Why does insurance agent become the key player rather than the digital channel?
Even though the existing report and research said that the new generation tends to prefer DIY methods, most Thai folks still lack insurance and financial knowledge which affects their confidence and intention to take action. That was a sweet spot for agents to help do financial & health planning, therefore human relationship and professional service become crucial.
Understanding of agent life is a key knowledge to set up the product and research direction. Creating an initial goal for the team, I took 4 following main initiatives over 2 weeks before project kick-off to set up things in place.
Mystery shopping which I convert them into anchor group of insurance sales for a personal consult and super fast feedback along the project
Researching in both internal & public documents, data analysis, and business strategy
Settle myself in an expert insurance sales(MDRT) channel help me understand their language, sales approach, and how they succeed in their career.
Design thinking workshop, acting as start-up who would like to compete in insurtech
Exploring players in insurance eco-system with ‘evolution mapping’ helped us understand the landscape of each role’s impact. Hence, we frame the targeted segmentation to cover main personas; new agent 0-3 months experience, less than a year experience, and between 1-3 experience. Leading us to an in-depth personas story.
How might we help new agent accelerate their expertise and closing sell better?
Responding to design challenge by speculating the product goal which determines to help agent increase success rate of the first 10-50 leads, which is the turning point of resigning and shorten onboarding process from a year to 3-6 months (referring to average active agent success rate). The understanding told us to find the gap in the sale journey that block agent from precise recommendation and efficiently closing sales.
Where to begin and how to go beyond the status quo?
Up to 75k agents nationwide who uniquely confront regional hesitated customers with different exclusive techniques which might be personal tricks, group best practices, or integrating with external tools. Challenging over 3 areas of research including user research, product evaluation, and decision-making criteria from trusted representatives in many aspects.
Deciding to break down agents into 3 agent profiles; 1-3 months experience, 8+ months, and MDRT who generate more than 2 million income a year which we expect to balance and recruit them from each location nationwide.
What are the factors that block you from being the professional agent who effectively closes sales?
Spending quality time with agents by observation and interviewing, we heard many requests as in sampling finding. Hence, we asked them, 3 agent types(new agent joiner, experienced agent, and MDRT) to set the expectation over the improvement version and prioritize frustration and severity inside the journey. Last but not least, we ran a concept test through a sale simulation interview by using the internal to-be version.
Drawing the current landscape emphasize the holistic turbulence which benefits us to craft the vision and create related success metric.
With successful conducting of survey and historical research in data and past studies. After the analysis, we transform data and rate each period of the sale journey with NPS.
Making the effective strategic move with direction while controlling waste by establishing guardrail called criteria and principle.
Unblocking and modeling the thought process, we create decision-making criteria and product principles from trusted representatives in many aspects covering key executives and managers level and MDRT (impactful influencer with expertise).
Once we gather all results shape the focus into 4 strategic approaches to design the first MVP that possibly improve agents’ life and accelerate their expertise and success.
- Rethinking the customer need analysis
- Reconnect the customer data flow
- Repair tech stability, improve performance, and be ready for platform
- Revamp UI theme and improve usability, but keep the major flow
Turning over of satisfaction from a one-way sale program to users-centric sale tool
Explicitly success over the rethinking part that the decision was made by flipping side to customer’s perspective base and increase acquiring ability. While measuring data of other parts are obscure caused by a non-built product that actual score relied on tech dependences unlike early part of the journey that is simulatable by fake door testing. However, the qualitative show very positive insight with the new sale tool prototype.
