Insurance tech
Broker prospecting tool
Overview
I worked with our clients to leverage our market data and offer new ways to enhance their prospecting process for new business opportunities. Prospecting was an area we identified as an opportunity for us to offer a valuable service in the market and for our clients. It was my job to help validate the problem and work with a cross-functional team across the business to explore, ideate, and design a solution for this opportunity.
The problem
The business needed to grow is value offering for our broker tool and prospective clients in that space. We already provide some organisation summary data for brokers, which is where this prospecting opportunity sprouted from.
Our clients value this view of the global market, but can only search for organisations one at a time, and they need to know who they are looking for. We have the potential to offer them a more powerful tool to explore new businesses and leads.
Process
My approach
As this project has the potential to be very large in scope, here is an overview of the end-to-end approach and process I followed. I am a strong believer in the double diamond framework and always try to emulate its methods in my work and projects I work on.
Collaborated with Customer Success and another designer to run a client workshop and interviews, mapping the prospecting workflow and identifying pain points.
Synthesized research with the product manager and product owner to define key problem statements.
Created and iterated on wireframes, reviewing with the product team and internal subject matter experts for feedback.
Led a 3 Amigos session with developers to assess feasibility and technical constraints..
Built a clickable prototype and coordinated client testing sessions with the customer success team.
Updated designs based on feedback, finalized visuals, and worked with the prodcut owner to write user stories and walk the dev team through the solution
Research
The first step was to talk to our clients and users to understand their current prospecting process and pain points. This led to arranging face-to-face interviews and workshops with a number of our clients. Understanding our users' pain points and what is valuable to them is key to my design process.
The problem
After talking to the client and interviewing some of our users, we came up with some key statements that would form the focus and foundation when thinking about solutions. This allowed me to begin ideating with clear goals in mind.
How might we... build upon our organisation data to help improve our users ability to prospect by reducing the manual workload.
How might we... allow our users to better interact with our data to be more useful when evaluating organisations
Ideation
Having a clear direction I could now start to ideate in the form of sketched wireframes. These would be discussed and iterated upon with the product managers and internal SMEs' alongside our marine working group.
Prototype & Testing
Once we have agreed internally on our best potential solution, I put together a clickable prototype with the intention of taking it to our clients and users to test our ideas and gather feedback.
Together with the product manager, we worked with the customer success team to organise client meetings where we can showcase the prototype.
Key findings
From the sessions we ran with our clients, we gathered a lot of feedback on their expectations and improvements. Here are some of the key points we discovered during this process. I have also added some wireframes below, which I created in response to this feedback, with the intention of adding these features into the scope of the project.
Our users wanted some more information about the organisations. A key point was the average turnover rate of vessels.
All the users we talked to wanted an indication if they already have insurance policies/contracts with any of the organisations they prospect.
We took the initiative to show the prototype to different client personas, in this case, Underwriters and P&I clubs. They were surprisingly positive about it and saw the opportunity to gain more understanding about their clients (Shipowners), and ways to manage their portfolios.
It was mentioned multiple times that having some sort of target list where the user can favourite/bookmark organisations to look at later, or want to regularly check.
The ability to define the search criteria with more detailed information, such as physical characteristics like engine types.
Final designs
Based on the key findings and feedback from our users I updated the designs. They can now be properly refined with our developers and written up as user stories.
Prospecting dashboard
Define search parameters
Organisation results page
Organisation overview
Outcome
The prospecting tool was well received and stood to provide significant ROI for the business and Quest Marine product. However, the scope was quite large, and we would need to manage expectations and put forward a realistic plan for delivery. This prospecting tool is currently in development.
The prospecting tool had a very positive reception from our broker clients and would form a large part of our future offering to this persona and segment of the market.
The unexpected interest from our Underwriting and P&I clients meant that this tool has a higher potential ROI.
Due to the increased scope of this project, I worked with the Product Manager and Product Owner to break up the tool into smaller deliverable stages. This way we could ensure a more efficient delivery plan.
Retrospective
Looking back there were some areas where I would have like to spend more time if given the option, and potentially taken a different approach before fully investing into the development of the tool.
I would have liked to do more discovery into the individual motivations of the user, as they still heavily rely on personal connections as a means to conduct business.
I would have liked to do more usability testing; however, due to the low digital and data literacy of our users, this was quite challenging. To get around this, I did leverage our internal industry experts; however, they tend to have more context and bias than our users.
I think we could have chosen to create a 'smoke and mirrors' POC, which we could have used to test and observe how our client uses it before fully investing in development.