Anna Jiwon Park has been covering the politics at The Korea Times since the summer of 2024, when she joined the press pool for the Office of the President in Korea. Prior to that, she spent about five years reporting extensively on financial markets, regulatory authorities and the financial industry. She joined The Korea Times in 2019 after spending eight years as a broadcast journalist at Arirang TV, Korea’s leading global broadcaster, covering politics, defense and culture.
MetLife enhances interactions between customers, sales agents
The Health Friends program is part of MetLife's 360Health, the firm's end-to-end preventive health program launched in 2018 across Asia. / Courtesy of MetLife Korea
By Anna J. Park
By Anna J. Park
In an effort to increase quality of interactions between insurance sales agents and customers, MetLife Korea has been successfully running its Health Friends program ― a special health education program for agents ― since last year.
The five-week health education program consists of lectures from renowned doctors at Samsung Hospital, aiming to improve understanding on chronic and serious illnesses Koreans suffer most, including strokes, cancer, diabetes and high blood pressure.
Fifty selected sales agents participated in the first round of the Health Friends program for this year ending in mid-May, and two more rounds will be held later this year.
The program was launched as a pilot program last year in collaboration with Kangbuk Samsung Hospital and Green Cross to provide sales agents with training covering various medical topics. Participating sales agents showed as much as a 16 percent higher productivity than the average.
The special health training program is part of 360Health, an end-to-end health solution MetLife launched in 2018 across Asia to help customers prevent illnesses, get access to treatment, ongoing care, and financial support and enhance engagement with customers across all stages of life.
“We want to engage customers across our relationship, so that we can really understand how their needs are changing and how we can make sure we create solutions that flex with time so that the solution can adapt to the various needs of customers,” an official from MetLife Korea said.
“We want to change the way the conversation happens between an agent and a customer. To this end, the agents themselves need to be knowledgeable about critical illnesses and healthcare services. By building expertise of agents through the program, we expect they will be able to have more meaningful dialogue with customers and enhance interaction with them.”