Unum is one of the UK’s leading employee protection insurers, helping organisations provide cover for their employees by offering Income Protection, Critical Illness cover, Life Insurance and Dental insurance. At the end of 2018, Unum protected 1.4 million people in the UK and paid claims of £314 million - representing in excess of £6 million a week in benefits to our customers - providing security and peace of mind to individuals and their families.
The Challenge
As with many business-to-business insurers, Unum’s route to market is via a broker network. This provides both benefits and challenges in equal measures. When considering the marketing of their insurance products, positioning of their offering and broker support in a competitive marketplace, how does a business like Unum differentiate?
The Customer Need
One of the ways that Unum has differentiated is by helping the broker network to improve their targeting and customer retention rates. To accomplish this, Unum needed a wider view on the overall market and chose to work with Dun & Bradstreet due to the comprehensive nature of D&B data.
The Solution
The first step was to match the historical data to the Dun & Bradstreet universe to standardise and enrich records where there were gaps—using essential ‘firmographic’ data to build out the data models. Once this was done, Unum was able to develop a universal view of all employers and build a ‘propensity to buy’ model that could then be applied back to the universe to identify key targets for their broker network. The data was ranked and priority lists delivered directly by Unum to their brokers.
Additionally, by using corporate family trees provided by Dun & Bradstreet, Unum was able to identify cross-sell opportunities. Finally, Unum used D&B data to support customer segmentation to find clusters where there is a ‘richness of cover,’ that can then be used for look-alike modelling (‘benchmarking’).
Results & ROI
“It is great to hear some of the more innovative ideas on D&B’s roadmap, and this is, of course, one of the reasons why we have continued to work with Dun & Bradstreet for over 8 years. Although we have used a number of the Dun & Bradstreet tools, ultimately, the data is the most important element for us. We have delivered good returns on our investment in marketing analytics, supported with D&B’s data," says Bill Mansfield, Head of Market Insight.