Bionic
Designing complex customer purchase journeys for an AI-enabled, human supported future
The brief
Bionic is an organisation that helps small businesses in the UK choose the right services, such as energy, insurance and telecoms, through their panel of verified solution providers. Bionic does the hard work in advance to take away the stress from, what can be, a hugely complicated process for small business owners. Bionic already had a service that smartly combined their team’s knowledge with automated digital elements to guide customers through choosing their energy and telecoms providers, but they wanted to upgrade the insurance journey to match.
Project summary
Bionic approached Loomery to help create this new journey. Setting up insurance for a small business can be a minefield of jargon and the quantity of different options makes it easy for busy business owners to just rush the process and not even be sure about what they’ve bought. Bionic wanted to streamline the comparison process to guide customers through the complex insurance-buying journey, while acknowledging how crucial it is to get business insurance right. The goal was to combine the efficiency and choice of a digital platform, with the expertise and personal attention of a real life insurance expert.
Project in numbers
16
Participants
15
Hours of call listening
"Loomery were crucial to the foundation of our new insurance experiences. They worked hard to understand our target audience of premised micro businesses, who have quite distinct needs from general "SMEs". Their research was exemplary and identified the cruxes around business insurance for our customers, and their prototyping provoked big thinking to inspire innovative new solutions."
— Glyn Britton, Chief Customer Officer, Bionic
Two phased approach
To approach this stream of work, the team broke this down into two phases;
Phase 1: Exploratory research
Phase 2: Prototype development
When approaching exploratory research, what we wanted to focus on was the current customer experience and how we could replicate this digitally. Using AI in customer service is complex and we needed to work closely with the Bionic team to understand how to build trust with small business owners.
Insights through research
We spoke to small businesses up and down the country that are representative of how our high streets are evolving: A village post office that's diversifying into cocktail and wine tasting evenings; a crafting and making space that sells workshops too; a zero waste grocery store; as well as umpteen coffee shops, takeaways, pubs and beauty businesses.
We dove into the details of their insurance buying experiences: what terminology is most commonly misunderstood? Do the business owners have a clear understanding of what they’re currently covered for? When they face uncertainties, how do they want to be helped?
We mapped out the pain points and created lo-fi false-door mock-ups to A/B test different entries into the buying journey. Based on the results, we were able to define user personas, and anticipate the pain points each one might encounter.
Customer insights
Understanding the current buying journey
Bionic has a great sales team who are able to explain complicated policies in simple ways, so it was vital for the team to observe this in practice and gain an understanding of how the digital journey should evolve to support the sales agents in their day-to-day. Working side-by-side with the Bionic team meant that we were able to identify the critical touchpoints for customers in the buying journey and move faster.
There were key decisions to be made: which parts of the journey were well suited to self-serve, and which should be deferred to a call with the sales team? The team wanted to develop a clear view on the ideal customer experience in order to create prototypes and move into testing.
Once the research was completed, the Loomery team were able to draw insights and learnings to rapidly iterate lo-fi prototypes. This meant that we needed to create a customer journey that was able to deliver all the value of the phone call in the initial stages of the interaction, including ways to gain sensitive information.
Testing our options
Based on what we found in the research phase, we developed three ‘false’ door landing page mockups, to test with participants to see which option was preferred.
These service models had mixed results but gave the Loomery team a clearer idea on the experience could encompass more difficult questions and make more complicated forms, less of a chore. It was key that the customer service team were not burdened and could focus on giving customers more additional help if needed, which is why we need to think of different ways to position information.
As we were going through this process, we also analysed competitor activities that were also trying to replicate this process online which gave us a clear indication of how customers react to different experiences, as well as how we could make it better. How we did this was by creating a prototype and continuing to iterate it. As we weren't designing an entire journey, we got a clear view of the digital elements and when it needed to defer to a phone call. Overall, this meant more choice for customers as well as responsive support and guidance.
Conclusion
Loomery designed, validated and delivered the best possible journey for small business owners to find the right insurance for them. A seamless handover to the Bionic team set them up to develop and roll out the new customer experience.
Related case studies
Naked Wines
Customer-centric technology strategy: evaluating eCommerce platforms, making build vs buy decisions and partnering to deliver next-generation architecture
BeZero Carbon
Accelerating delivery of a data and analytics platform whilst building product capability at a fast-scaling, UK-based ratings agency for the voluntary carbon market
