Custellence Case: How a service company within the field of pension and insurance uses the Customer Journey to Digitalize!

The Challenge

Fora is a non profit service company whose main task is to handle the flow of collective insurance premiums and fees between companies and insurance providers. They also have the liability to provide impartial information and tools to employers and their personnel concerning collective insurance and SAF-LO Collective Pension Insurance.

In the transformative process that Fora has been in during the last couple of years, they turned to the service design agency Transformator Design to obtain a deeper customer understanding. Fora wanted help in visualizing their customers’ journeys to create a more relevant service offering and clearer customer communication. They also wanted the customers’ needs to become top of mind, in order to prioritize, make decisions and plan for future platforms catering to those needs.

Fora faced the classic challenge that organizations face when undergoing large scale changes — how to stay familiar and relevant here and now, while at the same time incrementally provide new solutions.

The objective of the new customer experience, for the individual was to ensure simplicity as well as a sense of security for individual errands. Fora wanted to find a better interface for companies by providing a clear path to an extensive network of insurance providers. In addition to this Fora faced the classic challenge that organizations face when undergoing large scale changes — how to stay familiar and relevant here and now, while at the same time incrementally provide new solutions to meet future needs and customers.

“We now have a deeper understanding of our customers — their needs and behaviors. The customer journeys and the detailed digitalization map based on those, help us see how it’s all connected. We use them in daily short term work as well as in long term prioritization and decision​ making.”

— Christina Schiller, Head of Communications, Fora

An enabler in the development process

Transformator Design’s method prioritized the early discovery of customer needs and insights which could then guide development. In order to ensure successful routing based on empathy for the customer, experienced service designers conducted in-depth interviews in order to discover why customers needed a specific service, and to design the experience with those needs in mind. This is a step which is easily overlooked, but which is a critical part of being able to easily prioritize measures later in the process.

Tranformator Design used the customer journey mapping tool Custellence, to systematically categorize customer insights and enable traceability and readability at different levels. Two digitalization maps were created, which were based on the customer journey, one for companies and one for employees. The maps answered the questions on why and where development should be done from a customer perspective. The maps made it possible to develop insights into activities and be able to track how different levels of change are affected by the customer needs.

An important aspect that the tool contributed to was to enable prioritization, to break down the big picture into components that were accurate from a customer perspective.

The tool provides possibilities to toggle the levels of detail, i.e. to be able to zoom in on a detail of a digital interface, or zoom out for an overview of an operational perspective.

An important aspect that the tool contributed to was to enable prioritization, to break down the big picture into components that were accurate from a customer perspective.

The Solution — Digitalization Maps

The solution became an unconventional customer journey map. In Fora’s digitizing map the customer moves vertically from the top down rather than horizontally, from left to right. The reason for this is that Fora’s customer journey consists of a few major areas of events occurring independently of each other without any chronological order. This structure was chosen in order to show a deep level of detail and still maintain a good overview.

1. Entries to Fora’s digital customer experience: Activities that make the customer engage with Fora.

2. Life events / business events: General customer situations were described in the form of life events or corporate events e.g. to “have children” or “hire new employees”.

3. Pain points: Places in the customer journey causing problems for the customer.

4. Use Case summary: Brief description and heading to the Use Case in the form of customer objectives.

5. Flowchart: Charts in detail showing flows and decision logic and which routes the user can take to attain an objective. Made in Illustrator and imported as images.

6. Use Case description: Description of use cases that in text summarizes the customers objective and what it takes for the customer to attain it. It describes, for example, preconditions and success factors, i.e. which needs are fulfilled. It also describes the content / features Fora can provide, what is required from Fora, as well as what is required of the IT platform.

7. Key Pages: Shows how activities in a flowchart can be visualized and gives an example of how a significant point in a flowchart may look like. Key pages are sketches and not final solutions.

8. Outputs from Fora’s digital customer experience: Outputs where the customer leaves Fora with information to complete the task. Shows what the customer is doing, in which channel and to which player the customer moves on from Fora.

The Result

The material compiled in Custellence formed the base for the final insight delivery that was handed over from Transformator Design to Fora. That material is being used on many levels of the company, from strategic work to actual development of touch points. The various ongoing development areas are now kept together by means of the customer’s perspective and prevent them from becoming silos. The insights delivered serve as a knowledge bank in overall customer understanding within the company.