Broker Leads Discovery

I partnered with the Design Director for the Salesforce Transformation team to conduct formative research on Travelers broker leads process. When I joined the team, I quickly understood that the historic process to generate sales leads at the company was extremely intricate with more actors and touchpoints than most processes. Stakeholders decided that the current suite of custom tools should be sunset and replaced with Salesforce but in order to properly utilize Salesforce, the leadership team needed a solid understanding of the historical user stories. To address this need, I led a mixed-methods research study that combined stakeholder interviews, service blueprinting, gap analysis, and contextual inquiry to produce a wholistic journey map and over 100 distinct use cases, behaviors, and pain points. Our central research question was:

 

"What is the end-to-end broker leads process and how can it be improved in salesforce?"

“How does the broker leads process vary across business units and roles”

 
 

SUMMARY

Primary Challenge: Creating an end-to-end journey map of the broker leads process at Travelers

Secondary Challenge: Identify moments of opportunity that can be improved within the end-to-end process

Format: Stakeholder interviews, practical service blueprinting, contextual inquiry user interviews, qualitative coding

 
 
Travelers insurance umbrella logo
 

The Team

.

Dani Beecham, Lead User Experience Researcher

Shwetha Ram, Senior Business Systems Analyst

David Gabriele, Director of User Experience Design, Salesforce Transformation

 

Stakeholder interviews and secondary research

 

The first step in my process was to hold informal stakeholder interviews with my UXD partner, the Director of UXD for Salesforce. I also received a few levels of Salesforce training to better understand the platform. Those early conversations helped me understand the stakeholder perspectives across the broker leads process and the potential segments that research should include.

Some discovery research had been conducted in the past but the interviews had been informal and with too limited of a sample to be definitive. I knew that early stakeholder buy-in would be important for such a complex field so after reviewing the secondary research, I gathered stakeholders to discuss what they felt should be the research priorities.

In this meeting, I structured the discussion in the style of the Lean UX canvas. With their feedback, we corroborated the need for a rigorous discovery study.

Example of a Lean UX Canvas on a virtual whiteboard with spaces labeled “1. Business Problem”, “2. Business Outcomes”, “3. Users& Customers”, “4. User Benefits”, “5. Solution Ideas”, “6. Solution Ideas”, “7. What’s the most important thing we need to learn first?”, “8. What’s the least amount of work we need to do to learn the next most important thing?”

 
 

It was apparent from that first session that lots of people held different pieces of the puzzle so-to-speak. I wanted to bring those stakeholders into the fold and help them see that even with all of their knowledge combined there were still gaps that user research could address.

 
 
 

Gap analysis, meet practical service blueprint

 

Goal 1: Identify gaps in the collective understanding of the broker leads process

Goal 2: Convert those knowledge gaps into research questions

I held a 3-part workshop with the same stakeholder group to create a practical service blueprint of the end-to-end broker leads process. In each session subject matter experts (SME’s) represented each portion of the process and helped fill in each step as they understood them. Any known pain points were identified with the corresponding step. Any outstanding questions were captured. By the end of the workshop series, we had over a dozen key questions that we knew user research could address.

During the workshop series, I worked with stakeholders to recruit employees who could represent the different actors we were identifying to participate in user interviews.

Example of a practical service design blueprint depicted on a virtual whiteboard with multi-colored sticky notes that represent different categories in a service model. The sticky notes read left to right to indicate progressing steps in a journey and under each step, other sticky notes are stacked vertically to represent categories like “critical moments” and “actors” that coincide.

 
 

virtual contextual inquiry

Shortly after the workshops, I shared out a draft of the user interview script that mapped the questions we identified in the workshop to the lines of inquiry we would explore in the interview sessions. With stakeholder approval and a list of potential participants, I began scheduling interviews.

Although, it would have been ideal to join my participants in their work setting to observe their processes, COVID necessitated virtual interviews. The participant breakdown was as follows:

Segment 1 - 5 participants employed under Business Specialty Insurance (BSI)

Segment 2 - 5 participants employed under National Accounts (NA)

Segment 3 - 5 participants employed under Middle Markets (MM)

Segment 4 - 5 participants with the title Account Executive

Segment 5 - 5 participants with the title Managing Director

Segment 6 - 5 participants with the title Underwriter (for BSI), Sales Analytics Manager or Business Development Director

Total:

15 participants across 3 business units and 3 role types

15 hours of interviews

 

Key Findings

  • Participants across segments wanted Salesforce to enhance their cross-sell functionality by providing an overview of each potential lead’s enterprise relationship with Travelers.

    • Recommendation(s):

      • Leverage Salesforce’s data visualization capability to illustrate the enterprise journey for each account entry

      • Utilize auto messages to close the loop with previous internal contacts when a lead has its status updated

      • Automate potential cross-sell notifications when a new line of business is written for an account

  • Participants in the Managing Director and Account Executive segments found it critical to be able to access historical data on leads like the submission overview, correspondence attachments, and broker meeting notes to help them better develop relationships

    • Recommendation(s):

      • Utilize “Tasks” function in Salesforce to add notes from broker meetings, attach correspondence, or update submission status to reinforce the behavior

  • Participants across segments were suffering from a lack of centralized workflow across business units and a lack of conversion metrics which left them feeling skeptical about the efficacy of their efforts

    • Recommendation(s)

      • Introduce data hygiene best practices as a part of the Salesforce rollout and training

      • Distribute an enterprise-wide conversion metrics quarterly report

      • Enable users to generate their own conversion reports from their dashboards

  • Participants across segments expressed interest in being able to automate generating leads that were within appetite rather than their current process of manually pushing new leads despite having the same criteria for each search

    • Recommendation(s)

      • Introduce Salesforce’s filter creation capability as a key selling point to drive adoption

 

Filling in the Gaps

In the read out, we focused on the key findings in context of the user journey and I centered that discussion on amending the practical service blueprint with the information that the interviews added, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.

I analyzed the feedback using the qualitative coding methodology. With so much added context and flexible data, we were finally able to cross-reference each segment and create a definitive end-to-end map for each phase of the broker leads process.

The results were:

75 use cases contextualized according to each participant, the platform in use, and whether it was an existing or proposed use case

102 pain points contextualized according to each participant, the phase of the process, and the platform in use

125 unique behaviors contextualized according to each participant, the phase of the process, the platform in use, and the participants overall objective

IMPACT

  • With the study findings, I worked with the UX Director and Senior Systems Business Analyst to prioritize my research recommendations from a design and development perspective

  • The UX Director led the stakeholders in a series of feature prioritization workshops

  • Prioritized features were written into user stories and mapped to sprints for all of 2021

  • The study insights are still leveraged to inform workflows and user journeys for the participant segments involved 1 year post study