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CASE STUDY: REDESIGN OF SUITE OF AGENT TOOLS
Enterprise, B2B, Insurance, End to End Design
Background
Safeco (a branch of Liberty Mutual) offers insurance that is typically sold to consumers through independent agents. An agent facing set of tools needed to be redesigned to accommodate new functionality, changing business practices, and recently developed automation. These tools would allow agents to easily transfer a "book" of business from another carrier to Safeco, and allow them to monitor the ongoing status of this "book transfer" in real time.
What is a Book Transfer anyway?
To illustrate this concept, imagine that the Lake Union Insurance Agency has a number of customers with flood insurance through one of Safeco's competitors. The competitor decides to stop offering flood insurance in light of recent climate events. All of the agent's customers now don't have the coverage they need. The agent needs to find a new carrier that offers this product line to transfer these customers over in bulk.
Business Goals
Increase conversion rates (how many of these customers were successfully converted from the original carrier to Safeco). This number translates directly to dollars.
Reduce the amount of hands-on time Safeco's territory managers needed to devote to each individual agency.
Make it easy for agents to identify potential problems early in the process.
Research
The business stakeholders had opinions as to why the bulk transfers hadn't been performing as successfully as they would like, but they were mostly based on anecdotal evidence and guesses. I arranged for moderated interviews with agents who were in various stages of a book transfer to understand their current processes and pain points. These agent interviews uncovered a few things...
Findings
Agents did not have direct visibility into how the transfer process was going. Instead, agents relied on (sometimes inconsistent) direct communication from their Safeco territory managers and reps for this information.
Although highly profitable for Safeco, bulk book transfers are relatively uncommon with smaller agencies, and as such, agents do not always know the best practices.
Despite the fact that Safeco provided some tools to help, the tools didn't really meet agent's needs, and there was very poor adoption of use.
How is the transfer performing?
Before the need to transfer the book, agents had been making money from these policies, and didn't want to lose business they already had. Based on the user research, we realized that agents needed a way to easily visualize the data of the book transfer's performance allowing them to easily identify problems early on, and take corrective action.
View of conversion rates metrics screen from Book Transfer Tool
Initial Designs
In conjunction with the business strategy team, we came up with certain metrics that we thought would be most useful for agents determining the health of the transfer. Initial wireframes were created and shown to the regional managers and reps to collect their input.
Unmoderated User Testing
We then conducted quick unmoderated testing with a group of agents to gather user feedback about how useful the information would be to them, as well as gather feedback about how this tool would work with their current process workflow.
Challenges
A problem that we encountered along the way was getting participants for user studies. Although book transfers are highly profitable for Safeco, they are relatively uncommon for the average agency. Partners in the business were able to help identify agents that were in the process of a book transfer, but really wanted to limit how much time we were asking active agents to participate in user testing. During this stage, it was decided that short unmoderated studies with smaller sample sizes would be best. Also, due to busy agent workloads, we added a $20 incentive to encourage participation.
A tool to help
After listening to agent interviews, it became clear that many agencies did book transfers so infrequently, that it wasn't clear exactly how they could improve conversion rates. To address this issue, a tool was added to the suite called Manage My Transfer, which was designed to guide agents.
Presenting these Best Practices
Based on analysis of past successful transfers, my business partners had determined that agents could optimize conversion rates by completing these tasks in the order presented. By presenting actionable tasks, Safeco could influence agents to adopt known best practices. These tasks were tied to existing email push notifications to encourage action.
Tool Adoption and Analytics
Throughout the process, I was able to conduct user testing to validate not only how the agents felt about the new features, but also validate discoverability of features, and ease of use. We incorporated Heap Analytics code hooks into the code base to get continuous feedback as to how users are using the tools which helped inform future iterations.
As a Sales Tool
The tools have also had the added benefit of giving the Safeco territory reps talking points to address concerns about the potential complexity of a large book transfer. Many agencies can be reluctant to initiate this process if they are unfamiliar with the ins and outs of how to handle one.
Reps have reported that in addition to being able to offer their in person assistance, they have been able to use the Manage my Transfer tools as a selling point with reluctant agents.
Some Considerations
At Liberty Mutual, I was on a team of 10 designers. As a product/UX designer, I was solely responsible for the end to end design of these agent facing tools themselves. I adhered to Safeco style guidelines and was not responsible for the creation of the overall aesthetic, which was dictated by our senior visual designer.
Additionally, there was a complementary set of customer facing tools being developed in parallel by one of my teammates. Throughout this process we worked very closely as there was some overlap in functionality and back-end systems that both applications utilized. Throughout the process I worked closely with another designer, various developers, product owners, and business stakeholders.
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