Transformation through multiple channels

Aegon Spain embarked on a digital transformation journey with a primary focus on enhancing their mobile experience. A project developed to push the boundaries within Aegon with a design led approach. I was the Head of User Experience leading a team in building a seamless user experience across all digital touchpoints.

The challenge

Aegon Spain, a health and life insurance company, struggled to attract and convert customers due to a sales-focused channel experience that lacked customer engagement. Their approach of emphasising price and personal data collection early on in the customer journey resulted in low conversion rates.

To solve this, Aegon needed to understand customer expectations and create a seamless channel experience that answered their questions and guided them towards purchasing insurance. This required providing an intuitive conversational UX, consistent across online and offline channels, with a trustworthy voice and tone, and information that speaks to users.

The approach

After conducting three weeks of extensive discovery, the designers and I gained valuable customer insights and generated new ideas. Through various methods including interviews, surveys, guerrilla testing, focus groups, and observation studies, we explored the current Spanish market for health and life insurance, evaluated our competitors, and engaged with over 200 individuals throughout Spain. Our findings revealed several key points:

• We identified three distinct customer groups: families, individuals, and seniors.
• Our sales approach was too aggressive, with a focus on pushing purchases rather than educating potential customers about our services and their benefits.
• Our website contained an overwhelming amount of information that was difficult to understand, resulting in many visitors leaving the site.
• We lacked the trust of our customers, as we failed to address their needs and appeared more interested in gathering their data than providing relevant information.

Customer Journey

Our strategy and vision for the user experience involved close collaboration with our analytical and data teams, using research to identify crucial moments in the customer journey where data aligned with our observations. Our findings showed that:

• 65% of traffic to Aegon was directed towards Health and Life campaigns, and 80% of users did not progress beyond the first page of the funnel.
• 77% of users began their journey on a mobile and would end their journey either on desktop or via phone.
• 63% of users were made up of families and individuals.
• There was a lack of overall understanding of who Aegon is and how we can support our customers in the user journey.
  

Our plan was to conduct a design sprint and create a prototype for testing based on these insights. If the prototype yielded positive user outcomes, we would move forward with building an MVP to further validate and refine our approach. 

Design execution and validation

Following a successful cross-functional collaborative design sprint, our team focused on refining the user journey from the landing page to the purchase funnel. Through wireframe development and testing, we found that users resonated with several key objectives:

• I want to know what the real value of an insurance is before I purchase.
• I want to know if Aegon Seguros is a trustworthy company before purchasing anything.
• I want to view the best options for me based on my needs.
• I want to know what benefits are included in my policy.

These objectives were validated across channels, and feedback from our testing was incorporated into our backlog to enhance the user experience.

My role

In my position as Head of UX, I oversaw the overall user experience and managed a team of three UX designers and one UX researcher. Working closely with the product owner and product manager, I implemented a UX strategy based on our established process and framework, and collaborated with the executive team to drive a transformation within the organisation.

In addition to setting up the team and framework, I ensured the highest quality delivery and execution of our processes and designs, and fostered a collaborative approach across the organisation. My role also included working with key stakeholders to address inconsistent channel experiences and develop a new operational model to break down functional silos and improve cross-functional collaboration.

The outcome

Despite knowing that our initial 4-month projection would be delayed due to the introduction of a new way of working, a new team, and a digital transformation, our top priority was to deliver a high-quality product that resonated with our users. As a result, the project was delayed by 6 months, extending the overall timeline to 12 months. Nevertheless, we were successful in delivering a new continuous channel experience that effectively addressed our customers' questions.

To ensure that we met our user journey goals, we tracked several KPIs related to behavior, attitude, and engagement. Our efforts resulted in the following outcomes:

• Over a three-month period, user engagement increased by 20%, while the number of quality visits rose by 5%.
• The success rate for users' tasks across all journeys improved by 25%.
• Pages per session increased from 0% to 75% of users completing the entire journey.
• Our conversion rate rose from 15,959 users to 24,534.