Sun life
Sun Life is a Canadian financial services company known primarily for its life insurance products and asset management services.
The company wants to make it easier for clients to transfer their products (such as an RRSP or TFSA) from another institution into Sun Life. The current process to initiate a transfer is to mail in a paper form by post. 🐌 ✉️
21% of the forms Sun Life received had to be updated because a client made a typo or selected an incorrect option. A highly requested feature from clients was to have an online alternative to submit a transfer request.
How might we reduce the error rate and design an experience that makes it simpler for clients to transfer their products to Sun Life?
Research
To start the project, we tested the paper transfer form with 8 participants using usertesting.com. We could see that users were frustrated that they would have to fill out an online pdf form, print it, find/buy an envelope, locate the closest mailbox, and post it.
We also observed where users got stuck and the information they had to find before transferring a product into Sun Life. This was an eye-opening exercise, and we could empathize with the users' needs, frustrations, goals, and motivations through user testing.
We wanted to hear both sides of the story, so we interviewed 5 financial advisors and customer service representatives who interacted directly with clients. They helped us understand the business and employee objectives and frustrations around the current process.
Following are some of the questions we asked to get a deeper understanding of the current experience:
Once Sun Life receives the mailed-in form, an employee scans the form and uploads it into an internal system. We watched a representative as they retrieved each form from the internal system, reviewed it, and either sent it to the other institution or rejected the form because of an error.
The representative walked us through how they communicated the errors to a client specialist, who then contacted the client directly by email to update the transfer form. We finished the job shadow activity by documenting the different errors the representative saw clients making, and we categorized the errors by frequency and how easy they were to fix. These learnings acted as a checklist to make sure our designs eliminated or reduced these errors from happening.
Using the Rose, Bud, Thorn competitor analysis method, we looked into how our direct and indirect competitors approached the transfer process. We were able to identify:
DEFINE
With the learnings from the interviews and insights from current state analysis, we mapped out current and future state customer journey maps. These maps helped us showcase to our business partners the existing client experience and how we would like to improve the user experience with the new designs.
Using all the information collected during the discovery phase, we created a Lean UX Canvas, which functioned as our guide. The canvas communicated the big picture and helped us document the business objectives, the findings from our research, and the problems we needed to solve.
Throughout the project, the Lean UX Canvas kept us honest, and we would keep referring to it to ensure our designs were solving the right problems and helping us achieve our success metrics.
IDEATE
Starting with a whiteboard, we mapped out the ideal experience, from how our clients would discover the online form to how they would be informed once the transfer has been completed.
PROTOTYPE & TEST
We asked our users to find the form on the site and complete an online transfer request. After each round of tests, we analyzed the following:
With the feedback from our tests, we iterated 4 times, testing until we solved all the user problems we documented in the Lean UX Canvas.
IMPLEMENT
