Allison Westbrook joined the Workforce Benefits Division at Pacific Life as its 15^th employee in 2022. Workforce Benefits is the newest division within Pacific Life that is building a workforce benefits business from the ground up. They offer group benefits products to companies to provide their employees with benefits like dental, vision, disability insurance, and more. This team differentiates their products from the competition with a highly automated, digital-first, seamless customer experience.

Allison contributes to the mission of Workforce Benefits as their AVP of Integration & Data Engineering. She has combined her extensive experience with a passion for innovation, helping lead transformative projects. In this interview, she shares insights about her role, career path, and why Pacific Life is a great place to grow.

What initially attracted you to join Pacific Life and how has your career path evolved here?

The creation of the Workforce Benefits Division (WBD) within Pacific Life was incredibly exciting for me as I’d worked in Group Benefits in the past and was attracted by the opportunity to build cutting-edge customer solutions that didn’t exist in the industry. A former colleague had joined the WBD team and I reached out to find out more about the vision and opportunity. Pacific Life has a reputation as a company that really prioritizes its employees and after several conversations, I knew that the culture and team was the right place for me.

I joined the WBD team as an Integrations and Data Leader from another group benefits carrier. I have 25 years of experience in building business solutions leveraging data and analytics in insurance and other industries. I was employee number 15 in Workforce Benefits and developed our integrations and data strategy for the build of the business. As we constructed our digital ecosystem, we realized that with 50+ systems, we were going to require more integrations than originally thought to build the connected digital framework that we envisioned. My role grew to managing three integrations scrum teams and a data management team.

What is your current role and what does a typical day look like?

I lead the Integrations and Data Engineering teams as an AVP within Pacific Life Technology for the Workforce Benefits Division. My job responsibilities include driving the strategy for integrations across our connected ecosystem and building a best-in-class data warehouse. We’ve continued to leverage the best technologies at our disposal and have been incredibly lucky that the Pacific Life Technology team had already vetted and were using many of the innovative data and integration tools in the market.

My typical day involves aligning people on the vision of what we’re building and laying out the path to get from the vision to the implementation. Team members come to me to pull together components across multiple functions and technologies to develop a new solution. There's a lot of identifying places where people aren't on the same page and helping bridge the communication gap, problem solving to helping team members break down roadblocks, and engaging a variety of teams to collaborate on resolving issues. I get particularly excited about building an innovative solution and delivering on commitments to support and add value to the business. Part of my role is sharing that path to realizing the vision and getting the teams excited about the possibilities and business value we are delivering. 

Could you share a milestone that you're particularly proud of achieving?

Since joining the Workforce Benefits team, we’ve launched dental, vision, life, and disability insurance products with a fully integrated digital experience for onboarding and enrollment. We’ve achieved onboarding for a new customer in 91 minutes from notification of sale to enrollment compared to an average of 6 weeks at other major carriers. This means that we can get a customer’s employees enrolled in benefits 91 minutes after they’ve decided to place their dental, vision, and life insurance with us. It’s an incredible improvement in the industry. We’ve built strategic partner integrations through fully connected, real-time APIs with three of the top Benefit Administration partners and are the envy of the group benefits industry regarding this technology delivery.

How has Pacific Life supported your career growth and development?

My manager and the leadership team of Pacific Life and Workforce Benefits have been incredibly supportive. The culture they’ve built is based on transparency, communication, and the ability to raise up issues and collaboratively work together to solve them. This is a great environment for me since I love solving problems and I don’t like to see issues grow into bigger problems. The culture really enabled me to thrive as there is a great deal of value put on hearing different viewpoints and a belief that the product of that healthy discourse will produce the best products and build a culture where everyone has a voice and is valued.

What advice would you give to someone starting their career in technology?

Try to pursue an area that you find interesting and dive in, take ownership, and work to drive business value. If you stay aligned to value creation, your results will get recognized. Working on innovations can be exciting and it is important to find ways to learn about recent technologies. Adding value is about incremental innovation, so even small improvements in an existing technology process or a legacy technology process can make a significant difference to the users. It doesn’t have to be something big and brand new. Providing someone automated access to new information, or cutting out steps for a operations person by implementing a technology enhancement have huge benefits on efficiency, morale and effectiveness.