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Shaping the Future of Insurance Digital Servicing

Concept Prototype
UX Design
Desirability Research
Usability Research
Business Challenge
The insurer was looking to define a future-state digital servicing strategy to be used as the north star vision for upcoming digital initiatives - that brings better customer experience, streamlines digital interactions, and drives long-term business growth.
MVP design focused on enabling a customer channel to enhance the agent-led policy application journey.
Project duration: 6 months
My Role
As the UX Designer on the delivery team, supported the strategy phase to visualise the service concepts and delivered UX solution for the MVP implementation phase. I have also wore the Design Researcher hat to plan and conduct desirability and usability testings.
Business team:
Head of Business Transformation, a group of senior stakeholders,
1 x Product Owner, 1 x Delivery Lead, 2 x Business Analysts
Delivery team:
1 x Design Lead, 2 x Service Designers, 1 x UX Designer (My role), 2 x UI Designers

Visualising service concepts with rapid prototypes and storyboards

In the Strategy Phase, Service Designers were in the driver seats leading senior stakeholders through discovery to identify the customer and operational pain points of the as-is servicing journey and align on the reframed problem statement, followed by leading the co-creation and turning ideas into 8 service concepts.
How might we create a north star vision for servicing that could bring best-in-class customer experience while optimising operational efficiency to drive long-term business growth?
That's when us, UX and UI Designers, came in to bring the service concepts to life, so that we could visualise the end-to-end to-be digital servicing journey and better tell the story of how the future state looks like for the senior stakeholders.

With my primary focus being rapid prototyping for key screens in the journey, I worked with UI Designers to co-create storyboards for the to-be journey illustrating the interactions between the customer, the agent and the corresponding digital tools they used.

Validating ideas' desirability with customers

Moving next, we then started planning for the desirability testing to validate and understand how customers perceive the ideas. While Design Lead was mobilising the research logistics with research agency, I took a stab to develop the research plan that was used as research brief for the agency - for each of the 8 service concepts, I pulled out the design assumptions to create a list of hypothesis and evaluation focus, supported with any relevant rapid prototype as visual cue.

As we observed the research sessions, we made use of Miro to capture insights, which enabled us to swiftly synthesise the findings real-time and validate if the features could address the unmet needs or uplift customer satisfaction. As a result, after evaluating the desirability and viability of the ideas, we concluded the Strategy Phase with a suggested list of prioritised features for MVP implementation, while senior stakeholders socialised the servicing strategy internally and continued to plan for implementation.

Building the MVP across customer and agent channels to facilitate policy application and onboarding journey

As we swiftly continued the momentum and progressed into MVP Implementation Phase, the focus was to re-design the agent-led digital servicing journey from policy application to account activation.

With the agent tool being the only digital tool on the journey, here are the key problems in the existing agent-led journey
1 ) there was a heavy reliance on agent’s manual efforts to facilitate application process with customers, leading to operational inefficiency and lengthened process time
2 ) customers were using social media and emails to share documents with agent, leading to potential security issues
3 ) lack of digital methods to secure signatures from all parties, make initial premium payment, or to track application progress

We had then started working around the idea of creating a customer-facing channel, so that customers can complete simple tasks on their own or track their application without waiting for agent assistance, which also helps streamlining the overall process.
HMW better facilitate the agent-led policy application journey by enabling a secure two-way digital channel, so as to empower customers with visibility and simple task completion, reduce friction, optimise agents’ operational efficiency?
As the UX Designer, I started off with defining the high-level view of the experience by mapping out the happy path of the end-to-end journey across the agent and customer channels - from initial enquiry conversation, agent processing the the application, customer using the digital channel to submit documents and signatures, agent reviewing the application, to customer making payment and activating their account upon application approval.

Then, I worked with the BAs to understand the exceptional use cases and complex scenarios (e.g. insured is not the policy owner, multiple insured, change of requests, etc) so as to map out those journeys accordingly.

After aligning the journeys with Product Owner, I further zoomed into one level down to define the detail user flows (e.g. every step flow, elements interactions, error case handlings and scenario-based variations) for each of the channels. UI Designers then worked with Design System to create hi-fi mock ups.

Evaluating product usability

Before moving into development, we ran usability testing to ensure desirable experiences are being translated into usable products that users can effectively and efficiently interact with them.

I then created the usability research plan - from defining the research goal, defining the participants recruitment criteria, designing the tasks flow for testing, writing the detailed discussion guide and questions, to creating the interactive prototype in 2 languages using the UI mock ups.

I also wore the UX Researcher hat by conducting the 12 remote research sessions and synthesising the research insights. As a result, we had a satisfactory SUS score of 79. Product Owner then proceeded to get ready for product development and started conversations around market release plans, while taking took some of the additional suggestions from customer into backlog for further exploration.