THE OLD MUTUAL STORY

Bridging Traditional Financial Advice With Modern Advisor Technology

Established in 1845, Old Mutual is one of Africa’s leading financial services providers, offering a comprehensive portfolio of insurance, investment, and wealth management solutions. With a strong legacy and a forward-looking vision, the company empowers individuals and businesses to achieve long-term financial security.
Old Mutual actively invests in digital initiatives that simplify customer and advisor experiences. As part of this strategy, the company is modernizing advisor workflows and accelerating the adoption of internal digital tools. To support this shift, Old Mutual partnered with Whatfix to improve user adoption of its custom-built advisor applications and reduce inefficiencies across its advisory ecosystem.

THE CHALLENGE

Low Advisor Adoption of Its Complex Financial Applications

Old Mutual’s advisory team relies on two mission-critical internal advisor platforms to generate product quotations, manage leads, and track account holder (customer) activities. But with frequent platform updates and increasing process complexity, advisors struggled to complete tasks effectively. This led to workflow inefficiencies, underutilization of application features, and many avoidable support requests from advisors.

“We think financial services is a numbers game or an IT game through the implementation of digital capabilities, but in essence, it’s a relationship game,” shared Hein Pieters, Head of Advisor Solutions at Old Mutual. “Advisors need simple, intuitive tools that help them build those relationships, not get in the way.”

Traditional training methods proved too rigid and resource-intensive. Advisors were overwhelmed with information, and classroom training (both virtual and in-person) was not aligned with how modern employees consume information and connect it to their role. This led to low adoption of its internal advisor applications and resulted in many support tickets on utilizing the platforms.

“The tricky part is that there are continuous application enhancements and changes, and that links very closely to the need we’ve had for Whatfix as a digital adoption solution to improve the ease of use for advisors,” said Hein.

THE SOLUTION

Empowering Advisors with Contextual, Just-in-Time Support

Old Mutual partners with Whatfix DAP to simplify additional advisor training, reduce support volumes, and ensure smoother onboarding for new advisors. Whatfix was implemented across two major advisor platforms and is used daily by Old Mutual’s advisors.

With Whatfix, Old Mutual enabled its advisors within its custom application with embedded workflow support to drive user adoption and improve advisor engagement. Old Mutual’s advisor solutions team was able to drive adoption by creating:

Pop-Ups and Notifications to communicate updates in real-time, ensuring advisors stay informed of application updates, financial product plan changes, and process improvements.

Self Help to guide advisors with immediate answers directly inside its applications, drastically reducing reliance on support teams and enabling advisors with self-service experiences. It also enabled the support teams to focus on resolving more complex advisor support problems and create a better overall advisor experience.

Interactive walkthroughs (Flows) assist advisors as they work, eliminating the need for re-training, time-consuming help desk calls, or leaving the application to search for task documentation in their knowledge repositories.

“What sealed the deal for us with Whatfix is that it’s such a light-touch system. For any other digital adoption program in the past, we had to build APIs, which involved a lot of resource time,” said Hein on the seamless Whatfix deployment on its custom advisor application.

In just a few months, Old Mutual expanded from a 4% success rate in its in-app Self Help search results to an impressive 88% success rate, demonstrating the frictionless nature of Whatfix inside its financial advisor application. It also provided a real-time feedback loop to engage product and workflow improvements and identify areas of the application where relevant information should be shared with advisors to ensure they’re acting on contextual signals to provide a timely, personalized customer experience.

THE RESULTS

Old Mutual Enabled Advisors and Achieved Outcomes With Whatfix

The Old Mutual and Whatfix partnership was successful from the very beginning, delivering immediate results, including:

• 33% Reduction in Advisor Support Calls: Monthly advisor support queries fell, easing pressure on internal IT teams and third-party support centers.
• 88% Self Help Success Rate: Within six months, Whatfix empowered advisors to resolve most of their queries independently, without needing external assistance, through a helpful in-app support center overlaying advisor apps.
• Improved Advisor Experience: Advisors received the guidance they needed, in the moment, allowing them to focus more on building customer relationships and addressing customer needs.
• More Scalable Training Methods: Whatfix enabled Old Mutual to continuously upskill advisors with role-based learning and hands-on training, without draining internal resources. This accelerates new advisor time-to-proficiency, facilitates frictionless change for new compliance laws or workflow changes, and drives adoption of newly launched application features.

Most importantly, Whatfix helped Old Mutual align its digital strategy and internal tools with the real needs of its advisors, driving long-term value realization from its internal application investments, and empowering advisors to operate more efficiently, foster better customer relationships, address customer financial needs, and achieve positive business outcomes.