Optimizing insurance operations

Established in 1886, MLC Life Insurance (MLC) is a leading player in the Australian insurance sector. The company supports and cares for Australians throughout their life journey by offering them award-winning life insurance products and services that are flexible, affordable, and innovative.

MLC is a long-standing ServiceNow customer, using ServiceNow in areas as diverse as IT service management, risk management, and financial services operations. Not only does ServiceNow help MLC accelerate and streamline its operational processes, but it also provides the highest levels of rigor and auditability needed for MLC to meet its commitments in a highly regulated industry.

Maximizing the investment in ServiceNow

Justin Gould, Head of Workplace Engineering at MLC, explains, “ServiceNow innovates at an incredible pace. We want to take advantage of that innovation to strengthen our business. But to do that, we need to understand these innovations, whether these are enhancements to ServiceNow products we already have or products that are completely new to us–such as ITOM Discovery. ServiceNow training delivers these insights. That means we can make informed decisions about which ServiceNow areas to tackle next, and it also gives us the skills we need to successfully implement and use these capabilities.”

Forging a partnership between development and business teams

Justin also explains how ServiceNow training creates a meeting of the minds across MLC’s technical and business functions. “To identify and deliver the right solutions for our business, we need people to be whole thinkers. Developers shouldn’t be order takers—they have to see things through the eyes of business practitioners and make the right design decisions. How is what I’m developing going to help the business team? Will it make things faster or slower? How is it going to be audited? And so on. That creates so much more value.

“This business understanding also really helps us to engage our business colleagues at the strategic level. We can approach a team like HR and have a business conversation about how ServiceNow can make things better for them. This really makes them enthusiastic about coming on board the ServiceNow platform. And because we’re able to take a business-focused approach, our implementations are far more successful. That success also drives further adoption—when business teams see other ServiceNow implementations humming along smoothly, they’re even more enthusiastic about starting to use ServiceNow themselves.

“Similarly, business practitioners can see more possibilities when they know how things work under the hood. That’s why we focus so heavily on cross-functional training for ServiceNow–both for developers and business practitioners. ServiceNow training creates a common language across business and technology, which means that we deliver better business results and deliver them faster. For instance, we’ve trained people who report to our Chief Risk Officer. Because they now understand how the ServiceNow platform works, they get much more out of it.”

Building careers and employee satisfaction

Equally important, ServiceNow training helps MLC employees to grow their skills and career opportunities. According to Justin, “It’s very important for our people to keep learning and growing. First of all, we owe it to them. It’s also good business. There’s a huge market demand for ServiceNow skills, so it makes sense for us to grow those skills internally wherever possible. It also makes us more resilient. I just talked about our focus on cross-training. This means that our people are skilled in multiple areas, so they can step in and take over if someone leaves or gets sick.

“Of course, this also opens up new career paths for our people—for instance, if someone in our risk team wants to become a ServiceNow developer. Providing these types of opportunities makes people feel appreciated rather than pigeonholed. And we know they feel appreciated. For instance, we recently upskilled two of our service management analysts on major incident management. We got emails from them thanking us so much for the training.”

ServiceNow training and ServiceNow Impact create a force multiplier

Justin also talks about the synergies between ServiceNow Impact and ServiceNow training. He says, “ServiceNow Impact is great. Impact lets you work with ServiceNow experts to better adopt what you own and discover new capabilities and build a roadmap that supports your business goals. And with Impact Accelerators, you get pragmatic guidance on how to use these capabilities. Couple that with ServiceNow training, which gives you the deep skills to implement and operationalize these capabilities, and you’ve got the complete package.”

The bottom line

Justin is emphatic about the benefits of ServiceNow training. “Here’s the truth. If you don’t take advantage of ServiceNow training, your team will never grow. It’s helped us to mature our team, open up new possibilities, drive platform adoption, and deliver better business results. ServiceNow training is a large part of why we’re successful.”