AvivaPlus — A whole new proposition
Jo Lloyd, project lead for our new customer proposition — called AvivaPlus — talks about what it was like being part of a project which had the objective of completely reinventing UK insurance for the digital age.
When Aviva announced it wanted to fix the way insurance worked, I was not even working here. I wasn’t working at all as it happened. I was on a career break, travelling with my husband and 3-year-old son somewhere between Thailand and Chile. The only insurance I cared about was the travel cover we had for the trip.
The storm after the calm
After that lovely calm, I jumped into the AvivaPlus storm in January this year. We had the nugget of truth that the market was broken. The question was, what exactly were we going to do about it?
So, day one in a new job, in a new industry, I had the task of helping to define the proposition for a whole new type of insurance. It was somewhere between exhilarating and terrifying.
It was brilliant that we were starting from scratch, writing on a blank piece of paper what was most important.
What did our customers like? What did they hate? What could we do about fixing that?
We heard from around 25,000 customers in one form or another to test and improve our ideas.
It was a massive challenge, but we had extraordinary senior support. Nothing focuses minds like knowing the Group Chief Executive is following every twist and turn. It helped having that backing too.
Reinventing, not tinkering
When you are trying to do something entirely new, there are always going to be things standing in the way, and having someone around to act as a bulldozer when needed is invaluable.
The biggest problem was the phrase “well, we’ve always done it this way.” In fact, I had to ban it from meetings.
It’s understandable that people reach for something familiar when attacking a new problem, but we were not tinkering around the edges of something- we wanted to start afresh and that really does depend on thinking differently too. There was something pretty inspiring about the machine once it got into gear.
I’d say working with awesome, tenacious, occasionally bloody-minded colleagues was the best bit!
We had about 300 people at any one time focused entirely on cracking this one big problem. We had to plug in to so many different moving parts- 27 different IT platform teams, operations, marketing, trading, data teams, legal, you name it.
And everyone was motivated by the knowledge that we were doing what we were doing because it was what customers were asking for.
Finding the right voice
It may sound like a small point, given some of the technical challenges, but I was also excited about changing the way we talked about AvivaPlus to our customers.
It is so important that people understand what they are buying, so we need to speak their language. We don’t talk about having no APRs, we say there is no monthly interest.
It sounds easy enough, but again it demanded a fresh way of thinking from our whole business- especially the risk and legal teams. I love where we have ended up.
The end of the beginning
People keep asking me if I’m putting my feet up now we have launched. Far from it. The fun is only getting started. We’ve been building up to this moment for over a year, but this is just the end of the beginning.
We learn from every single interaction with a customer, so in the months to come we can keep improving things to really make AvivaPlus sing.
I’m really excited about what we do next. Although a bit of me wouldn’t mind being back in Macchu Pichu, of course.
