The connective tissue here was between a government insurance body and workers who had been injured on the job and needed support to get back to work.
Responsibilities:
» Customer research planning
» Research synthesis
» Client workshop facilitation
» Journey mapping
» Service blueprinting
» Interface design
» Prototyping
» Digital partner
» Project manager
» Lead designer
» Lead designer
» Research specialist
» Business analyst
I worked with the insurance agency's CEO who suspected that his staff had lost touch with their key customers. This was because of the introduction of intermediary insurance providers who sold policies and managed claims on their behalf. The CEO was determined to restore the connection to customers and improve the experience of workers who are injured on the job.
The CEO had a strong intuition that a workplace injury is just the beginning of the troubles that workers face in this scenario. Difficulties with making claims, entanglements in legal proceedings, and alienation from colleagues were just some of the elements of a fraught and complicated problem space.
The CEO's intuition about the customer experience was the jumping off point for a program of in-depth, ethnographic-style customer research. Working with another service designer and a research specialist, I planned a series of recorded interviews at the home of injured workers.
We used insights from the interviews to raise awareness within the organisation and create a compelling case for change. The next step was to help the client figure out what that change should look like. We mapped current and future journeys for three customer archetypes. Then we extended the experience layer into a plan for organisational change with a service blueprint.
I brought the future state to life with an interactive prototype, built with Sketch and InVision. This illustrated a new vision for how the client could support injured workers through the processes of making a claim, receiving payments, and preparing for a return to work.
Working in parallel, our strategy consultant colleagues began analysing the operational and financial implications of the new customer journey. This allowed them to calculate what the new service delivery model would cost, and what kind of savings the client could expect by reducing waste and duplication.
The most striking non-obvious discovery that we made during the customer research was the level of stigma associated with workplace injury claims in Australia. The stereotype of somebody claiming workplace injury cover as a "bludger" who wants to get paid without doing work is a strong and persistent one. It affected people with actual injuries in a variety of emotional and practical ways. Some were reluctant to make claims at all, while others became anxious about how they were being perceived by colleagues while absent from work.
Anxious and isolated individuals were often vulnerable to predatory legal firms, tempting people with huge payouts, but often alienating them from their employers and enmeshing them in legal proceedings that could take years to play out.
Sharing these kinds of nuances in the customer context with the project stakeholders had a profound influence on their empathy for the subjects and their openness to bold new solutions.
We proposed a radically different experience and customer journey for injured workers. This was supported both by new technology, and by the introduction of case workers for individuals who needed, or simply preferred, a more human touch. The new service delivery model would act as the main point of contact for injured workers. This replaced and standardised the variable mechanisms of the insurance provider intermediaries.
This set the scene for the government agency to regain its central place in supporting injured workers and smoothing the way for their physical recovery and return to work.
This project worked so well because our choice of approach closely matched the client's need. They already had enough data about customer behaviour and outcomes; what they really needed was the insight and personal connection to customer stories that qualitative methods provide so well. It's one thing to have a CEO tell you that there is a customer experience problem -- it's another to see it with your own eyes, in the form of a story told by someone whose life has changed in a profoundly negative way, and doesn't know what to do.
