Taking members on the product development journey

When designing a product, or an evolution of an existing product, it’s the member engagement and testing tools that will create real value.

These days, it’s not new to involve members in the product development process. Human centred design activities and focus groups have long moved away from being the sole domain of marketing teams, and are now embedded in the day to day practices of many functions across a business.

However, just going through the process, or ticking a box, isn’t enough. It’s critical to ensure we’re ‘getting it right’ when it comes to engaging with members. This can only be achieved by identifying and focusing on the right issues, asking the right questions, using the right processes.

Of course, there are some challenges in applying these fundamental principles to life insurance product development. After all, we aren’t Apple. Sadly, it’s rare to have members racing to be part of the next evolution of a life insurance product!

The adage that you never know the value of something until you need it is never truer than in life insurance, and this can be challenging when we’re trying to engage members in product evolution.

When designing a product, or the next evolution of an existing product, we have four core principles to ensure we’re getting the fundamentals right and creating fair value to our members, while also being mindful of the needs of all other stakeholders including the regulators:

• What are the product’s features – are they unique and differentiated? 
• Does it serve a specific purpose? What member need does it meet? 
• Who is it suited to? 
• What’s the operating environment, including legal, regulatory and market conditions?

However, this is only our starting point and reflect the fundamentals of good product design.

It’s the member engagement and testing tools that, when applied effectively, create real value. Some of the ways we pursue tangible member advocacy include leveraging unique capabilities for competitive insights and the expertise of those who may work closely with the member.

Leveraging unique capabilities for competitive insights

In the process of developing a new product, we believe it’s critical to tap into people with Human centred design expertise. Human centred design uses an established process and creativity to combine the needs of people with the possibilities of technology, while ensuring a product is viable from a business perspective.

When used effectively, the results exceed what a person’s imagination could put on a PowerPoint slide. At CommInsure, we benefit from being able to tap into the capabilities of a team who are experts in Human centred design operating out of our Innovation Lab.

Recently, we harnessed this capability to run a workshop with some of our Group Insurance superannuation fund partners and their members.

The insights were impressive. The Human centred design workshop, with one of our industry fund clients, focused on the insurance design from the member’s perspective. The participants came up with a variety of statements to help them focus on the themes that create difficulty in the end-to-end insurance process, such as “How might we… make insurance simple to understand” and “How might we… deliver a brilliant member experience”.

By using member stories and feedback on their experiences with insurance, the groups then took the time to empathise with the member from their perspective and started to build some design concepts. Having landed on a few prototype designs, we’re now at the stage of fleshing out those designs and testing them to ensure their viability in the market.

Getting closer, every day

In addition to leveraging the right people with the right capability to gain members’ unique insights, we also leverage the expertise of those who may work closely with the member.

In our business, this is the claims team. The insights we receive from those who are at the forefront helping members at their critical time of need is invaluable.

We deem this so important, it’s now embedded as a daily activity. Every day, the product team meet with those who are involved in complex claims.

There are many insights but the most valuable is ascertaining real time feedback from the member about the product and their expectations. We can then leverage this learning and apply it into longer term product development and improvement processes as well as immediate corrective actions, should they be required.

For example, we’ve developed a comprehensive Back to Wellness program that supports members affected by a mental health condition, and a new Tele-claims service to make the process of making a claim faster and more convenient.

It’s not the ‘what’ but the ‘how’ that will lead to successful product development.

We leverage the right people with the right skills and the right insights. When done well, the picture of the members’ expectations is even clearer.