I partnered with Petplan to support their ambition of becoming the #1 pet insurance provider in North America. Our collaboration focused on identifying opportunities to improve operational efficiency, scalability, and growth on a five-year horizon.
My team and I worked with Petplan over three engagements; 1) evaluation of the current-state of the business including employee experience, technical architecture and operational efficiency, and proposal for six-fold increase in operational efficiency; 2) Creation of the future-state employee portal experience with integration into the new customer-facing experience; and 3) Identifying future-state customer experiences that can improve customer loyalty and reduce churn at critical moments along the journey (current & ongoing effort)
Project objectives | Identify opportunities to increase operational efficiency, increase utilization of customer self-service tools, decrease reliance on customer support, and establish digital capabilities that will allow Petplan to expand their offering in the future.
Experience ambition | Create a new employee-facing experience that increases efficiency of each customer service interaction and more accurately models the lifetime relationship with the customer.
Project components | Current-state experience evaluation, qualitative research, operations strategy, workflow mapping, product strategy, enterprise software product design
Role | Director
Duration | 6-8 weeks/project
Our first collaboration with Petplan focused on identifying opportunities to improve operational efficiency, scalability, and growth on a five-year horizon. Pet insurance is more like car insurance than health insurance when it comes to policy structure and coverage. But, standard property insurance management software isn’t equipped to handle the unique health-related data and frequency of customer engagement that pet insurance requires. As a result, Petplan had taken it’s foundational software and patched it over the years, leading to both operational and workflow inefficiencies that led to financial losses, customer frustration, and employee fatigue.
We began by conducting a current-state assessment of the business processes, technology platforms and architecture, and employee experience. With a thorough understanding of the current-state, we developed and tested hypotheses for future-state improvements for each of these areas
An immersive approach to evaluating the current-state
Our team took an immersive approach to understanding Petplan’s current-state product experience, processes, and technology. In addition to reviewing existing documentation, the working team interviewed and shadowed employees across all business units — IT, customer service, claims and policy administration, and sales — to understand the reality of their day-to-day.
By observing employees at work, the team gained first-hand experience of the challenges that employees and customers face. In addition, the team conducted an assessment of the existing insurance and customer management tools and platforms to identify gaps in the existing systems.
Find the full Employee Research Summary here.
Building a vision of the future
With a solid understanding of the current-state business processes and operations, we took a hypothesis-led approach to defining a future-state vision for business processes, the foundational architecture, and the product experience for employees. employees including optimized workflows, usability and functionality of tools and systems, and support in evaluating performance.
Optimizing business processes
In order to understand where Petplan could gain operational efficiencies, our team worked hand-in-hand with key stakeholders to understand and map the current-state. This view included an analysis of the resources spent at each point in the process, and projections of efficiencies that can be gained over time with new solutions.
See the full document here.
Crafting a future-state architecture
Petplan’s architecture reflected a history of piecing together solutions that supported short-term needs. Our team team identified a new future-state that would support an optimized workflow and process for employees, improve data collection and evaluation, and support the growth of Petplan’s offering in the future. The proposal took into consideration previous investments that would require enormous effort to change, while proposing new solutions that would allow Petplan to deliver their current and future offering more effectively and flexibly.
Partial view of the proposed future-state architecture.
Improving the employee experience
Taking what we gleaned from interviews, shadowing, and assessments, the GlobalLogic team identified pain-points and moments of friction within the existing workflows and processes that most impact employees. For most, the existing systems are difficult to learn and use. This resulted in complex workarounds, ad hoc fixes, and ultimately, a less than optimal customer experience. Taking these existing pain points as inputs, our team identified opportunities to better support employees including optimized workflows, usability and functionality of tools and systems, and support in evaluating performance.
In a subsequent engagement, we designed a new employee-facing experience that integrated with a new back-end system (Sapiens) while more accurately reflecting the employee workflow and customer relationship with Petplan. We called this experience, the “Customer 360”; an experience that provides a comprehensive view of Petplan’s relationship with each customer rather than capturing the relationship at the policy-level. This product experience included onboarding new customers and generating new policies (sales workflow), all customer account management (customer support) and tools to help retain customers at critical moments of tension (retention).
Find a summary of the new product experience design here.
The design system for the new product experience provides Petplan with a flexible UI kit that can accommodate new features and functions as the customer support offering expands. In addition, it provides flexibility for multiple non-insurance products and multiple brands of policies to seamlessly be displayed and managed in the same view. For example, Petplan has established a relationship with Walmart to offer Walmart-branded pet insurance that is managed and delivered by Petplan. In addition, Petplan is currently expanding their offering beyond insurance to include pet wellness products. Both the design system and the design of the overall Customer 360 profile were created to accommodate these shifts in offering.
A holistic view of the future Petplan experience
By evaluating the business, technology, and experience processes and technologies together, our team was able to provide a comprehensive view of opportunities to optimize the current business. Our recommendations highlighted improvements to workflow efficiency, usability and functionality of the current tools and systems, and evolution of the technology architecture, along with cost and savings projections. With these recommendations, Petplan is able to make informed decisions about investments to their processes, tools and technology that will support their business objectives for the years ahead.