Insurance roadshow
Creating a truly customer-centric focus in organisations
In large organisations, you often need to get really hands on to explain the importance of UX to the business. In corporations of a certain size, presentations are frequent, and though attendees are present, it doesn't necessarily mean they are engaged.
There's often a lot of talk about 'championing the customer', 'customer-centricity' and 'digital transformation' to improve the customer and user experience. However, large organisations can often be siloed and without internal understanding from a true customer perspective, it can be hard to make real change.
I work hard to break down siloes within companies and to embed customer understanding - which is after all the bedrock of UX.
Step 1: Zurich Customer Roadshow - the brief
The word came to the UK from Zurich Global that one of Zurich's new pillars and areas of focus would be better understanding of our customer base, with a view to providing a joined-up brand and customer experience.
Zurich offers a wide range of products, serviced and underwritten by separate parts of the business and also by third parties.
Some services are also sold direct, some via aggregators, some via brokers and financial advisers - all of these products are serviced internally by different departments and offices across the country (and globe).
It seemed that before we could provide a seamless CX and UX journey, we would need to improve internal understanding of the customer and the products we offer in the various different business sectors - across the UK (including with a view to improve our EMPS scores).
So, I volunteered.
Step 2; Making it interactive
With a c-suite sponsor, I went about forming a plan. I wanted to design an interactive event that broke with the usual format of a presentation about why our customers should be our focus as, having been to plenty of these myself, though interesting, they can ultimately be forgettable.
I also wanted to engage not just different business areas (who all work with a certain sub-set of products, and had little knowledge of areas outside their own), but also the different disciplines within those areas, in a collaborative and interactive way.
I conducted interviews with each of the different business areas (general insurance, life insurance, commercial insurance, financial services, public sector insurance and high net worth client insurance) to better understand the needs and requirements of their customers.
Then it was time to engage and recruit volunteers from each business area, across the country.
Step 3; Getting the business together
Once I had the facts and had the outline for some high level personas, I needed to engage each department, and call for a team of volunteers from each UK office to help run a face-to-face interactive event in various office locations across the country.
This was quite a new approach to what were often fairly traditional offices in locations raging from London to Glasgow to Birmingham to Swindon.
Having found and recruited volunteers, and explained the proposition, I engaged the events team to help organise attendees and where the event would be hosted.
I then worked out where the most 'traditionally, run offices were, and arranged to host events at these locations myself.
Step 4; Creating informed and accurate personas
With the information gained from interviews with front line servicing staff, underwriters, brokers and end-clients, I created a suite of high level personas, one for each business area.
I then matched the persona up to the products we offer that would service their requirements. After checking these with legal and gaining sign off (a lengthy process!), I created a script for volunteers to refer to on the day of the event.
I also created a script for the event lead at each location, instructing attendees to take a range of persona cards and find the correct 'stall' where a Zurich representative would service the persona and explain what products we could offer them.
Step 5; The scripts
I created a detailed script aligned to each persona (all thoroughly checked by legal and underwriting, but not too dry!).
The volunteers on each stand were sent the script ahead of time, and I ran through these on a call with each office's volunteer team to make sure they were comfortable with the information they would be reading out to attendees in the role of Zurich representative for each business area.
It was great speaking to all the different business areas, and the volunteers were really engaged with the idea of getting out from behind the desk, and speaking to a wide range of their colleagues in a role-playing event rather than a presentation.
It was a lovely way to collaborate, and everyone - including me - learned a lot about the intricacies of the business as a whole.
Outcomes
The events were a hit!
The business now has simple, clear personas to share - something that was missing before
Great feedback came back from all attendees, which we collated and presented back to the c-suite.
Siloes were broken down, and the various parts of the business fed back that they had found it genuinely interesting to learn what other parts of the business did - most had little idea of operations outside their business area
Our ENPS score improved +7
Happy bosses - they plan to run the event once a year, for new starters and those who want to attend