The challenge
MetLife’s US worksite insurance business noticed irregular metrics in conversion and retention across different sized companies. My team proposed a deep dive with brokers and service representatives to understand what drove certain teams to succeed above others.
key work done
I designed, ran, synthesized research
Created an ecosystem map, journey map & blueprint of front and “back of the house” practices
Facilitated cross-team operating model ideation
The Outcome
Our work broke down myths of what made a broker or a service representative successful, and what clients were looking for or expecting from their insurance carrier. The result: an overhauled approach to client management, including adopting new tracking tools and new ways of working.
doing the work
Understand needs of multiple actors
We tailored the research to the type of audience - brokers were a series of phone calls in between their meetings, service representatives shared their screens with us and let us “ride along” as we captured them nimbly switching between multiple applications.
For example, we asked brokers to describe their last couple contracts and hear how they internalized their experience (they attributed differences in support quality as a reflection of the service rep’s tenure). When we sat with service reps, we documented how servicing different sized companies required accessing different sets of legacy systems.
Gain buy-in across stakeholders on areas of the experience to focus proposed changes
We held multiple sessions across the sales and operations teams leadership to share findings, placing them in context with known practices in the competitive landscape to help create a sense of urgency & opportunity.
Design interventions to serve collective needs
A key to success here was having a proactive and incredibly committed program manager from the business join the project from kickoff on, who committed herself to following through on the principles and solutions we identified:
Reset expectations of which team members were key *at which points in the onboarding process* (aka fewer but right people on a call)
Identified ways to better communicate progress and flag needed support (in order to enable the more efficient attending noted above). This included sunsetting an ineffective ticketing inbox, invest in building kanban board style team management tool, committing dedicated time for teams to do real-time stand ups to flag and share workload
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