Applying the design thinking tool mind mapping   to the delivery of a customer service of excellence

“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” - John le Carré

1.  Challenge

I work at a b2b insurance underwriting agency that provides specialized insurance solutions  (art, high net worth properties, personal indemnity, among others) through brokers, our key  stakeholder, to the market. This means that our main client are the brokers and not the final  customer. So, our aim is to provide a customer service of excellence to them, so they are  comfortable in proposing and “prescribing” our solutions to their clients.

In the last year we have been working in improving our customer service and observing if they  are aligned with our values through a specially designated task force. To have a more accurate  insight on how the behaviour of our team and the values we preach are understood, perceived  and impact our brokers we set to adopt designing thinking to transform mere impressions into  a more accurate feedback from our stakeholders.

This could at the end confirm that we are right at the spot or that there are changes and  improvements to be made, or new ideas to work on and implement, may it be on how we  approach our customer service, may it be our values.

2.  Selection

We chose the mind mapping tool for the “What is” phase because it allows us to withdraw  direct feedback and relevant insights from our stakeholder, through patterns and links, on  sight.

Making the brokers, in an informal environment, collaborate with us, they’re interactions  would have a direct impact in the outcome that would, again, turn into a better service for  them, more satisfied clients, more business and a higher retention rate. Never the less it would  help us to separate what’s important from what is not, helping us in channelling the right  efforts for the next phase.

3.  Application

We invited 20 brokers from different companies in terms of dimension, type of insurance they  buy from us or proximity to our team. This meant we had a heterogeneous group with  different experiences and different contact with us. They were invited to spend an afternoon  at our office because we wanted to have their feedback on customer service.

At our office’s common area, we’ve placed series of posters that captured our key values “Act  just and fairly”, “Be different”, “Always improve the customer’s experience”, “Act as a  specialist in everything to do” as well the central idea “Customer service”. This is not one of  our formal values, but we needed to see if any patterns and links were generated between this

expression and our values. More, what insight identification, ideas and clusters it produced  that helped us to ask the question” “if anything were possible, what criteria would your new  design meet?” and move forward.

After touring through the posters, we divided them into 4 heterogenous groups and asked  them to interact directly with the themes, identifying the insights related to each cluster and  to look for connections between and among the clusters.

4.  Insight

The impact on the personal relation level was very positive because it was the first time that  this interaction happened, and our brokers could have a word on how they perceive customer  service, our values and how it, on the long run, would impact the service they get from us. It  showed how important it is to interact directly with customers and get feedback, as well as  helped us to move from expressions and massive ideas, with or without their validation, to the  construction of a concept that was worth devolving and testing.

On the insight level, we were able to identify the following:

•  our values are not perceived as warm and close.

•  our team, that establishes the communication with our stakeholders, have not fully  internalized our values.

•  need to revaluate the way we communicate our values to the teams and build from  there a customer service of excellence.

5.  Approach

In the future we would use again this tool but amplifying it to two other stakeholder groups:  our team and our customers clients.

This would on one side help us to improve our customer service internally and validate (or not)  our values and on the other side, getting insights on what our customers clients perceive as  customer service and if it is aligned with the service we provide.

