THREE
SIXZERO
Nationwide ThreeSixZero is working toward a future where customers are fully protected from the curveballs that life throws at them along the way so that they can continue to build financial prosperity.
ThreeSixZero changes how Nationwide engages with customers— this digital, holistic, guidance platform brings solutions for all customers’ protection needs into a single experience. Customers share their information and protection needs, and ThreeSixZero recommends three competitively-priced bundles design to help them accomplish their goals and keep them on track to live the life they want to live.
We use ML models to build a recommendation engine that creates personalized offerings and guidance for each user. Over 20 APIs are integrated to pull data from third parties and legacy billing systems to generate quotes for each of the intelligent bundles. We also apply microtargeting tactics to identify customers who strongly resonate with our value proposition of “holistic protection.”
By combining the power of product expertise, technology and data services, we’ve reimagined our relationship with customers and collaborated as one team to deliver a seamless protection journey for users.
THE PROBLEM TO SOLVE
When it comes to insurance, customers are looking for the greatest value for their protection needs, which increasingly translates to low cost. Because many Direct & Digital insurance carriers have limited product offerings, consumers have little option other than to spread their protection needs across multiple companies.
bUSINESS PROBLEM
Nationwide offers a breadth of protection solutions, but previously has been unable to unlock the power of its portfolio’s breadth due to siloed product distribution. The distribution model passes commission cost to the customer, which hurts overall competitiveness. Nationwide’s Personal Lines business has lost millions of customers over the last 3 years due to uncompetitive pricing and no digital solution.
My ROLE
As Design Program Lead, I direct 8 UX professionals across design, research, experience strategy, and content across the experience.
I transformed a group of UXers from a team of individual contributors to a Design Program, which includes: org changes to clarify roles; design strategy planning; 2022 design priorities based on business insights; monthly UX readouts; and a sponsor user program to ensure inclusive research and design. I manage relationships with cross-functional partners in Product, IT, Marketing, Business, and Analytics. With our Product Director, I co-led a design and research initiative with EY.
🔍 INSIGHTS
holistic Protection study
RESEARCH PURPOSE
One of the first goals of this effort was to understand what holistic protection meant to customers and if they accepted Nationwide’s definition of it.
SESSION DETAILS
30 consumers provided feedback through 150 video responses
RESEARCH METHOD
We used VoxPopMe to gather rapid feedback from consumers on the concept of “holistic protection”, the coverages offered, and purchase sentiment. We presented a visual stimulus and collected video responses for 5 questions:
Describe what holistic protection means to you?
What are your first impressions of this list of protection?
Does this list of coverages make sense to you? Why or why not?
How likely would you be willing to try this experience?
How would you improve it to make it relevant to you?
HIGH LEVEL INSIGHTS
HOLISTIC MEANS ALL ASPECTS OF LIFE
Customers want personalized protection that adapts to real-time life changes and financial situations, such as joblessness.
Protection goes beyond insurance. Customers also want protection from physical harm and cyberthreats. They want to protect their future.
DON'T BE LEFT HOLDING THE BAG
Customers who experienced financial hardship through insurable events were more likely to be over-insured.
This was less about the desire to be overprotected rather than avoidance of being underinsured, because knowing what the “right amount of insurance” can be confusing.
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
Customers frequently cited four key barriers to choosing and buying holistic protection with a company:
Overall cost of insuranc
Inconvenience to switch carriers
Lack of coverage transparency
Negative perception of customer service
ChallengeS
#1: “Holistic protection” was borne FROM a market whitespace, not a customer need.
GROUNDING OUR WORK IN CUSTOMER NEED
In the first three months of the project, the product lead and I partnered together to ground our CTO, CSO, and Chief Innovation Officer in undercovering what problem we were solving for customers.
Although we learned in our holistic protection study that customer accept Nationwide’s definition of holistic protection, we weren’t sure if consumer purchasing behaviors matched with how Nationwide wanted customers to shop.
#2: New insurance products take months to file. regulations ALSO vary state to state.
UNDERWRITING LAWS AND REGULATION
Because of the regulatory nature of insurance and underwriting, the path of least resistance to test market viability for “holistic protection” was to build on top of existing products and infrastructure. Underwriting and rating factors vary across dwelling, auto, umbrella, pet, and other insurances.
Our challenge became creating a user interface that brings siloed products with separate, legacy billing systems to feel like a single experience.
While the rest of the global economy has gone online, “fintech” thus far has mostly been about better apps and user interfaces on top of the same slow, expensive, inflexible, and censor-prone infrastructure.”
— Ryan Sean Adams, Bankless
What’s Taking So Long
BETA RELEASE
In March 2021, we launched an internal release to over 10,000 Nationwiders to test our concept. After two months of testing, we found had three findings that helped us move our next iteration forward.
EASY DOES IT
95.8% of the participants who used the beta release rated the experience as Easy/Very Easy
MODULAR OPTIONS
Not everyone would buy Home, Auto, Pet, Life, and Travel products through a single point of sale— some testers desired modularity
ONE PRICE
Testers liked seeing a single price with the ability to see price changes as they toggled on and off products; many testers desired additional line item cost breakdown
🔍 INSIGHTS
CONCEPT OLYMPICS
RESEARCH PURPOSE
Test concepts for different phases of our sales funnel experience to help customers 1) assess their protection and risk, 2) get guidance, and 3) build confidence in their purchase decision
SESSION DETAILS
8 participants in 60-minute 1:1 interviews
RESEARCH METHOD
We used a drafting exercise (like sports team drafting) to prompt participants to make a choice on features that resonate the most with them.
Participants were shown 3 concepts at a time (9 rounds)
Participants picked the concept they most prefer and share why
Winners from each round were collected for a final round
Participants picked a single winner for each category of 1) assess, 2) get guidance, and 3) build confidence
HIGH LEVEL INSIGHTS
MAKE IT COST-RELEVANT TO ME
Consumers found seeing the financial impact of an unexpected incident to be more valuable than the cost of the repair.
Comparing repair costs of $5,000 to being equivalent to (1) month your salary is more helpful than seeing average repair costs on its own
Sharing quantifiable data (ex. “The average windshield repair for your car is $327”) is more compelling than learning about types of accidents or types of coverage
IT'S LIKE. . . CREDIT SCORES
Seeing a grade as a metaphor for a person’s level of risk or protection was intriguing for some and off-putting for others.
Even for consumers who were neutral or negative on the concept were curious on the mechanics
Several consumers likened it to a credit score with both positive and negative sentiment
If a score were to come into play, consumers want to understand how they can personally take control of their score
Our Solution
MOBILE-FIRST
Customers are increasingly turning to online channels to buy insurance and financial products, with high expectations around ease and transparency.
What we did: Offer online sales, onboarding, and chat support in a digital web application
What we saw: Although many customers start their journey on mobile (almost 70%), most of our purchases are happening on desktop.
HOLISTIC OFFERING
Customers don’t want to manage multiple relationships. They want credit and value for loyalty and consolidation. They want financial accumulation on top of protection.
What we did: Partner with other companies to provide multiline products across insurance
What we saw: Customer expectations of single payment and servicing regardless of partnerships. Holistic means “one.”
LOW COST
Customers want the best value when it comes to shopping for their needs. With insurance, a product they hope to never use, they seek out the most competitive price for same coverage.
What we did: Offer our most price competitive products with bundling and program discounts
What we saw: Customers come to ThreeSixZero often for comparison research. We’re still not able to offer prices as competitive as some of our digital competitors.
QUESTIONNAIRE
PRICES
PROTECTED
retrospect
SUCCESSES
“Speed” to Market
In a slow-moving industry such as insurance, our teams were able to get a product to market within 10 months to test our learning objectives.
A Maturing Design Program
Within two months of stepping into my role as the Design Program Lead, I reorganized our design team, improved UX-wide communications with partners, and empowered our team to spot opportunities to inform the roadmap. Our success as a program informed the restructuring of our partner Product and IT teams.
FAILURES
False expectations
Within the first few weeks of launching, we noticed over 30% of customers dropped off after clicking “Start your Quote.” Our current testing hypothesis is that chunking questions out by topic set false expectations that the quote questionnaire is longer than it is.
LEARNINGS
Targeting a Unicorn Customer
Our target customer is over the age of 35, has a high household income, no accidents and or violations, is married with kids and pets, and lives in a home— a perfect customer with a lot of assets but is low risk.
We learned our customers are far more complex than how they were represented in a persona. In reality, our customers often switched insurance when things don’t go as planned. They may have had a bad claims experience after an accident. Or they saw their premiums get jacked up despite being a loyal customer.