Assigning irrevocable beneficiaries - Sun Life
Helping clients make educated decisions when choosing irrevocable beneficiaries
View project
Design process
Sun Life is a Canadian financial services company known primarily for its life insurance products and asset management services.
Sun Life 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 receives have to be updated because a client made a typo or selected an incorrect option. A highly requested feature from clients is to have an online platform 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?
To start the project, we tested the transfer form with 8 participants using usertesting.com . Testing showed us where users got stuck and information they needed to know before transferring a product into Sun Life. We learned and empathized with the users’ needs, frustrations, goals, and motivations through user testing.
Some of the many questions we asked to get a deeper understanding of past customer experience were:
Once Sun Life receives the mailed-in form, an employee scans the form and uploads it into an internal system. We watched an administrator 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 administrator walked us through how they communicate the errors to the customer representatives, who then reach out to the clients to update the transfer form. We finished the job shadow activity by documenting the different errors the administrator sees clients making, and we categorized the errors by frequency and how easy they are to fix. These learnings acted as a checklist to make sure our designs eliminated or reduced the chance of these errors happening in the online experience.
We also created an Ecosystem Map to show how the completed transfer forms travelled between clients, Sun Life, and other institutions.
Using the Rose, Bud, Thorn competitor analysis, we looked into how our direct and indirect competitors approached the transfer process. We were able to identify:
These findings were documented for the Define phase of the project.
With the learnings from the interviews and insights from current state analysis, we mapped out current and future state customer journey maps. The maps helped us showcase what our clients were currently going through and how we would like to improve the user experience in the future.
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 all of 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.
Users were asked 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 kept iterating and testing until we solved all the user problems we documented in the Lean UX Canvas.
This online form is currently being monitored for completion rates and call centre impact.
