CTF Life Leverages MongoDB Atlas to Deliver Customer-Centric Service

Hong Kong-based Chow Tai Fook Life Insurance Company Limited (CTF Life) is proud of its rich, nearly 40-year history of providing a wide range of insurance and financial planning services. The company provides life, health, accident, savings, and investment insurance to its customers, helping them and their loved ones navigate life’s journey with personalized planning solutions, lifelong protection, and diverse lifestyle experiences.

A wholly-owned subsidiary of NWS Holdings Limited and a member of Chow Tai Fook Group, CTF Life consistently strengthens its collaboration with the diverse conglomerate of the Cheng family (Chow Tai Fook Group) and draws on the Group’s robust financial strength, strategic investments across the globe, and advanced customer-focused digital technology with the aspiration of becoming a leading insurance company in the Greater Bay Area. To achieve this goal, CTF Life modernized its on-premises infrastructure to provide the speed and flexibility required to offer customers personalized experiences.

To turn their vision into reality, CTF Life decided to adopt MongoDB Atlas. By modernizing their systems and processes with the world’s most versatile developer data platform, CTF Life knew they’d be able to meet customer expectations, offering improved customer service, faster response times, and more convenient access to their products and services.

Data-driven customer service

The insurance industry is undergoing a significant shift, from traditional data management to near-real-time data-driven insights, driven by strong consumer demand and the urgent need for companies to process large amounts of data efficiently. As insurance companies strive to provide personalized and real-time products, the move towards sophisticated and real-time data-driven customer service is inevitable.

CTF Life is on its digital transformation journey to modernize its relational database management system (RDBMS) infrastructure to empower its agents, known as Life Planners, to provide enhanced customer experiences. The company faced obstacles to legacy systems and siloed data. Life Planners were spending a lot of time looking up customer information from various systems and organizing this into useful customer insights.

Not having a holistic view of customer data also made it challenging to recommend personalised products and services within CTF Life, the Group, and beyond. Reliance on legacy RDBMS systems presented a major challenge in CTF Life’s pursuit of leveraging real-time customer information to enhance customer experiences and operational efficiency.

For their modernization efforts, CTF Life was looking for the following required capabilities:

• A modernized application with agile development

• No downtime for changing schema, new modules, or feature updates

• A single way of centralizing and organizing data from a number of sources (backend, CRM, etc.) into a standardized format ready for a front-end mobile application

• A future-proof data platform with extensible capability for analytics across CTF Life, their diverse conglomerate collaboration, and their strategic partners to support the company’s digital solutions

Embracing the operational data layer for enhanced experiences

CTF Life knew they had to build a solution for the Life Planners to harness the wealth of useful information available to them, making it easier to engage and connect with customers. The first project identified was their clienteling system, which is designed to establish long-term relationships with customers based on data about their preferences, behaviors, and needs.

To overcome their legacy systems and siloed data, CTF Life built their clienteling system on MongoDB Atlas. Atlas serves as the digital data store for Life Planners, creating a single view of the customer (SVOC) with a flexible document model that enables CTF Life to handle large volumes of customer data in real-time efficiently.

By integrating their operational data into one platform with MongoDB Atlas on Microsoft Azure, CTF Life’s revamped clienteling system provides their Life Planners with a comprehensive view of customer profiles, which allows them to share targeted content with customers. Additionally, CTF Life is using Atlas Search to build relevance-based search capabilities directly into the application, making it faster and easier to search for customer data across the company’s system landscape.

These benefits helped improve customer service with faster access to data with an SVOC so Life Planners can provide more accurate and timely information to their customers. Atlas Search is now the foundation of the clienteling system, which powers data analytics and machine learning capabilities to support various use cases.

For example, the clienteling app's smart reminder feature recognizes key moments in a customer's life, like the impending arrival of a newborn child. Based on these types of insights, the app can help Life Planners make personalized recommendations to the customer about relevant services and products that may be of interest to them as new parents.

Because of its work with MongoDB, CTF Life can now analyze customer profiles and use smart reminders to engage customers at the right time in the right context. This has made following up with customers and leads faster and easier. And, contacting prospects, scheduling appointments, setting reminders, sharing relevant content, running campaigns and promotions, recommending products and services, and tracking lead progress can all be performed in one system.

Moreover, access to real-time data enables Life Planners to streamline their work and reduce manual processes. And data-driven insights empower Life Planners to make informed decisions quickly. They can analyze customer information, identify trends, and tailor their recommendations to meet individual needs more effectively. With MongoDB Atlas Search, Life Planners can use advanced search capabilities to identify opportunities to serve customers better.

Continuing to create value beyond insurance

CTF Life strives to provide its customers with value beyond insurance. Through a range of collaborations with Chow Tai Fook Group, and strategic partnerships with technology partners like MongoDB, CTF Life has created a customer-centric approach and continues to advance its digital transformation strategy to enhance a well-rounded experience for customers that goes beyond insurance with a sincere and deep understanding of their diverse needs in every chapter of their life journey.

In the future, CTF Life will continue to build upon its strategic partnership with MongoDB and expand the use of its digital data store on MongoDB Atlas by creating new client servicing modules on the mobile app their Life Planners use. CTF Life will also be expanding its search capabilities with Atlas Vector Search to accelerate their journey to building advanced search and generative AI applications for more automated servicing.