In Q4 2022 Aegon has officially been sold to ASR and the following year we made preparations to merge our companies and customer base. As with many migrations the first priority is a product merger to cover legal bases. Secondly comes the IT as this is the most cost intensive. Somewhere between these two priorities are our customers who, from everyones personal experience, tend to have a sub-optimal experience. We know this can result in customers leaving and choosing different financial providers when it comes to ‘short-term’ services such as insurances, our goal market for growth.
I set out to get the customer back into our sights. In the end they are the ones who we do it for and they are the ones who allow us to do our work. If we start with their experience we can increase customer retention and make more efficient choices in terms of IT systems.
Together with the management team we decided to host 3 afternoon workshops during the preparation period. The first session was about getting to know each other. By going through different icebreakers we started building bridges between similar teams. Generating understanding of where Aegon customers were leaving from and joining a.s.r. From architecture we received several IT boundaries that we shared and ended up the session with a MoSCoW brainstorm around our customers, intermediaries and fellow employee’s. As a result everyone could share what they thought was important and find alignment on the set goals & vision. By strategically placing designers in the groups we maintained the human-centric perspective. One of the main challenges was: “How do we make the customer feel welcome?”
The second sessions build up on the first by continuing on the MoSCoW and translating it to customer journeys. How does it look like if we want to achieve what we find important? This resulted in several happy flows and service recovery initiatives. The third session went a level deeper and was a check-in for the teams to help them with their migration plans. These contained the required details to calculate costs & benefits.
The results of the workshops gave input for the design team to conceptualise different customer journeys into prototypes from A to Z. Starting with the official legal letters every customer is required to receive and ending with a warm welcome in the a.s.r. environment. During the development of the prototypes we had several iterations that we validated with Aegon customers. Reaching out through e-mails to gather their thoughts and idea’s about the upcoming migration. Paralel we dived into the data to get a better understanding of what possible % of customers could receive what journey. Gathering up to 1.000 observations that were consolidated into 4 actionable insights to shape the work to make our migration the best migration ever.
In the end I converged all the knowledge into a slidedeck as a playbook; a plan to win the competition. The playbook has been positioned as a vision document for the upcoming 3 years on how we want the migrations to go in terms of customer experience and is used as a starting point for decision making by the decision makers.