How to build an award-winning customer experience
Laura Mullaney, Associate Director, Digital Proposition, talks about how BGL built up its digital and technical capabilities to meet the demands of today’s 24/7 mobile-centric audience:
‘Insurance can’t be innovative’
We set out to prove this wrong a number of years ago. In an industry where the products and services we provide can be so important for customers, we should be able to innovate in a way that serves them best.
In 2016, we began a programme of work that challenged us to transform from a more traditional insurance organisation to a leading digital business, aiming to deliver exceptional online and digital experiences for customers.
Through the creation of a dedicated team — across both business and technology — we worked to replicate the exceptional service that our contact centres provide, but for an online audience.
Having seen both the demand for 24/7 online servicing and the use of mobile devices increase hugely in recent years, we focused on the delivery of an end-to-end online service offering, with new design ‘mobile first’ journeys and a complete review of our technical architecture, allowing us the right flexibility to deliver new online functionality as customer demand grew.
We set out to digitise and modernise our overall offering for customers. Opening up more transactions for online self-service, rolling out Virtual Assistants and integrated webchat across our journeys were just some of the digitally-focused initiatives delivered. It has all been geared around providing customers with the best digital experiences now and for the future, as nothing will ever stand still.
As an established business, this also involved completely restructuring the technical architecture required to be a market leader — being more agile and enabling quicker changes from a user experience (UX) perspective.
As well as delivering the right initiatives to meet customer’s needs, we invested for our future capability, building a dedicated digital customer experience (CX) team.
Within this team, we brought in and developed skills in insight, UX research and design, change management and online optimisation, with a focus on understanding through research, what customers want.
All of our design is created with the customer in mind: We always ask what are the problems that customers face? What are the challenges? We use insight from a lot of different sources — from analytics and screen recordings, to quantitative reviews of webchat transcripts, to targeted focus groups with potential customers. This all helps us to create a design which we now carry out in-house and can go through multiple iterations before we then test online with real customers.
But what happens when customers don’t like the design? We try again. We have examples where we think something is going to be amazing and we show it to the customers and they just don’t get it. So, we go back with a second iteration and retest it. Once we have a design we feel is addressing the customer needs, we will test it on an A/B or 50/50 split. Once the design is refined, we take it into build and roll it out and continue optimising.
For example, we reshaped online renewals as we knew customers want to action renewals online. We tried a number of different designs before we got it right and now it’s one of our standard offerings on our Budget brand, reducing the need for contact where customers want to transact online.
We’ve adopted a scrum model for design and delivery, with product owners sat within the digital CX team working with developers from the outset, ensuring all outcomes are customer focused.
It’s not without its challenges — everyone is a designer! That’s where UX research is so important, to understand real customer demand. Test before putting things live, as design can be so subjective and therefore, it’s essential to have the research which gives you the best guidance from the outset. Also, don’t stick to one type of testing. Different initiatives will have different needs at research stage and this will continue to evolve as they go-live and are optimised.
Customers have responded positively to our developing digital CX. We now offer a complete range of online services 24-hours-a-day, so a customer can ask questions from their mobile and get a response — whether this is self-serve options or being directed through to our contact centre teams. Our online Net Promoter Score (NPS) continues to increase and we regularly receive positive reviews for our lead brands.
We have also won two awards for the project — Digital Insurance Innovation of the year at the British Insurance Awards 2019 and silver for Best Online Customer Experience in The UK Customer Experience Awards 2019, which is great recognition for everything our teams have achieved.
The new features and functionality, overlaid with the best design, as well as having a customer experience that drives the architecture change were the things that resonated with the judges. The way business and technology are working as a single collaborative team was also praised by judges.
Building on this success, we are continuing to invest in growing our capability and advancing our digital servicing agenda, with an exciting future that engages our teams across the business.
