New York Life identified efficient knowledge capture and sharing as critical levers for operational enhancement and future growth.
One of the largest life insurance companies in the United States, New York Life maintains an unwavering commitment to innovating and being at the forefront of evolving technology trends. This includes leveraging technology, data, artificial intelligence (AI), and, more recently, generative AI to deliver exceptional experiences for clients and agents. New York Life seeks ways to increase agility across the enterprise to further the company’s growth and to help advance as an industry leader.
Eager to embrace a “learn-it-all” mindset, the New York Life team knew that speed, agility, and efficiency were key. As with any company with the size and scale of New York Life, the on-the-job experience of accessing and transferring knowledge could often be challenging.
Employees previously documented their knowledge by manually taking screenshots and adding them one-by-one to Word documents and PowerPoint slides. They recorded time-consuming videos that were tough to update. They held live meetings to walk their colleagues through complicated processes.
These approaches came at a cost. Employees with expertise were spending hours wrestling with manual documentation, updating old videos, or creating trainings. Those who needed to learn were often searching through shared drives and legacy systems, pausing and rewinding videos, and spending hours in walkthroughs for processes that would inevitably change.
As New York Life sought to find a better way, a partnership between New York Life and Scribe began in 2021 with an initial exploration of the commercial and strategic use cases for applying Scribe’s technology across various business units. This led to the development of a pilot across multiple New York Life teams facilitated by NYL Ventures, New York Life’s corporate venture capital team.
A pilot program leads to company-wide adoption.
New York Life’s initial rollout of Scribe focused on a handful of teams grappling with the challenges of manual documentation and ongoing updates. With Scribe, the ability to bring speed and efficiency to these processes quickly became clear and the road was paved for broader implementation.
The next phase of rollout focused on providing support in three specific situations:
These use cases quickly led to additional successes and word-of-mouth excitement, which prompted New York Life to expand the rollout further. An intranet post and open awareness sessions led to a waitlist of New York Life employees who were eager to start making use of Scribe.
Participating teams were supported with enablement and best practices to help shift their documentation practices to Scribe seamlessly. Each team used Scribe to drive efficiency aligned with their business priorities. For example, Scribe uses have included:
Across use cases, the tool’s ease of use and ability to expedite process documentation was evident.
“Scribe is the only solution I've ever seen that has people on our team actually excited to do documentation. For that purpose alone, it has been incredibly helpful to improve our processes."
- New York Life Actuarial Professional
Today, more than 80 teams at New York Life use Scribe, including Corporate Finance, Human Resources, Investment divisions, Product areas, Business Strategy, Marketing, and Technology.
With this widespread adoption comes a crucial question: What’s the ROI?
Time savings
Average hours each Scribe creator saves per month producing content
Increased efficiencies
The amount of work that New York Life employees estimate they use Scribe for
Between time saved in documentation and increased knowledge transfer, the benefits have added up for New York Life.
A key pillar of New York Life’s rollout has been collecting survey feedback from the company’s Scribe users. This allowed them not only to gather information on ROI, but also to surface ideas for new use cases within the organization.
In a recent survey conducted by New York Life, employees using Scribe reported saving up to 41.6 hours per month. With their time freed up from documenting processes manually, employees have greater ability to spend time on additional activities that drive business outcomes.
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To drive these efficiencies, some New York Life employees report using Scribe frequently, estimating that in a typical month, they use it for 20% of their work. It’s no coincidence that employees also reported high ease of use, which contributed significantly to adoption across the enterprise. On a scale of 1-5, New York Life employees reported an average 4.5/5 rating for ease of use and navigation. This was a key unlock in the seamless implementation across a broad range of teams.
Today, New York Life uses Scribe to drive value in a wide range of ways.
Improved employee efficiency
Searching for answers or asking colleagues to explain processes is a time drain that New York Life now increasingly avoids. The effect is far-reaching, with some Scribes accumulating views from hundreds of unique employees. Given that Scribe’s internal data shows that each viewer saves 15 minutes of learning time when they access a Scribe, that adds up!
“It used to take our team 2-3 hours to compile a step-by-step procedure, depending on complexity, and now, using Scribe, it takes an average of 45 minutes.”
- New York Life Product Professional
Reduced document maintenance
When a New York Life employee updates a Scribe, those changes are reflected automatically everywhere that the Scribe is embedded or linked, including in internal knowledge bases, wikis, and emails. This means that employees responsible for maintaining documentation spend less effort on time-consuming version control — and audiences have confidence they always have access to the latest procedure guides.
“Using Scribe ensures that if the procedure changes, it's simple to edit the SOP.”
- New York Life Product Professional
Reduced risk of losing institutional knowledge
Average tenure in the insurance industry can be significant, with employees amassing large amounts of institutional knowledge. If these employees were to leave — or even to transfer to other teams internally — this knowledge could be lost. With Scribe, New York Life makes it easy for employees to capture and share their best practices and process knowledge.
“Scribe has eliminated some of the apprehension of documenting work because the platform is easy to use.”
- New York Life Operations Professional
Enhanced regulatory precision
Accuracy is critical in any highly regulated industry. Detailed, precise work instructions are essential for employees to execute tasks quickly and accurately. For some regulated processes, SOPs are required. Using Scribe enables New York Life to align on and easily share internal how-to guides and SOPs.
“It’s very easy to follow documentation steps from a Scribe because of the screenshots and click targets. There is little, if any, back and forth between the document writer and the end user."
- New York Life Actuarial Professional
Today, New York Life is a valued Scribe customer, empowering the company’s employees to streamline tedious processes and focus on business-essential activities. Inspired by the success of New York Life’s internal rollout, NYL Ventures also became an investor, participating in Scribe’s $25M Series B funding round.
