Insurance Customer Portal
Client was a global insurance company with 98,000 agents serving 30 million customers in 13 markets across 2 continents.
Business aimed to improve customer engagement, trust, and productivity while minimizing in-person interaction during Covid. I designed an integrated solution to assist agents sell policies virtually, replacing tedious and slow manual paperwork.
Frictionless multi-platform point of sales experience
As Covid emerged, new business development was at risk. Agents relied heavily on face-to-face interactions for lead generation and to close sales. However, because of Covid agents could no longer meet customers in person. I helped design a virtual platform for customers to upload documents, review their policies, sign the agreements and make payments so they no longer need to meet the agents to purchase the policy.
I worked on strategy, research, and design. I was responsible for stakeholder management, influencing and contributing to product strategy, design direction and managing sprint scope and velocity. I also facilitated workshops and sessions for requirements gathering, ideation and user research.
— CONTEXT
With the onset of 2020, COVID started affecting lives and businesses across geographies and industries. Insurance industry was not an exception. Heavy reliance on human interaction meant industry was vulnerable and at risk of widespread disruption to agents' day to day activities and customer relationships. Some of the key challenges business was facing included:
How to enable agents to continue business as usual?
How to win customer trust and build relationships given lack of in-person human interactions?
How to leverage existing tools and platforms for a quicker turnaround?
Some of the success criteria and KPIs were lower drop-offs, higher task completion rate, and improved NPS
— STRATEGY
"How do we enable agents and customers to interact and carry out the key task and activities virtually in simplest and easiest way possible."
After evaluating the business impact and considering the urgent requirements of the agents, the team collectively decided to prioritize the steps in the sales journey that have been negatively affected by the lack of in-person interactions. As most of the sales process could still be conducted online, I focused on improving the submission of policy applications. I negotiated the project's start date and developed a structured timeline.
— IDEATION & DESIGN
We as a team explored several ideas such as co-browsing, synchronous or asynchronous approach.
Common theme was to have a stand alone customer facing portal to enable customers to perform tasks in conjunction with agent platform. Finally, after considering pros and cons, we decided to go with customer portal that would sync asynchronously with agent platform without co-browsing. Once the direction was clear, I worked with UX designer to identify key scenarios and map the task flows.
— TESTING & ITERATION
With further inputs from PO and business stakeholders, I refined the flows and details. Then, I built the prototype to conduct usability test with customers in Hong Kong and Philippines. We recruited 22 participants in total who had at least one Manulife policy and a policy with one of the competitors. I applied mixed methods approach and used several techniques such as
Warm up : understand participants’ background, awareness
Tasks: Observe, learn users experience as they complete task
Interview: collect reflections and expectations following tasks
System Usability Scale: quantitatively rates impressions on usability
Post-test surveys: user’s profile and experience as a whole
Based on feedback, I made changes to the functionality and interaction, collaborated with the UI designer to finalize the visual design style guide and improve usability. I also conducted stress tests on the layout for local languages (e.g. Chinese, Vietnamese or Burmese), reviewed with stakeholders, and provided detailed specs for development. The feature was released in key markets first and was due to release in others in the future.
— What were the key features ?
22
Total number of participants
Hong Kong, Philippines
Test locations
10 / 12
used mobile / desktop to test
10 / 12
Single / married participants
This project, like any other, had its imperfection. To improve the project, we could have moved the payment process earlier so customers wouldn't need to talk to the agent so many times. However, given the urgency, we had to be flexible and move quickly.
I worked with stakeholders to organize requirements into logical and actionable scenarios, prioritized them, and made necessary trade-offs within our constraints. I encouraged the team to make smart assumptions, use existing information and best practices, and take calculated risks.