Leading UK insurer

Health and wellbeing which doesn’t cost the earth

We recently partnered with one of the UKs leading insurers to build out a strategy and proposition for a new personal health and wellbeing product. In 8 weeks we collaboratively developed a proposition as well as an understanding of how to deliver it to market for a new audience.

The challenge

Starting with the question: how can we create a highly personal health and wellbeing service that doesn’t cost the earth? We began by;

Building a team – made up of a diverse range of expertise and experience from across the organisation to help us understand and take on the health and wellbeing sector
Embedding our human-centred approach – during two weeks of immersion we shared our human-centered mindset and approach and taught the tools and techniques required
Understanding our customer and user needs – we wanted to know what they’re trying to do, how they’re currently doing it, the problems and frustrations they are experiencing, and what they really need from us

Our approach

We began by creating the right environment and physical space to allow us to work as a cross disciplinary team – somewhere free of existing structures, hierarchies, boundaries and assumptions. This enabled us to:

Establish new ways of working through shared principles
Collectively explore appropriate tools and design processes
Set up a buddy system that allowed us to peer learn, and grow as individuals as well as a team

Then Covid-19 struck. Our response, as a team, was calm and considered. We came together, discussed our options, and made a quick decision to migrate our work into virtual environments and continue our work remotely. LovedBy spent time upskilling the insurance proposition team on virtual collaboration tools and without too much disruption or delay we continued with the design and delivery schedule.

Our mission to uncover user and customer needs during Covid-19 took our research process online – engaging social communities, corporate customers and individual users via one-to-one interviews and user testing. Focussing on umnet needs and the desirability of our early proposition ideas.

As a team we learned that the steps users and customers take in the health and wellbeing marketplace are similar, but every trigger and emotional journey is different and personal. We mapped these journeys out. Understanding the problems, barriers and opportunities along the journey. Identifying unmet needs and how we could start to design for them.

We ran several experiments, each focused on a different health and wellbeing need. We continued to speak with experts and people with lived experiences. We researched our competitors and validated our ideas with potential users. We also made sure we extended our ways of working beyond the core team – setting up an employee panel – where people eager to experience our process and approach could learn more.

Outcomes

Within 8 weeks we had the insight needed to deliver a market-ready proposition. Critically, we arrived at this point through close collaboration. Together we navigated the unexpected complexity of Covid-19 and found new ways to continue our work. By bringing the team to the customer and exposing the company to new ways of (remote) working, we secured buy-in and go-ahead for the build phase. Watch this space for a follow up on our approach to this phase.