Overview
Background
Hastings Direct is a multi-award-winning business and one of the UK's leading insurance providers of home and motor products. Established in 1997 and built on legacy systems, digital transformation became a key focus of their forward-looking strategy.
Challenge
Hastings Direct sought to improve its digital presence and customer experience across multiple channels. With every touchpoint and journey under the microscope, the challenge was to increase new customer numbers, reduce call centre contacts, accelerate digital adoption, and increase lifetime customer value.
My role
My role started as a firefighter, reducing design debt and operational inefficiencies, and swiftly moved onto leading my team at Glue to takeover partner agencies' involvement in the programme of work. I designed the quotation and ancillary micro-journeys within the customer acquisition journey, the entire multi car acquisition journey, and the dashboard, mid-term adjustment, and payment journeys within the in-life customer app. I led my team and was involved in designing the renewals journey discovery, the app rebrand including the Electronic Notice of Loss (ENoL), and future-state journeys for documents, payments, and the validation of a new digital rebroke proposition. In addition, I worked with Hastings Direct's internal teams and knowledge shared with multiple agencies involved, including Product Managers, Product Owners, Business Analysts, Developers, Solution Architects, Customer Experience Leads, and Transformation Leads.
Services
- User Research
- Gap Analysis
- Participant Recruitment
- Competitor Analysis
- Experience Review
- Touchpoint Analysis
- Workshop Facilitation
- Opportunity Mapping
- User Experience Design
- User Interface Design
- Prototyping
- Customer Validation
- Usability Testing
Deliverables
- Research Plans
- Research Reports
- Journey Maps
- Wireframes
- Design Systems
- Screen Designs
- Prototypes
- Design Specifications
- Operational Frameworks
Approach
Process
Primarily, I used the double diamond approach when tackling new features and journeys. This meant I was identifying problem / opportunity spaces and understanding customers. Defining what we—as a team—were tackling and how to go about it. Ideating ideas into opportunities and solutions. And finally, validating hypotheses, assumptions, and solutions with real customers.
My secondary approach when validating new propositions, akin to corporate innovation, looked at validating what customers say, do, and buy against a trifecta of criteria being desirability, feasibility, and viability.
Ways of working
I was involved in prioritisation with business unit leaders to decide on what work my team would tackle. From there, I would decide who would tackle what from my team. In most cases, anything that was to go live immediately was taken care of by myself (partly due to my level of accountability and my past relationships with some of the stakeholders involved). And anything more future-state or simple reskinning was tackled by my team.
This made lines of communication easy to manage, even across multiple stakeholders and business unit leaders.
Solution №1
New customer acquisition journey
I was tasked with two critical sequential micro journeys that made up half of the larger new customer acquisition journey. With 92% of all sales coming from price comparison websites and a new focus on improving direct customer acquisition, the quotation journey was arguably the most important one to get right. Second to this, with an objective of increasing Income Per Policy (IPP), I also handled the ancillary journey with great attention and care.
Through close collaboration with subject matter experts, the project team, and customers I was able to land an experience that achieved it's goals of increasing conversion and IPP. An important win, especially considering how high performing the old journey was.
Solution №2
Multi Car digital proposition
Like many insurance providers, Hastings Direct were providing multi car insurance through telephony journeys. But no one had cracked doing it digitally. This was my opportunity to understand the nuances, define how it should be, and ideate a solution that would work for the masses.
Designing this experience included adapting and imagining new ways of completing the acquisition journey and in-life customer app. Insurance quotations require a lot of data, so the process is long. A multi car version of this is, as you can imagine, even longer. So the solution had to be simple while dealing with the complex and complicated. To say this was a success would be an understatement. Within the first year, the multi car journey was already on track to 50,000 sales.
Solution №3
Mobile app transformation
Hastings Direct already had an app with hundreds of thousands of monthly active users. But, there were signs of decay and frustration creeping in. Customers were unable to act in the way they wanted and had to pick up the phone, even though in nearly every aspect of their lives they were interacting in more modern ways. This sparked the opportunity for the app.
I worked with a great focus on mid-term adjustment (MTA) telephony service digitisation. Particular attention was spent on customer segments and how they interact with the app. This meant the dashboard, documents section, and quote journey were all made fit for the app. At the same time, with the new digital brand coming to light and the introduction of the time-saving design system, my team and I were able to complete a whole app redesign.
Alongside my core areas of focus, I led my team to rebrand the entirety of the existing app, and validate future-state journeys and features.
Solution №4
Delivering a scalable digital design system
Originally, another agency who were involved in the design of the question set for the customer acquisition journey created a design system. However, it wasn't fit for purpose thanks to how Figma design systems progressed and worked, plus the fact that the app was completely ignored. Therefore, I was tasked with ensuring the design system considered multiple channels and touchpoints, and was positioned to scale to Hastings Direct's needs.
My approach for the design system (pre-dating variables) was to embed a framework consisting of foundations, components, and templates. This meant that any team working across the programme could easily assemble screens, focus on the user journey, and messaging across any channel. To protect this month-long investment, I created a decision tree to provide governance and ensure that every time someone created a new screen that it didn't necessarily result in a suite of new components being created. This kept design and technical debt low and massively increased efficiency.
Solution №5
User research and customer validation
Like many organisations out there, Hastings Direct were big on saying they did research, but in reality, it was only evaluative as opposed to generative. And, in my opinion, with great bias, too. On the other hand, I am a promoter of research and I established its importance within my own team and the various other internal teams Hastings Direct had.
Throughout the two or so years relationship, I had led and directed research studies with over one thousand Hastings Direct customers and over 400+ lookalike audiences from competitors. Various qualitative and quantitative methods were used such as user interviews, surveys, Voice of the Customer (VoC), observation studies, card sorting, and many more. Through this, I collected data, synthesised insights, formed recommendations, and played our findings back to stakeholders to guide decision-making.
Solution №6
Product Development Framework
The team I led was lean, agile, and aggressive (think, highly efficient, self-motivated, and accountable). Many across Hastings Direct were heavily impressed by this. We were outperforming much large teams, doing much more with much less. Several prominent members wanted this way of working for themselves and I was asked to co-author their Product Development Framework.
This framework includes the guardrails and governance, methods and processes, and communication lines and roles and responsibilities required to deliver business-critical solutions in time and in full.
I'd love to show this piece of work off; however, as you can imagine, it's proprietary intellectual property and part of their continued success. So, naturally, I'll keep it hidden for now - but do check out my other pages to see my frameworks that I've developed over my career.
Conclusion
There were many lessons learnt supporting Hastings Direct with Digital Transformation. The first would be that when organisations only focus on touchpoints, AKA digital products, they often find themselves with design and technical debt. Secondly, contextualising the user journey for the business as a day in the life of a customer helps make prototypes and screen designs tangible, especially when they're backed by vox pops and insights made with real world data. And lastly, with great planning, one can enjoy providing the design leadership required to steer such a beast as digital transformation, while also enjoying being hands-on and in the design work.
You only need to scour LinkedIn and some insurance industry blogs to see the success Hastings Direct have achieved through digital transformation. But I'll tell you: this is one of my favourite programmes of work to be involved in.
