Service Design. Ben Reason
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FIGURE 1.3 The new routines were added to the CRM system. A field for customer-specific notes (on the left) functions like a sticky note.
Simplifying IT Infrastructure
All of a customer’s details are entered into Gjensidige’s S2000 mainframe system, which crunches through the numbers and risk analysis in the actuarial tables to produce an insurance offer. Management said that it was the most brilliant system in the insurance industry in Norway. S2000 is very flexible, which means salespeople can manipulate more parameters than Gjensidige’s competitors, but salespeople did not see an advantage in this flexibility. It was too hidden, and in their conversations with customers, the salespeople realized they did not need this flexibility.
Such a flexible system also has the overhead of being more complicated. For instance, a customer could not have a house and a car bundled up in one insurance product. This made it more difficult to create a joined-up experience for the customer.
Putting Insights into Practice
One of the things that hampers product innovation in insurance is the time delay. Organizations only find out whether an innovation will make or lose them money after they see the level of claims, which can take several years. Thus, the insurance industry traditionally is conservative about innovation. The customer insights gathered by the design team helped inspire confidence in bringing new ideas to market.
Using the material from the insights research, Gjensidige ran co-design workshops with different groups within the company and generated 97 ideas, five of which were chosen for further development. Finally, the team came up with one new service proposition.
Gjensidige had about a dozen products for everything to do with people, from individuals to families. From an insurance point of view, this meant that they had a fantastic array of tailor-made products for different eventualities. From a customer point of view, this meant that people felt like they were faced with impossible life insurance choices, such as gambling whether they would die of cancer or in a car accident, because nobody could afford to buy all of the policies and be 100% covered. Customers faced the same dilemma when choosing which possessions to insure—the dog or the laptop?
The breakthrough concept for Gjensidige was to go from offering 50 products to just two: one to cover the individual and his or her family, and one to cover everything they own. From an insurance point of view, this was very radical, but in an example of the value of the expertise that exists inside organizations, the basic idea came from Gunnar Kvan, a very experienced Gjensidige actuary, during a series of design workshops. He suggested that it was possible to think about the company’s offerings in a dramatically different way. He had been working on this idea for five years, but had not been able to get people to see his point. He had no way of expressing his view in terms of what it would mean as an experience for customers, but he knew the financial algorithms could be modeled differently. The design team sat down with him and went through how such a service could be put together. It would require hard-core mathematical engineering in a huge spreadsheet running in the background to make it happen.
Experience Prototyping the Service
Anders Kjeseth Valdersnes, the design team’s Microsoft Excel maestro, built a prototype of the product in Excel, which had all the tools required to handle the actuarial tables and live information visualization. Rather than spending a week or two designing and coding a Web prototype with a functioning back-end database, Anders did it in two days and designed it to look like a website so that it could be tested with customers (Figure 1.4).
FIGURE 1.4 An experience prototype of the insurance website built in Excel so that the real data could be used when testing with customers.
With this prototype, Gjensidige were able to carry out experience prototype testing with customers discussing and buying insurance, a salesperson selling insurance, and someone trying to make a claim. They tested what it was like for customers to try to buy the services face to face and what it was like for the sales staff. They also tested this process over the phone and observed the process from both sides of the call. To test the claims process, they went through the material with someone who had just had an accident. Actual staff and actual customers took part, and even though they knew they were taking part in testing, the conversations they had were very real. Through this process, the project team learned a lot about what needed to be done to shape, explain, and sell the new service proposition.
It was clear from the prototyping that the new approach changed the conversation from being about buying products to one about service. It meant that customers considered what they could afford on a monthly basis, taking into account what they earned, what was in their “rainy day” savings account, and what they would need in the event of a tragedy. They were able to see the difference their decisions about excess and payout levels made to their premiums, and the conversation was much more open, with the customers in control.
A series of touchpoints were prototyped—the one-page contract, informational leaflets, fake advertisements in a financial newspaper and a tabloid newspaper (Figure 1.5), and the bill customers would receive at the end—so that a broad range of the service experience could be tested.
FIGURE 1.5 Creating fake newspaper ads—one for a financial broadsheet, the other for a tabloid—helped the team understand how the marketing of the service would feel in different contexts.
The one-page contract prototype was a good example of the difference between what people say and what they do (Figure 1.6). Many interviewees said that they did not read long contracts and thus did not know what was in them, leading to a lack of trust in the insurance company. They suggested that a one-page contract would be much friendlier. During prototyping, however, it turned out that customers did not trust a one-page contract either, fearing that too much important detail was hidden from them, as their previous policies had been about 40 pages. Gjensidige ended up creating contracts with around 5 to 10 pages.
Prototypes were also made of the claim process confirmation documents. Traditionally, customers simply received a letter stating, “We have received your claim,” which left them uncertain about how the claims process was handled within the company. The redesigned confirmation shows the customer how the process unfolds over time and helps to manage their expectations (Figure 1.7). This way they know when to be patient and let the process take its course, and when they have cause to follow up.
FIGURE 1.6 A prototype of the one-page contract so many interviewees claimed they would prefer. Evidence showed that they did not trust it.
FIGURE 1.7 A prototype of a redesigned claim confirmation. This document manages customer expectations by illustrating how the process unfolds over time.
Lastly, the team prototyped an offer sent out in the mail after a sales call or meeting (Figure 1.8). The insights research showed that this was one of the most crucial touchpoint failures, and the company did not realize the potential of improving it. Previously, customers had an interaction with a salesperson