Innovator Spotlight

Sun Life

Lydia Frangos

Senior Client Insights Analyst

Sun Life

Lydia Frangos’ role has grown steadily during her eight years at Sun Life US. She made the shift from advanced analytics to client insights because she wanted to work more directly with Sun Life clients. “There was so much more I wanted to know about the people behind the data. I wanted to hear about their thoughts, feelings and motivations.” she notes.

Now, Lydia is responsible for client research initiatives, including two separate online communities called Broker and Employer Voices. She describes her role as an internal consultant, helping people figure out solutions to their business problems, and seeking out improvements where there may be gaps.

Scaling the research program

As Lydia has built up Sun Life’s Voices communities, she’s been able to scale the customer research program to support multiple stakeholders and critical business initiatives, such as the company’s digital transformation.

Now, when a product team needs Client feedback on their latest designs delivered within two-week development sprints, Lydia and her team meet the challenge.

Lydia is particularly proud of the communities’ consistently high member satisfaction scores, which far exceed Alida’s average community satisfaction scores and satisfaction scores of comparable cohorts as a whole.

As the program has grown, so has Lydia’s role as a leader within Sun Life. “I work a broad spectrum of people across the entire business and have developed a great understanding of how this business and industry functions. I'm hearing about clients’ issues, their wants, their needs, their strategies, and I'm helping them get to where they want to be.”

Best Practices

Not every piece of data is an insight. If you see a behavior performed over and over, that’s data. But if you figure out why they're doing it—maybe it’s something that you wouldn't think of—that’s an insight. It's figuring out what motivates people and what would help them in the long term.
People want to be heard and listening improves our business. Many of our clients don't feel heard by insurance companies. It's incredibly important that clients know we're listening to them because they want to tell us how to be better and how we can better serve them. If we're not listening to those using and selling our products, we're shooting in the dark.
Everything hinges on communication. I look for opportunities to present my work and sharpen my communication skills. In fact, our team makes it a point to go to leadership meetings and present at Town Halls. The better we can articulate our learnings, value and purpose, the more important research topics come our way. The quality of our research improves and so does our client experience.