobile traffic increased to 53%
o 30% increase of member registrations
o 23% increase in average time on page
o 16% increase in session duration
o 4% increase in pages per sessions per user
o Case resolution 73% even though we are not a customer support platform

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Comments
I like the layout! good job guys

Thanks! Our goal was a clean, modern homepage that showcased user contributions and conveyed what the community is about through the three CTA tiles on the hero image. ^_^