Lincoln Financial Group achieves audacious digital ambitions with Quadient Inspire

A complex technology estate was getting in the way of a seamless customer experience

At the time of this case study, Lincoln Financial Group was a 115-year-old Fortune 200 financial services company serving more than 17 million customers across retirement, insurance and wealth protection. Growth through acquisitions had brought many products and technology platforms into the organization, while four lines of business and corporate functions all relied on enterprise IT.

The company wanted to create a better experience for both policyholders and internal teams. That meant bringing together a fragmented technology environment, reducing the operational burden of paper-heavy processes, and creating a digital foundation that could scale across business lines.

Executive leadership launched Project Ambition with three priorities:

1. Improve the way the organization does business.

2. Enhance the customer experience.

3. Innovate with digital and data.

Building a reusable digital communications foundation

Lincoln Financial looked for technology and partners that could support enterprise scale, preserve brand consistency and provide reusable foundational capabilities. The company selected Quadient Inspire as a core component of its electronic communications platform, including a preference-management environment that could connect earlier initiatives with larger future programs.

The first use case focused on electronic communications in the retirement plan services business, where customers already showed strong digital adoption and printed statements carried significant print and postage costs. Lincoln Financial spent about a year testing and learning while establishing the initial framework, including workflows, template designs and surrounding processes.

Once that foundation was in place, the next business line and use case could move much faster and with fewer resources.

From static PDF forms to guided digital experiences

Historically, about 1.4 million forms were downloaded from Lincoln Financial's website each year. Customers completed the static PDFs and returned them by email or mail. Those downloads represented roughly 7,200 unique forms, supported by a back-office operation that had to manage data across documents that did not share information.

Incomplete or incorrect information also created data-quality problems and prevented some forms from being completed and logged successfully. Moving forms to the Quadient engine allowed Lincoln Financial to replace static documents with guided digital experiences and bring its life insurance business into the broader digital initiative.

A small use case with a large operational impact

Lincoln Financial started with the beneficiary-change form in its life insurance business. According to the case study, the original form had an unacceptably high number of issues. After the Quadient-powered experience was implemented, reported issues fell to zero and processing time dropped from weeks to minutes. A small team delivered the implementation in approximately 30 days.

Lincoln Financial also wanted business teams to take on more of the work themselves. Quadient Professional Services supported training so business users could manage many functions within the communications framework, including configuration capabilities.

Scaling the foundation across the organization

With the core digital platform established, Lincoln Financial was positioned to extend the same capabilities across additional lines of business and address new opportunities one at a time.

The case study describes this foundation as a way to move beyond repeated debates about the cost of building separate services for each business line. Instead, teams could solve one business problem, capture the value, and then move to the next.

For Lincoln Financial, the broader objective went beyond digitizing individual communications. The program was designed to improve customer experience, reduce cost and friction, strengthen brand consistency and reinvest captured savings into the business.