A division of a global financial corporation wanted to develop a differentiated experience for financial field agents. Rêve partnered with the company to uncover underlying needs of the agents and develop new service experiences with the power to not only transform the agents’ selling experience, but also the buying experience for the end-consumer.
Our client had a goal to differentiate its service experience to address the high expectations of its non-captive agent network to be easier to do business with, and to improve its overall positioning within an increasingly price competitive product category. We were jointly hired by the Vice Presidents of Marketing and Operations to ultimately help grow the product line by: 1) uncovering and understanding the unstated needs of their agents 2) validating the current stated needs, and 3) developing the agent’s future experience.
We kicked off the 14-week effort by hosting a vision-setting session with the core project team. Our team was comprised of key subject matter experts and process owners from market insights, interactive, operations, and quality team members.
During the insight-gathering phase, the team was able to interview agents in the context of their work environments. Through deep listening and observation sessions, we were able to identify that the agent needs were not about cycle time of product approval. We found that, regardless of persona, the agents needed help reducing the number of times they went back to their clients for information. We also uncovered a secondary need of freeing up agents to do what they do best—build relationships with their clients by removing administrative tasks from their daily activities.
Within the ideation phase, the team developed more than forty concepts and rationalized them down to three high-fidelity prototypes that were taken back out to the field to be tested with the same group of agents from the insight gathering phase.
The team took the agents’ feedback and developed both the minimum viable experience and the full journey with input from all functions. In order to bring the experience to life, we developed a service blueprint that tied back to the business case we had developed for each prototype, including technical roadmaps and operational plans. The team is currently preparing to move into the funding stage.
Ideas
Concepts
Low-Fidelity Prototypes
Operational Plans + Roadmaps
