Project Case Study
Inspiring a health insurance company’s vision for better customer experience
I facilitated a workshop to build consensus around the ideal customer experience and stimulate collaboration across organizational silos.
Context
Health plans are continually found at the bottom of the barrel in customer experience rankings, and many are trying hard to change that.
This health insurance company had worked with Mad*Pow on many UX projects, including user-research-driven personas. In 2012, the company's newly founded customer experience (CX) team needed help getting leaders from across the organization thinking from the perspective of these customer personas, and building consensus on the ideal customer journey. To address this, we proposed a team-based journey mapping workshop.
Team & Role
My role was to design the agenda and activities, prepare participant materials, and facilitate the workshop. Mad*Pow’s Amy Cueva and Adam Connor assisted me with background knowledge and day-of facilitation. Members of the insurance company’s CX team identified appropriate attendees, helped us facilitate breakout group activities, and took notes and recordings throughout the workshop.
The workshop took place over 2 days and involved 22 participants in leadership roles from across the organization.
Workshop Structure
The basic idea was a blue-sky exercise – after discussing current pain points, we’d “break away” to envision a brand new insurance company that could freely address members’ pain points.
- Presentation from the CX team – current state, including a mess of digital tools and some painful customer call center recordings
- Presentation by me – cross-channel experience design and sources of inspiration
- Empathy mapping – the current customer experience, focused on personas in specific scenarios
- Found a new company – teams create a customer-focused mission, experience principles, and measurable business goals
- Brainstorm with lenses – inspired by 'lens' keywords, each person generates large quantity of loose ideas that could help improve the customer experience
- Customer journey mapping – teams work together to pull ideas into a cohesive story
- New company pitches – presentations, critique, and theme identification
- Back to reality – How might we get there? What’s already being done today? What can we build on?
Spark the need for change
Break away from the status quo
Share & ground back in reality
Outcomes
The workshop helped the company develop a unified vision of what the customer experience should be, and that groundwork continued to guide business and design decisions years later. In addition to the activities and ideas, two factors were most important in making this a success.
#1: Simply bringing the right people together to share ideas can make the difference between a wasteful, redundant effort and a strategic, value-creating initiative.
Halfway through the workshop, one of my breakout group members became disengaged and frustrated because she felt the organization was already trying to implement many of the ideas we were coming up with. Nothing seemed new or innovative to her. But when she shared this, other group members were surprised to learn about these initiatives.
Later, when we reunited with the full group, a senior leader stood up and thanked us wholeheartedly for bringing everyone together, because there was so much that was not being shared across different lines of business and organizational silos.
#2: Workshops are only a starting point. A team must own the refinement, socialization, and growth of the vision.
The internal CX team did a fantastic job recording and synthesizing the ideas and issues discussed in the workshop. They created a highly effective presentation summarizing the ideal customer journey and tangible initiatives that could support the journey. And they did the hard work of socializing this vision throughout the organization, continuing to build bridges and support efforts to bring the vision to life.
While this was the shortest project I’ve ever worked on (planned and executed in less than two weeks), it remains one of my most memorable because of the impact we were able to have in such a brief amount of time.
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