Transcription:
Rick Heffernan: (
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our panel. Our panel's title is Using Experience Design Effectively in End-to-End Product Development, as Tom said, my name's Rick Heffernan. I work at, Travelers Insurance, where I've been leading the customer experience, practice for the last seven years. And we have a fantastic pair of panelists here today, ready for you to, listen and learn from them today. So we are starting from a premise that customer experience shouldn't be ignored after the ink dries on a policy. The policy holder experience should be anticipated and integrated into the entire conception of the product form from sales to service. So I'm gonna start off by introducing our panelists to my left here. I have Christina Villena. Christina currently leads risk solutions department at The Hanover, which supports commercial specialty, personal lines, prestige business.
Rick Heffernan: (
She has worked on product teams to build handovers international products, admitted excess and surplus specialty GL and business cyber. She's been in the risk management field for over 20 years. And in addition to her undergraduate degree in occupational safety and health, she has an MBA from Pepperdine University... Is an associate in risk management and is certified safety and health professional. She currently serves on the board of directors for the Institute of home and business safety and is a member of the American Society of safety professionals. Please welcome Christina. Thank you very much. And to our left here is Jillian Badanes, Jillian leads, PNC product and solution development for the Americas at Swiss Re Solutions. She and her team take a human centered approach to build new products and solutions for Swiss Reis insurance clients and distribution partners. She believes product development must start with a deep understanding of end customer needs. Prior to her current role, Jillian was part of Swiss Reis data science team, where she used design thinking to connect the dots between business needs and tech capabilities. Before joining Swiss Re Jillian worked with early stage startups in marketing tech and IOT, helping them find product market fit and test growth strategies. Welcome Jillian.
Jillian Badanes: (
Thank you.
Rick Heffernan: (
All right. Let's dig in. Shall we? All right. So, Jillian, before we jump into, getting into product design, could you share just, some baseline thoughts of what is product to you?
Jillian Badanes: (
Yeah, I'm glad we're starting with that, cuz it can be sometimes controversial, between different parties in the company. But for me it's really anything that the customer touches. So that would include the, form the coverages, the price, the rate, but it also includes the underwriting experience, the information that they provide when they apply for a policy, it includes what happens after they bind a policy and how they interact with their insurer. And you could argue, it could even include the claims experience.
Rick Heffernan: (
Excellent. Christina, anything to add to that?
Christina Villena: (
Yeah, the piece that I would add is, also some of the services before the loss occurs. So the risk management loss control, also even partnerships that you can get, being insured by a carrier.
Rick Heffernan: (
So not a traditional answer. Right. I think that's, pretty good. The entire customer experience really is the product that we're starting with. So then, just another baseline question for the audience here is we talk about customer, how should we define the customer and should we differentiate between customer agent or partner, Jillian, why don't you start out?
Jillian Badanes: (
Sure. I think the most important person we have to keep in mind is the end customer, cuz ultimately they have to buy the policy, they have to engage with the product so we have to keep them in mind, but there are other stakeholders, the agent, the other parties that might be involved and their perspective is also very important to consider
Rick Heffernan: (
Christina wanna add to that?
Christina Villena: (
Yeah, I mean it's funny working for different insurance companies. I've had the experience with direct to consumer, but then also with the agency channel. And it's interesting even within some of the firms, when I refer my experience had been, the customer was the actual policy holder, but it can be a bit confusing cuz some firms may look at the customer is the actual agent, right. But for this session we're focusing on the end user.
Rick Heffernan: (
Very good. So Jillian, you're a relative newcomer to the industry, as a reinsurer. Why are you thinking about the end consumer when you sit so far away from them in the value chain? if you could explain a little bit about that.
Jillian Badanes: (
Yeah, no, that's a good question. Cuz we are complete other side and there's a lot in between us in the value chain, but, for us, it's really about, what's gonna make our clients that we're working with successful. And we know that, we can put together a beautiful reinsurance treaty and great partnership agreements, but if no one buys the product at the end of the day, or they buy the product and quickly switch to another product, it doesn't matter, all of it is worthless. So, that's why it's hard. It's not kind of organic for us to understand the customer needs. So we've built up like a team like mine to make sure that we are intentionally doing the work to, get to understand their needs.
Rick Heffernan: (
Excellent. So Christina, this next question's for you to start with, so thinking about the industry, the marketplace in general, right, what are some of the key market dynamics that are challenging the industry into how we think about building products?
Christina Villena: (
Yeah. So I think for, those of you that are involved or have been even an observer in product development, it's not a surprise that, there is, quite a, it can be complex, the, at the end, the product might be simple, but getting that product to the final stage, can be complicated and, the more specific and customized you get, then it can get, difficult. I know the panelists at the prior session mentioned that when you're thinking about data and having all these different products, but the key dynamic that I've seen is, there's a lot of parties involved. So if you think about a company, you have actuary, you have claim, technology is involved, the legal underwriting and, you have all these people together in designing a product, then you need to file it, so that's a challenge, for companies.
Rick Heffernan: (
Yeah, definitely. So you've got internal you touched a little bit on internal dynamics too there, right? So you've got external dynamics, right? The customer's expectations are rising, personalization's been a big key for this whole week and I guess it will continue to be, so you've got rising customer expectations internally. What are some of the, I'll start with you Jillian internally? What kind of, obstacles or, or things you need to overcome internally to really put the customer at the center of, of what we're building?
Jillian Badanes: (
Yeah, Some of it is foundational with the way that we're, we're set up. I haven't seen every insurance organization to know how they're set up, but it seems like generally we're quite siloed. So you have underwriting claims I.T, very separate units and even then within the product lines, you have property casualty, life and health, customers don't think like that they understand that they're interacting with their, insurer, they see it holistically, like we talked about at the beginning, but we, it's hard for us to make decisions really in a holistic way because we're set up in these silos, and I think the other element of that is, who has the, biggest voice, it ensures its underwriters, of course makes sense, but, it's not, other industries, it might be more customer-centric because of, who's kind of making the ultimate decision. So I think those are some of the challenges that, just basic to, how we are.
Rick Heffernan: (
And, maybe you guys could, how do you break some of those down? Like what are some of the tips that, or tricks that you've guys have used internally to sell a new idea? Right. Like designing products from a customer perspective, I've been in insurance since 2008 when just seven years ago when I started in customer experience, we certainly were not building things with customers in mind, maybe agents in mind but, so, I guess it's some schooling and influencing skills, right. How, how have you been able to some tips or tricks to get people to think a little different? I'll start with Christina sorry.
Christina Villena: (
Yeah. I mean, I think from the internal perspective, I mean, just to what Jillian, mentioned regarding the, silos I see when, when you do get closer to the customer, whether it be through agency councils, even some departments that have that interaction somehow figuring out how do you, how do you get that information in the organization? can you have underwriting actually participate in an agency council? I think the a big challenge can be when there's a misalignment with underwriting, but then what the customer needs are, and when it is aligned, then things can, you can actually build products together. But when it's not, then it can be a bit of a challenge there.
Rick Heffernan: (
Yeah. So what I'm hearing is, actually bringing some of your partners, maybe the ones that are hardest to convince, bring them to the design table with you. Right. Any, any other tips maybe that,
Jillian Badanes: (
Yeah, I mean, we're I'm trying to do this, so I don't know that I have all the answers, but we're trying every day one thing that we've done is just really like literally bringing the customer voice into the boardroom. Yeah. And we've done that internally, but also as when we're working with partners, when we're working with ventures and that, I think it really can wake people up to the needs of the customers, cuz in some cases we have plenty of clients where they really don't have access to their customers because they, speak to their agents mostly and I think of one example a few years ago we were working with, a life in he carrier and we did some customer interviews and we recorded them and with their permission, and then we brought some of those recordings into a discussion with the C-suite and there was one where someone was talking about their struggle to afford their premium. And it was just such a light bulb moment for the team because they realized that this person was sold the wrong policy and then it kind of opened up this whole discussion of how could that happen and is there agent education that needs to go on? but it was just so powerful to have that human voice describing how important this policy was to them and their, struggle and things in their life to be able to make sure that they could pay that, premium.
Rick Heffernan: (
I've also seen that video testimonials and comments from customers be really powerful, right. It actually like voice a customer traditionally is text right. Written word with no face, no name to it and, but having a video testimonial where, and they, tend to be a little bit more of verbose and tell you all the corners of their challenge, super important.
Christina Villena: (
One thing I'd add to kind of figuring out those internal silos, like I know the departments within Hanover, so I'm like, okay, who are gonna be the challenge, I divulge that, but I'm sure all of you might know, like which one might be a hurdle for some companies it could be the it department, it could be actuarial it could be legal figuring out which one is the, tougher one and, really just spending time at the beginning, socializing it, it sounds so simple, but it goes a long way. Like anytime I'm thinking about like, Hey, we wanna offer this new kind of service., in addition to the coverage, I make sure I get the stakeholder involved, cuz if I need them to play it's key. So that's one of the things I found that's been successful.
Rick Heffernan: (
Yeah. They're more likely to buy in and help support your idea. Right. Yep. Right. So you bring 'em along so we've talked a lot about talent, at this event already, we all know the challenges we have around talent. So I wanted to get your, take let's start with you Jillian, around skill sets that are required in, this new way of building products. What are there new skill sets or competencies to help, either build from the inside or hire from outside recruit? any thoughts on skill sets.
Jillian Badanes: (
Yeah. I mean three things one, I think you have to start at the top, like you were saying, getting the buy-in from decision makers from management, and maybe that's them going through an innovation training and design thinking training and just to start seeing a different mindset, and in our experience they're really excited that really motivates them. And then they come back and say teams, you gotta go through this, we gotta bring these practices in, so that's really powerful. And I think important to get that, kind of tactically someone with customer research experience with CX UX experience, we've, brought people like that into our teams. that's really critical someone who understands how to, validate customer needs, but in a commercial way that it can't be an in-depth ethnographic study, like a PhD program, but what some quick processes, experiments we can do to, validate customer needs and the third thing, not quite a skill set, but I think diversity is really important. yeah, because if we're building products for people, we need to have teams that look like our customers. So, diversity of experiences, bringing people in from different industries, but then also racial gender diversity is I think really critical as well.
Rick Heffernan: (
Yeah. I love that. Jillian. I'm thinking also some of the things that I've seen and I'm gonna ask you for your, thoughts, like just curious minds, right. People who are just like, want to ask that third, fourth question, getting deep into a topic, right. Questioning the data, storytellers, right. People who can understand the data that's in front of them, but then tell a story about it. Right. So it seems like a rare talent, but super important. Christine, what do, what do you think?
Christina Villena: (
Yeah, in terms of talent especially with the emerging trends and things that we see, I would say digital is key digital talent, as we all know that it's really hard to find digital talent today but I think data scientists, data engineers, as you think about just a recommendation engine, if you can have talent, that you bring on that can actually look at the data, figure out customers are buying this coverage. Oh, and they bought this, then you can build a model, test it, look at it. And then you have a recommendation engine, so you can create value within your organization and for the end consumer. So I think that is a key piece, also, we talked about talent, but even just some of the resources, there's some really slick AI tools. And I know a lot of the, companies out, exhibiting can do some of this, but just helping collect information, what is the data that's out there? What, products are available? there's some great AI tools that can kind of keep a constant scan on the marketplace there.
Rick Heffernan: (
I love that, you know? and I don't think it goes without saying, but so I'm gonna say it, but we talk about when we talked about we divined, product in the beginning we talked about it. It's basically the entire value chain. Right. All stitched together, how many of you out there can actually stitch your whole value chain together at an individual level show hands? Not that many. I don't see any hands. Right. So that's a difficult thing to do. Right. And digital talent, right. Data talent, to be able to stitch these things together will help us build better products in the future. Right. So, I think that's great. So, we talking a lot about the voice of customer customer data, I think customer centricity is, kind of key to doing all of, these things. Can you give me a sense, maybe I'll start with you, Christina. Okay. At the handover, like how customer centric is the company. Yeah. And like, how do you, like, how do you prioritize voice a customer? Right. I think it's different at every company.
Christina Villena: (
Yeah. And I've been with the company eight years and seen quite a change in leadership, where it was primarily focused on the agent, and we've evolved. Like we still have that's, that's one of our key foundations of our strategy, but we are bringing in, the customer more, and so how we prioritize it is we don't make customer engagement, our agent engagement and event. So for example, if we are thinking like, it's time to rewrite our school's product, or, we're thinking of launching, even building a new business unit we, we hope to already have in place a robust agency council, of agents that we know is, that are top on top of their industries, that are dialed in with their, customers, we hope to have that regular. And then when we do wanna think about launching, or even just testing, like how is our product doing? What do you think of it? Is it adequate? We're able to tap into that group. So I think that's one thing, as I said, don't, don't make it an event like, Hey, we're gonna get this group together, but it should be evolving. And if it's really, natural, it will come in, your product will come along that way too.
Rick Heffernan: (
So how about at Swiss re how do you guys prioritize customer? How customer-centric do you guys think you?
Jillian Badanes: (
Yeah, so I'm, in a group called Swiss free solutions. So we're looking at things that we could do for our clients beyond reinsurance. So we're building products across the value chain, so for us, with our focus, it's really about, when we're developing something new for kind of scalability or for a specific client, we always start with, what is the problem that we're trying to solve and who is the customer who has that problem? so for us, in our space, it's just the way we go about, solution development. And, we have kind of our process that we go through, but we come back again and again to the customer. So who is the customer? What's their problem, let's understand that problem. What's the context in which they experience that problem, that they're, what are the influencers around them when they think about the problem? And then we go into ideation, solution development from there, but then we come back and we say, okay, here's the solution? Does this make sense? I love the idea of having sort of set panels to do that as well. So I think we're always looking at how we can make it go faster and more organically as well.
Rick Heffernan: (
So, you develop and co-develop with partners all the time. This is how you do things yeah. In that process that you're just talking about. Maybe you could explain, the process that you go through to gather insights and, really build products from the customer's perspective. And then has it always been like that? Or is this relatively new? maybe you could talk about that.
Jillian Badanes: (
Yeah, so I guess to the second part of your question, you know this is evolving, I've been in the company for five years and I've seen more and more awareness, and interest in this way of thinking, but it is probably in our 150 something year history, it's probably new, but how do we do it with partners? So we work with different sorts of partners we work with.
Jillian Badanes: (
our clients who are the large to very small insurance companies, but we're also working with sort of the emerging new entrance to insurance, we have a group called strategic partnerships. That's looking at the embedded insurance base. So, that's a good example where we're engaging with these companies when they're at their really earliest stage of thinking about an insurance vision. And, sometimes there's clear view of where they should go, but we start with our partners and kind of ground level, like what do we really know about the customer base that they're trying to serve?
Jillian Badanes: (
And this would be their existing customer base. And we work together to kind of unpack those knowns and unknowns to figure out where we, need to do some deeper diving research. And I think that helps to the, point of kind of bringing everyone on the journey. It helps us all see what is there that we need to learn more about, and then we use, customer interviews as a main tactic for us. So we'll choose a sample of customers, to interview and better understand what are their unmet needs, whether it's product that they are already buying, what would make them choose to buy it somewhere else or buy it differently? or maybe it's, thinking about what's something that they don't have coverage for today that they, need to have coverage for. And then we'll follow up. Maybe we'll use surveys. We have other tools we used for kind of online user testing as well, prototyping. Awesome. But I think just the customer interviews is, so basic, but really powerful.
Rick Heffernan: (
Yeah. Very good. And, so I wanna touch on something you talked about, which is embedded insurance and, at the Hanover, you're also thinking about embedded insurance, right. And that ecosystem what are some of the things, I feel like embedded insurance is talked about a lot in our industry. Right. So what are some of the things that you guys are, thinking about when it comes to embedded insurance?
Christina Villena: (
Yeah, I mean, we're thinking of, I mean in multiple lines, I mean, in really our this is for our agents, have really been helpful for us, some of them have been looking at different types of personal policies where, Hey, there's something here, and so we test the idea so we, we look selectively, but we really rely on our agent, partners there, another piece, that we're looking we're exploring too is related to, user based insurance it's something that we've been exploring, again there's certain certain industries, where it makes sense. So, it's something that I can't give too much information but, both areas we were looking at.
Rick Heffernan: (
Excellent. Thank you. And, Jillian, we were talking earlier about some of the new, exciting products that you're you're working on. One of them was, parametric products. maybe you could talk about that a bit.
Jillian Badanes: (
Sure, Yeah. So it's one of the, few products I could talk about cuz, often there's NDAs and things, but this is a product that's launched that we co-developed with Zurich north America. And, they have a pretty big builder's risk, program. And they identified for their contractors that there was a protection gap if extreme rain or heat freeze occurred. It could delay a project for a period of time and that had, big costs for them. So they'd have to pay labor, still they'd have potentially product delays, liquidated damages, and they thought maybe a parametric product could, could solve that need. So that's when we started engaging with them and we together conducted interviews to validate, really where were contractors and developers feeling this need, what perils were relevant to them. We did interviews with, some of their, contractor clients with brokers as well that they worked with.
Jillian Badanes: (
And we used that to inform the product to the coverages, to the pricing, and the way that, we set up the product. And then, like I said we, after we'd done all the product development, we went back and we showed them, here's the way that you'll be able to make choices about the the options and your coverages and we found some of it might be confusing. And so then we were able to iterate and, make some changes to the way that the brokers could explain the product, it was really cool process to go through that, full approach and bring something totally new to market. And it launched, last year.
Rick Heffernan: (
Excellent. Very exciting. so maybe last question for both of you, I'll start with you Christina as you guys have been obviously doing a lot with agents and customers listening and trying to adapt the product sets that you have, what are some of the basic unmet needs from a customer perspective? Yeah that's kind of general that the insurance companies need to, focus on.
Christina Villena: (
I would say the most basic are probably a Buring risks. So if you think about it, think about the product piece you could be, say it's 20, 21, you design your, product. and then you file it for to get approval. It may not be till 2023 when you actually get the approval from the regulatory agencies and then you have to implement it within your firm. So that's 20, 24 by then your product may already be obsolete. So, that can be a big challenge. So it's staying on top of emerging trends and that is very broad cyber's a really good example of a trend, that's constantly evolving some of, some of the special coverages with, schools and human services, we're finding we've gotta have product out. So the speed to market is key. So anyway, we can identify what are risks, cause they may not be risks today. And that's really, I think key for us staying involved with our clients, with industries being involved in associations so we can anticipate. So when we do get into the actual design and building phase, we can be quicker.
Rick Heffernan: (
Excellent. Yeah, it's super important now for that was from an internal perspective, right? Maybe from an external perspective, some of the, basic needs maybe that are being that are unmet from either agents, customers, whoever you're designing products for even embedded insurance. Right.
Jillian Badanes: (
I think if you think about what are customer expectations now they're really being informed by all the other services that customers are engaging with. So Amazon, their digital bank, social media, it's, it's super customized. I know that was the topic on the last panel, but they're really expecting now that their services speak to them and they understand who they are even we're now getting used to the ads that are like freaky, how relevant that they are, so that's what people are starting to get used to. So I think that's an opportunity and we've, talked about some of the internal hurdles that we, we need to overcome to be able to do that, but how can we as an industry really focus on different types of people, personas and design products around those needs. And that might mean bringing life and health and homeowners together, and providing that in more of a packaged way to a specific type of customer who has specific types of needs.
Rick Heffernan: (
Yeah. It's, I love that last point, right? That you're thinking about goes back to our silos, right? As in insurance companies, lot of, silos within the, company itself, but maybe from a personalization perspective, that's what customers want. When insurance is really governed by the law of large numbers and risk pools and all of these things to an individual who, doesn't come to this conference, they don't care about any of that stuff. They wanna be treated like an individual still, right. And other companies and other industries are doing that. And that's how we're being measured. Our experiences are being measured, not by other insurance companies, but by the experiences they have with Amazon and Facebook and apple and all of the best brands out there. So that's our time for today. I wanted to, uh, thank you all for your attention and thank my panelist, Chris, Christina, and Jillian. Thank you. Thank you for having us. Thank you so much for your time.