Stephanie Linville
Director of Customer Digital Delivery
CNO Financial Group
United States of America
As the Director of Customer Digital Delivery, Stephanie's job is to provide the leadership and execution of the digital customer experience strategy across the enterprise operations team (comprised of 800+ associates) which supports all CNO brands and lines of business - dealing with over 3 million customers.
For the past year, Stephanie has been leading the initiative to find a solution that enhances or replaces CNO's current online portals, launching a Voice of the Customer programme to collect insights about the existing three portals, and deep-diving into operational data to provide a holistic view of the digital experience currently being delivered.
She has pioneered the first type of customer journey mapping activity that the CNO's enterprise operations team had ever participated in, leading webinars about human-centered design thinking and customer journey mapping and how they can be utilised to achieve corporate goals by redesigning the customer portal. Having educated groups from across the business and at all levels (from the front-line up to executives), this work fostered significant company-wide engagement. Buoyed by this enthusiasm, Stephanie hosted a future state design workshop, validating the outcomes with customers, the data from which - along with the VoC and CJM data - has formed the backbone of the Request for Proposal (RFP) from new customer portal vendors.
Stephanie's efforts have also had a wider influence, with her work setting a precedent for using journey mapping and other design thinking approaches as part of each new agile initiative within enterprise operations, and partnering with the training and development team to create enablement tools and materials for project managers to incorporate in their projects. The IT department, for instance, has requested Stephanie's involvement in agile training sessions to educate associates on how to use customer personas and journey mapping techniques.
Stephanie has also participated in the launch a CX Advisory Council providing cross-functional representation and input to inform future CX initiatives at CNO, as well as partnering with CNO's marketing team to include key questions in the NPS relationship survey to uncover any issues related to awareness and utilisation of the portals. The full results of this analysis, along with recommendations for improvement, informed a new digital strategy, with CSAT scores from the VoC programme providing baseline performance metrics to compare customer perceptions and track progress once the new consolidated customer portal is launched.
While CNO is still in the early stage of its CX maturity, Stephanie is already delivering results for the organisation - leading the implementation of a CX journey management and analytics tool to measure the cost-to-serve and ROI of paperless document delivery via customer portals, and the replacement of IVR technology.
The organisation has been tracking one key CX survey metric in its Voice of the Employee (VOE) surveys: "CNO delivers excellent experiences to customers." This survey item saw a significant increase in positive ratings in 2022, so associates are seeing that CNO is increasingly focused on CX, and they understand what improvements the company is making and how it is investing in technologies that will deliver better experiences to our customers.
