Travelers is a global B2B insurance company. They were at a crossroads. Disruptive companies were developing new and innovative insurance products which were cutting into their market share. They had invested globally in a new B2C product which was not working.
They needed to reinvent themselves from the ground up as a data-driven company, which would be seen as modern and innovative.
When I arrived, the previous lead UX consultant had just been unceremoniously moved on. I was given four days to prove that was 'UX' something useful and not a waste of time. So I created a Vision piece which showed how they could simplify their offer and that there was a connection between customer experience and increased profits. It worked.
I was fantastically lucky to be teamed up with two amazing people - the European Head of Delivery and a superb BA. We ran around the UK talking to clients and creating a detailed As-Is journey covering every customer touchpoint and isolating all the pain points.
After talking to all the customers it was clear that in order to sell a Travelers policy, they needed to send emails, scan faxes, write out letters based on photocopies and get on the phone. The solution was obvious. To turn all those different touchpoints into a single seamless digital experience.
Some senior stakeholders were resistant to change, so my strategy was to explain how their individual functions were vital to defining the new service - their knowledge was key. All I was doing was enabling their input.
As it was quite a major departure in terms of processes, the obvious first major step was to specify an MVP, which in this case was a mixture of a limited set of high value policies plus a focus on key functionality. I built the initial prototype around this, following the BA's system architecture.
Referrals are not a good thing. When a customer makes a choice which creates some kind of conflict in the system, the whole application used to grind to a halt - it is 'referred.'
This was losing a huge amount of sales. I came up with an innovative way to avoid these referrals by changing the system flow. There was some pushback, but the new model reduced referrals by 90%, so it was soon adopted.
At this point, Travelers released their global B2C service, which was competing directly with the like of Hiscox. There was a strong push from IT to descope my work and use the B2C product for the B2B market. However the path an individual might take was dramatically different to a B2B salesman who had fifty or so clients.
I showed how how my new model was more in-line with B2B needs and yet could also re-use much of the code created, to efficiently create a better solution.
Although as with any service, it can be simplified down to basic ideas, insurance has a number of detailed process steps. These might be edge cases, new policies versus renewals, the list goes on. As I had been designing the product we had been documenting every conceivable edge case and user journey and making sure that the design delivered on all fronts. It did.
My final step was to convert the ideas into epics and stories in JIRA, and work on the sprint backlog. The design was split into all the different templates and wireframes and annotated to the level the development team specified.