00:00 Introduction: Welcome to Tech Talk, a podcast featuring employees and leaders discussing all things tech at Mutual of Omaha. Join us to learn what tech professionals can gain from a career with us. Let’s talk tech.
00:12 Brian Poppe: Welcome everyone, to another edition of the Tech Talk podcast sponsored by Mutual Omaha. I am one of the co-hosts, Brian Poppe. I’ve been at Mutual for a while and have done a whole bunch of other jobs here but currently I lead one of the business units. I am joined today by Maura Ramsey
00:29 Maura Ramsey: Hi, Brian I’m good. How are you doing?
00:32 Brian Poppe: Yeah, doing great. So, over the last weekend, I got to DJ again, and you may not know this about me, but I used to be a DJ, and I’ve been, like, off and on doing it for more than half of my life, which is crazy to say. And every once in a while, I’ll get to get the equipment out for a wedding. So, I did that this last weekend. And, yeah, we had a great time. It’s fun to take out the fog machine and the disco ball and just like, turn up the music real loud. We had a great party.
00:59 Maura Ramsey: So, I have to ask what is your go to song? What is your staple song you’ve got to play?
01:03 Brian Poppe: Yeah. When the night’s about to get crazy, Fireball by Pitbull comes on. We do a conga line, the whole nine yards.
01:12 Maura Ramsey: That’s a great to get the party started, that’s for sure.
01:16 Brian Poppe: It does the job, that’s for sure. What about you? Find anything fun to do?
01:21 Maura Ramsey: Well, I also had a past hobby come to light this weekend. I’m in town visiting back in Omaha, visiting my family, and my dad decided to pull out our old sailboat that we had when we were younger. So, it’s not quite in the water yet. Still in the driveway, getting work done. So, waiting.
01:40 Brian Poppe: It’s like the natural habitat for a sailboat.
01:43 Maura Ramsey: Pull up the sails and take off, but I’m my dad’s right-hand man getting it ready to go, making sure the lights work.
01:50 Brian Poppe: Sounds like a lot of work.
01:51 Maura Ramsey: Yea, for him. Not so much for me.
01:56 Brian Poppe: I hope. Like, you’re the one that’s like, just flipping a switch.
01:59 Maura Ramsey: I just make sure the lights are turned on while he’s inside and hand him the tools. I know what I’m doing as a support role, not so much as a lead.
02:13 Brian Poppe: We are joined today by Lisa Longenecker. Lisa also has been at mutual in a variety of roles here. She’s currently responsible for leading the customer experience enablement team. So, Lisa, hello. How’s it going?
02:24 Lisa Longnecker: Hello, good morning, everybody. How are you all? Thanks for having me.
02:28 Brian Poppe: Yeah, doing great. So glad you could join us.
02:30 Maura Ramsey: And we’re happy to have you as a guest. So, I wanted to learn a little bit more about you and what your career path looks like at Mutual and really how you got to the role that you’re in today.
02:41 Lisa Longnecker: Sure. Well, thanks for asking. I started at Mutual, it’s been a bit now, let’s say a little under 30 years ago. And I came in thinking that I was going to be an Actuary. I worked in Small Group Actuarial pricing products and in quoting systems. But, you know, over time, ended up moving around and supporting different systems at Mutual of Omaha from the business perspective and then on to some operational excellence roles and business transformation and eventually into our Customer Experience Enablement Team. Really able to have, I think, a couple of careers inside of the time that I’ve spent at Mutual of Omaha. So that’s been fun for me.
03:20 Brian Poppe: Yeah, you’ve really got to see firsthand then as an actuary, getting to work on the products and now working on customer experience. Kind of mimics the path that Mutual of Omaha has been on going from product focused to customer focused. Can you tell us about maybe that transition and kind of how we better understand the customer experience now that we are a customer focused company?
03:40 Lisa Longnecker: Sure, sure. Glad to. I mean, I think it was really great to be in the organization when we started to change our mindset a little bit more towards our customers and, you know, led by James in a really strong way the business units started to really, really work on understanding what our customers’ needs were and then obviously how our solutions were being crafted to meet those needs.
04:03 Lisa Longnecker: So that’s really, you know, part of the change that we’ve gone through and continue to go through over time. How it’s manifested itself in my team though, is really trying to get, you know, our partners in the organization closer to our customers. That’s really one of the charges that we have. And a big part of what our team does is listening to our customers.
And we do that around, you know, how is our relationship with our customers versus our peers? How do interactions with us go? You know, we do that after they call us. We do that now digitally after they’ve used some kind of a digital asset website, typically. And we’re looking to do more and more of that as we become more digitally mature. Just staying connected and being able to help people.
04:48 Lisa Longnecker: You know, a lot of roles in the organization don’t get to spend time directly with customers. And so, the closer we can get them to our customers and their feedback on their needs, that’s the job well done there.
05:00 Brian Poppe: Who knew that improving the customer experience started with something as simple as just asking them? That’s great. So, speaking of that, what’s something surprising we learned about how customers want to work with us along the way?
05:12 Lisa Longnecker: Sure. Sure. I mean, one of the things and we when we look back on it, we always think, geez, should we have been surprised by that? But we started sending text messages to customers here in the last couple of years and realized that what we’d really done is opened a two-way channel dialog, if you will, and then wanting to respond back to us.
And that really was unique. And it just opens your mind to, you know, when you get into these digital environments, you really have these great opportunities to dialog to understand customers better, hear from them directly while they’re in the middle of the processes. And so, we definitely were surprised and excited about that, so much so that we actually received a text message with some family photos in it from one of our recipients that, you know, was just like pinging us back and adding attachments. Who knew, right? But there you have it.
06:03 Brian Poppe: I hope we ended up on like some group chat or something with like the rest of their family plus Mutual of Omaha. That’s great.
06:07 Lisa Longnecker: Yeah, that’d be awesome with it just a little logo like, here we are.
06:13 Brian Poppe: So glad to be a part of your family. That’s amazing.
06:15 Maura Ramsey: So, Lisa, for those candidates looking to apply for a position in your area, what are the characteristics or skills that you’re looking for in them and what advice do you have for those applying for those positions?
06:27 Lisa Longnecker: Sure. I’m glad to talk about that a little bit more. It’s one of the unique things that my team does to try to bring that voice of customer back into the organization. So, one of the primary things that we that we really look for is customer obsession. You know, how passionate are you about getting really close to our customers and understanding them deeply and then being a really good connector back into the organization of what you learn. You know, the job is to learn and share and make sure that people can get connected and be able to use what they learn in their next actions. So that’s a really important thing for candidates that are applying into our role.
07:00 Lisa Longnecker: If I look at Mutual more broadly, I think the advice would be, don’t think the first role is the role that you’re going to have for very long and certainly not at the end of your tenure at mutual. There are so many opportunities across the organization. And you’ve heard Brian and I both say that we’ve moved through, you know, various destinations in the org, and I think that’s fairly commonplace. And so, you should expect that you can have a career that’s full of variety, different roles, different opportunities, acumen, all those kinds of things.
07:33 Brian Poppe: That is one of the great perks about a company as big as Mutual of Omaha is. You can have a variety of careers and not actually have to change companies. So that’s super great. Well, Lisa, thanks for joining us today.
07:42 Lisa Longnecker: You’re welcome. Glad to do it.
07:45 Brian Poppe: And thank you all for watching. This has been another episode of the Tech Talk podcast. So, on behalf of Mutual Omaha, thanks, everyone.
07:53 Maura Ramsey: Thank you.
07:54 Lisa Longnecker: Thank you.