Wesleyan: embracing customer-centricity

1 min read

Alongside Coast, an Elixirr company, we helped Wesleyan, a UK-based insurance firm, embrace customer-centricity by re-imagining their website and focussing on customer life stages, aligning the architecture to the firm’s revised growth strategy.

With the rise of technology, smart phone use and internet access, customers have never faced so many options. In order to be seen in this competitive environment, companies must ditch product-centric strategies and instead fixate on their customers with a laser-focus.

Wesleyan, a UK-based insurance and financial services provider, understood this evolving landscape and initiated an organization-wide transformation program to increase efficiency and embrace customer-centricity. Through re-imagining their website and focussing on customer life stages rather than product categories, we improved Wesleyan’s customer relevance, which would in turn help them to boost online traffic and product conversions. The site is scheduled to go live later this year.

Wesleyan brought in Coast Digital, an Elixirr company, to drive this transformation. Experts in digital marketing, UX and CX design, Coast Digital helped the insurer re-think their information architecture, aligning their website to a revised customer growth strategy and streamlining the user journey.

Why Elixirr and Coast Digital?

Having partnered with Wesleyan across their digital transformation program, we understood the business context, strategy and internal challenges associated with the project.
Coast Digital, the latest addition to Elixirr’s House of Brands, was the best firm to help Wesleyan achieve their objectives, bringing market-leading expertise in digital marketing and website optimization.
Coast Digital have a demonstrated track record of achieving measurable results for businesses to help drive traffic, grow brand awareness and encourage conversions. The project team has extensive experience in information architecture, SEO insight generation, and strategies to validate customer insights.
Our experience in strategy alongside Coast Digital’s digital marketing expertise meant we could hit the ground running – delivering value from day one. With our combined expertise, our team was perfectly aligned to the insurer’s broader digital transformation goals.

01 Overview

Wesleyan, a UK-based insurer, wanted to redress the balance between their product and customer-centric offerings in line with an organization-wide transformation program. Having previously worked with Wesleyan, and therefore understanding their business context and strategy, we were engaged alongside Coast, an Elixirr company, to re-imagine the firm’s website through a series of audits and design sprints.

02 Outcome

Our work helped boost Wesleyan’s customer relevance, increasing online traffic and driving product conversions.

03 Method

Design thinking; content audit; scenario analysis

The challenge

Wesleyan are currently undergoing an organization-wide transformation program to improve efficiency and redress the balance between product and needs based content. To support this transformation, they wanted to make sure their website architecture supported and encouraged easy navigation through these life stage journeys. This would also help to increase engagement and product conversion.

Throughout the project, we had three key objectives:

To design information architecture that linked customer needs and life stages with relevant product offerings to improve user experience and product conversion rates
To develop a plan to mitigate the risk of website migration whilst accelerating benefits realization
To define a delivery approach and resource structure that supports effective migration and validates user experience through a test-and-learn process

The approach

Audit & review

After reviewing Wesleyan’s existing migration plan, resource model and content audit, we created an up-to-date site map to identify potential improvements. We used this to address, validate and challenge existing design decisions that were previously implemented to satisfy customer needs and internal business objectives. We then used this to design recommendations and identified additional SEO data opportunities.

During these first stages, we conducted a Google Analytics review of Wesleyan’s website, focusing on devices, channel acquisition, user journeys, and content. This helped us to identify patterns in content popularity, engagement and entrance points.

Design

Following the review, we ran a collaborative design sprint to rapidly develop a new information architecture for the client’s website that would optimize the user experience and supercharge conversion rates. During the sprint, we developed an MVP prototype of the website and recommended some data-driven research. The findings from this research could then be used by Wesleyan to validate the new information architecture with customers, could help to mitigate the risk of website migration; and would allow them to continuously improve the user experience.

Planning & support

To help Wesleyan prepare for the website move, we collaborated with their teams and defined potential migration scenarios. This involved identifying benefits, risks, brand impact, timeline, and technical implications. Based on this scenario analysis, we recommended a revised migration approach that would minimize risks and accelerate the transformation’s effectiveness.

We also proposed an updated team structure, sprint approach, and new ways of working. This supported efficient delivery and validated the user experience through a test-and-learn process.

The value

In just two weeks, we developed a sitemap and navigation for Wesleyan’s new information architecture that optimized the user experience and product primacy, seamlessly guiding users through customer journeys. This included developing prototypes of the website navigation and footer, and developing a detailed sitemap for new and existing content to deliver on Wesleyan’s vision of customer life stage journeys.

Our proposed data-driven research activities supported the information architecture, meaning Wesleyan could continuously improve the user experience and drive transformational change.

Our recommended migration approach, which took into account associated benefits, risks, timelines, brand impact, and technical considerations reduced the risk of moving websites, underpinning the transition and supercharging the execution.

Through recommending a team structure, sprint approach and changes to ways of working, we helped Wesleyan to optimize the effectiveness of the transformation and improve the efficiency of the team.

Elixirr and Coast Digital have been working with us to transform our digital user journey. Working collaboratively with Wesleyan and utilizing their expertise in strategy, digital marketing and user experience, the team helped us to re-imagine our website, taking it from a more product-focussed experience to one that was fully catered towards our customers. Elixirr's strong digital capabilities helped set our team up for success by seamlessly transitioning to a new way of working to deliver the website, and reducing the risks that usually accompany a migration and transformation of this size. Elixirr have played a huge part in mobilizing a large, company-wide transformation initiative, that will eventually help us achieve our wider growth ambitions. I look forward to seeing what we can do together next!

Genevieve Kangurs – Head of Digital, Wesleyan