This insurer recognised that they needed to improve their overall digital customer experience by offering the best in digital propositions. To do this, they needed to change the culture and understanding among the leadership and IT teams toward customer-centric design and digital strategy. This meant prioritising digital initiatives, improving their technology agility, increasing the pace of technology change, and ultimately reducing their cost per insurance policy.

Why Elixirr?

We were engaged by this insurer because of the quality of our innovation network – our in-depth knowledge of the startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley, and our established relationships with the best of the best new solutions and technology inside it. They knew we could show them the art of possible, and we didn’t disappoint…

The challenge

This insurer needed to understand the disruptive business models that were emerging in the insurance sector. Alongside this, they needed to find the latest technologies to support their digital agenda. And we immersed them in new ways of working, so that they could experience the power of customer-led design, rapid prototyping and collaboration.

The approach

We started by hosting a visit to Silicon Valley, where the team met with relevant VCs, startups and corporates to provide new insights into disruptive technologies, business models and ways of working.

Importantly, this visit validated the ‘case for change’, aligned the leadership team and gave us the mandate to kick-off a new agenda upon our return to the UK.

This new agenda focussed on 5 key things:

  1. Re-prioritising a lengthy IT backlog, using metrics designed to maximise the benefit for customers and speed of implementation.
  2. Forming a new, cross-functional, dedicated digital entity from the existing IT workforce, and organising team members around specific customer problems and identified opportunities.
  3. Upskilling the new team in design thinking, rapid prototyping and iterative customer testing to help them quickly create new front-end customer propositions.
  4. Introducing new ways of measuring both digital initiatives and the digital culture in place.
  5. Identifying where and how legacy back-end systems could be better enabled to support rapid proposition development.

The value

We worked with this insurer to identify and prioritise a new book of digital work, centred on the problems their customers really wanted addressing. To ensure the long-term success of the programme, we created a digital roadmap that tackled the changes to the back-end architecture.

At the heart of this agenda was a creative, innovative way of solving complex problems. Using design thinking and rapid prototyping, together we were able to set up an ‘innovation factory’ or ‘digital fast lane’ that launched 5 minimum viable products (MVPs), with an average zero-to-live timeline of just 18 working days.

We upskilled 30 team members from both the business and IT, building momentum around the culture change across the whole organisation. Very quickly, we saw the techniques we had introduced diffuse across to other areas of the business.