Using journey mapping to improve customer experience and increase adoption for a digitally focused insurer
Making insurance simple
Hastings Direct is one of the UK’s leading insurance brands, providing 3.1 million policies to their customers. Their agile, data driven and digitally focused approach helps deliver their vision to provide great value insurance in the most simple and straightforward way. Hastings Direct approached 383 for support in driving digital adoption, whilst also solving internal frictions, to create a best-in-class customer experience.
Identifying pain points
A key area of focus for Hastings Direct was considering how to provide customers with options to ‘self-serve’, reducing their reliance on traditional service channels and allowing them to communicate on their own terms, in their own way. Aligned to this, Hastings Direct wanted to explore internal frictions too, looking at the challenges and frustrations their team experienced when delivering great customer service. To achieve this, we needed to understand where users were struggling and what barriers might exist to digital adoption through a journey mapping project.
Getting to know you
To understand the existing customer journey and the business objectives, we began with a series of exploratory workshops. We chatted to key stakeholders at Hastings Direct about their expectations and desired outcomes, the technological landscape, competitive marketplace, customer segments, and business culture. We supported this by looking into their existing data, conducting competitive analysis, and performing UX reviews on key customer touch points.
Listening in
From here, it was time to see what things were like for the people actually interacting with customers, joining the contact centre team on call listening and screen sharing sessions. We were able to witness customer interactions first-hand, giving us invaluable insights into the systems and processes used by the team - and the frustrations they experienced whilst using them. These sessions were augmented with in-depth interviews with a dozen call handlers, supervisors and contact centre managers over three locations.
The voice of the customer
We concluded the research phase with user interviews, chatting to current and lapsed customers of Hastings Direct. We explored their experiences using the ‘Jobs to be Done’ methodology, reviewing their specific experiences making policy changes and engaging with the customer service team, as well as their wider expectations and how well these matched up to reality. We were able to find out about their experiences with other insurers and how their purchase decisions were influenced by ratings, recommendations and price comparison sites.
Mapping the journey
With the research phase complete, we moved on to creating the journey map. It quickly became apparent that we’d need more than one map to tell the full story, reflecting the experience of the Hastings Direct team as well as customers. We created three interconnected journey maps. When viewed separately, they illuminated the crucial elements affecting customers and internal teams. When viewed together, they revealed a complex web of cause-and-effect, showing how each impacted the other and affected the customer experience.
A roadmap for change
In the final playback session, we were able to present three connected journey maps, plotting over 100 customer goals, 400 customer pain points, and 300 internal frictions and challenges. These were brought to life with real customer stories, gathered directly from our interviews. Most importantly, we provided Hastings Direct with a list of prioritised recommendations, including a number of ‘quick wins’ alongside more in-depth, strategic initiatives that could be considered as part of the product roadmap.
