How Northwestern Mutual drives innovation with Microsoft tech

By Microsoft in Business Team

January 22, 2018

Tags
Financial Services

Focus on: Empower Employees, Engage Customers

Since the company was founded in 1857, Northwestern Mutual, a leading financial security company, has been putting its clients first. Today, the company provides its 4.4 million clients with a wide range of insurance, investment and planning services, including life insurance, financial consultation, investment advisory, and retirement and estate planning. According to client data, the company maintains a steady and impressive 96 percent retention rate with these clients year after year.

As the financial services marketplace continues to evolve rapidly, Northwestern Mutual is setting its sights on the digital sphere. Roughly five years ago, it embarked on a large digital transformation journey to create a culture of innovation and drive growth. Through that process, the company has been able to use the latest technology to optimize operations, promote productivity and deliver a distinctive digital experience for its clients and financial representatives.

More than 5,000 Northwestern Mutual employees at its corporate headquarters and 16,000 financial representatives and employees in network offices nationwide have been leveraging Microsoft’s on-premises CRM platforms and Office 365 applications – including Power BI – regularly for some time. These tools have helped Northwestern Mutual break down silos and streamline data management across its technology stack.

“We’ve been able to bring data together from across the company, transform it, and deliver it to the user in an engaging and dynamic way,” says Chris Wagner, Senior Engineering Lead for the Business Intelligence portion of Northwestern Mutual’s Book of Business project. With the recent upgrade and implementation of Power BI Premium, Wagner and the rest of the team are intent on building out the company’s analytics capabilities and expanding its user base. Creating exciting and engaging user experiences with real-time data managementNorthwestern Mutual has been using Power BI in various capacities for roughly two years, starting with Power BI Pro. Their recent Power BI Premium adoption aligned perfectly with their vision of transforming data management experiences for employees and clients, and the seamlessness of the integration process far surpassed their expectations.

“The ease and the simplicity around the integration of the premium solution was incredible,” says Wagner. “We deployed in the middle of the day, scaled up and down, and there were no issues whatsoever. Nobody dropped a connection. It was about as smooth as you could possibly imagine.”

Now, the company uses Power BI Premium and on-premises Microsoft Dynamics CRM technology to enable real-time and intuitive data reporting. Together, these solutions empower Northwestern Mutual employees and financial representatives to serve clients across a range of user groups and skill sets with customizable dashboards. Whether these individuals are in the office or on the go, they can easily access and present key metrics using dynamic visuals and versatile features.

The current system also makes it possible for dashboards and analytics to be integrated into a variety of different contexts, applications, and technologies.

“Other applications can pull data and visuals from it, they can interact with it, and they can embed it within their own experience,” says Wagner. “Power BI has transformed reports and analytics from an end point to just another point in the development cycle that provides a great user experience.” Driving digital transformationNorthwestern Mutual views its current successes as the foundation for achieving bigger and better objectives through continued digital transformation. The company plans to integrate more big data and machine learning platforms to fully optimize efficiency and workflows. They also want to move their on-premises CRM solution to the Microsoft Cloud to take full advantage of the flexible and interactive Dynamics 365 platform. In the very near future, Northwestern Mutual will expand its Power BI Premium adoption to 21,000 users and provide more self-service features to their field service and sales representatives.

“Our users’ needs are vastly diverse,” says Wagner. “By building out this solution in a dynamic fashion, we can rapidly deliver solutions and enhancements while providing our users the ability to build out their own dashboards to meet their needs with very little effort on our side, and we’re very excited about that.”