Unum's Competitive Advantages

Unum’s Competitive Advantages

When Unum makes an offer to a potential client, they ask the employer to review their offer and decide if they’re interested in learning more about what Unum has to offer their employees. Through his experience speaking to potential clients during IDI Finalist Presentations, AVP, Michael Miller, has become an expert on the various strengths of Unum’s IDI organization.

In 1939, Unum became the first insurance company to offer IDI. Since then, we have taken measures to outperform competitors whom attempted to challenge our position in the market. Some of the strengths that seem to be the most sought-out from potential clients include our financial well-being, organizational structure, ability to handle large clients, high-performing implementation teams, special enrollment options, billing strengths, and cyber security protection.

“These aspects of our business allow us to establish trust…at the end of finalist meetings, we often hear clients confirm that we have earned their trust and they feel confident that we will do a good job,” said Miller, describing the importance of our confidence in our strength.

Our employees on every team come together to make IDI coverage with Unum an unmatched opportunity. From a financial perspective, we perform well and have an impressive layout of IDI market share, which shows that we have the funds to adequately fulfill our promises. Additionally, our organization has a strong structure, with the way in which roles are broken down. For example, we have our own executive IDI team and we have an account manager role that allows clients to communicate with one business area that handles attaining and maintaining all of their account’s administrative needs.

Our ability to effectively manage large clients is reflected in our experience doing business with 31% of the Fortune 500 companies. This experience gives Unum confidence when promising large clients that we have the background, resources, and experience to handle an account of their size. Many large prospective clients express interest in having IDI coverage with Unum to match competitors for this reason.

“We are unique in that we are a strategic business unit in IDI. We have a specific role committed to managing clients’ accounts here. That’s not something our competitors have done,” shared Miller.

An additional feature highlighted, is our dedication to providing steady IT security and privacy protection to clients. The best proof of these efforts is the newly implemented single-sign-on enrollment tool, which allows employees to enroll through their work platform without being required to type in personal information into login fields (similar to how we access Workday). This is both faster and more secure than regular enrollment.

 “Ultimately, we want potential clients to walk away from the presentation feeling like we can handle it…we let them know that we’ve got a team that’s very focused in this business and we have a lot of experience. Not much is going to surprise us,” shared Miller, pinpointing Unum’s overall goal for presentations.

Please note that this article was endorsed by Unum IDI Business Operations' for a company newsletter in Feb. 2017. It is not to be reproduced by outside individuals or used for informational purposes. It serves as a sample of the newsletter written communications work done by Kathryn Severance.