Faster, Higher [Engagement], Stronger—Together: Plymouth Rock Hosts Hi Marley Olympics

Plymouth Rock Assurance Corporation claims representatives battled for gold at the inaugural Hi Marley Olympics.

“We wanted to increase engagement with Hi Marley and thought a competition that coincided with the Olympics would be something fun for everyone to participate in,” said Jeff Andrada, Claim Supervisor at Plymouth Rock Assurance. “We included everyone across the claims floor.”

The company awarded monetary prizes for those who won gold, silver and bronze in a series of events: customer quote of the week, most five stars, highest utilization rate, most re-assignments, most surveys sent, highest engagement and an award for the team with the highest combined score.

The Hi Marley Olympics not only increased adoption, it also helped the Plymouth Rock team develop certain skills and improve processes. Take re-assignments, for example, when a claim becomes a total loss. In this situation, the property damage rep handling the original claim must re-assign the claim to a total loss rep so they can communicate directly with the policyholder.

“One of the reasons we chose re-assignments for an event was because we weren’t great at them, and we wanted to provide better performance in that area,” said Doug Sprous, Vice President of Claims, Plymouth Rock Assurance.

The focus on re-assignments ended up being incredibly valuable just a few weeks later when Hurricane Ida hit. In the aftermath of the storm, Plymouth Rock received thousands of claims, and 90 percent were a total loss—an unprecedented total loss rate the team had never experienced before. “The contest gave our reps vital experience making re-assignments, which was critical to our process and ensuring we could handle the volume of claims during Ida,” said Sprous.

Every two days, the claims floor would receive an update on the individual and team standings in the various events, fueling the competition.

“Everyone was excited and engaged,” said Andrada. “The reps wanted to do well and get bragging rights. The supervisors kept asking for more updates and questions on how their team was doing. It was a great way to increase utilization—which was our goal.”

Utilization of the Hi Marley tool increased 18.5 percent among reps who had not yet engaged with the tool during the course of the Olympic Games.

“The way Jeff set up the Hi Marley Olympics with both individual and team competitions was really smart,” said Sprous. “There was competition related to performance. And then with the team component, colleagues held each other accountable for the team award.”

“Hi Marley is becoming increasingly important to our organization,” said Tony Ranauro, Director of Analytics, Plymouth Rock Assurance. “The offer rate is one of the metrics we’re tracking in 2022 as part of our claim representative’s overall performance.”

However, change is challenging for some people. As Ranauro described, there are three segments of Hi Marley users, “we have high performers who utilize and understand how to use Hi Marley, middle of the road users and those who require a little more motivation and encouragement. This contest was a great way to drive adoption and get more users in that third segment working with the tool.”

All of the Hi Marley Olympic events were very competitive among the Plymouth Rock team. At the conclusion of the competition, the Claims team leaders wrote an email to the participants congratulating them on their success and thanking them for their participation: “We enjoyed the opportunity to share with you our vision for engagement within Hi Marley while having a little fun and giving all of you an opportunity for a friendly competition and prizes.”

They continued, “We hope that the past couple of weeks reminded everyone how powerful Hi Marley can be for us. There aren’t too many tools that check all of the following boxes in claims: Improved customer experience, more accurate decisions and improved efficiency and time to settlement. Hi Marley is certainly one of those that does.”

The team hopes to do the contest again as a fun way to get new hires involved in the competition, continue to build community and increase engagement of Hi Marley.