Role: Product Design Leader, Oversaw & Guided Project Execution
Context
Guardian Life Insurance had set out with a corporate goal to increase loyalty with their members. How that played out for their group insurance line of business was to focus on increasing customer lifetime value by narrowing in on the renewal experience.
Guardian wanted to provide personalized experiences for group insurance members to enhance the year-over-year satisfaction they have with the group insurance they get through their employers. With a focus on year-over-year renewals, the Productive Edge Product Design team worked with them to update the user experience in their app to provide a more personalized experience to their members.
Process
With the renewal season just around the corner, we had to act quickly to ensure these updates were live for members in just a few month’s time. I was tasked with putting together a team to solve this problem for our client, so I quickly assembled a cross-functional team to work to attack this challenge. Partnering closely with Guardian business teams, through a series of design-led strategy workshops, we broke down their business goals, helped frame the problem they were trying to solve, and built a plan to get them to a state where they could enable personalization within their group insurance offerings.
Now that we had direction for the work ahead, we first started by diving deep into existing Guardian research–and we saw several themes arise:
consistently, people didn’t know what plan was best for them,
nor did they know what they would use from a benefits perspective,
and they also didn't know what plan or plan details were best for them.
We had to build an experience that empowered people to choose benefits plans that would best serve their needs. We wanted to start small but also make a big impact, so we started by focusing on a single target persona that represented Guardian’s largest audience segment within their group insurance line of business.
We worked to begin redesigning the app experience to account for the themes we found in our research. The team built out UI flows across the primary personalization paths, and we brought users in early and tested the new updates at low-fidelity to make sure the design direction was right and that we were building something that provides additional value to Guardian’s members. The updated app worked to inform members of how they used their previous year’s benefits, how much they paid for their previous year’s benefits, and if there was a better offering based on their historical spending and potential future plans.
Note: the UI we utilized was from an existing Guardian Insurance design system per the client’s request.
Throughout the project, we worked closely with Guardian business, technology, and data science partners to ensure we were on track both from feasibility and a desirability standpoint. The team made smart decisions to make sure the tradeoffs we were making, in conjunction with other teams to hit hard deadlines, weren’t going to negatively impact the user experience.
Guardian App Personalization Demo Reel
Results
We took the updated app features to market 3 weeks before renewal season started–enabling us the team to make sure the app was working without a hitch before the mass of users began to use the app. We brought personalization updates to the app in under 4 months–for the initial 3 state test market.
The personalized experiences brought forth by the design updates to the Guardian app ensured members were able to get benefit plans that fit their lifestyle, the way they wanted to spend, and the coverage they needed.
Over the following 1.5 years, these and subsequent personalization updates have benefited Guardian’s bottom line in a way that aligned with their strategic priorities, leading to:
Customer Lifetime Value increase of 3.4%
Retention rate increase of 4.8%
Customer Acquisition Cost decrease of 1.6%