Challenge     I am working for the insurance company and our focus product is motor insurance. One year ago,  we have decided to revamp our digital journey of buying car insurance policy, with the ultimate goal  to improve visit to sales conversion. In the overly crowded motor insurance market, we had to be  different and better, not only in terms of pricing and coverage, but also in terms of overall customer  experience of searching, considering and buying motor insurance. Our challenge was how we could  make our website and journey of buying such a dull product more human, more engaging and more  relevant.     Selection     The whole project was based, more or less, on principles and tools of design thinking. Many tools  were utilized in our collaborative and iterative efforts to come up with the end solution that could be  easily and further optimized based on data and customer insights. One of the most prominent tool  used was storytelling. We used storytelling in general, to tell the story to our stakeholders for their  buy-in to both fund (Management team) and implement this project (Development team – all team  members working on the new journey), but we have also used this tool particularly when we had to  develop different personas and their ‘stories’ of how they go about when buying car insurance.  Storytelling proved and still proves to be a powerful tool when you need to put your customer and  their experience front and center. Storytelling tool was used in conjunction with other tools, mainly  Personas Development, Visualization and Projective Techniques, especially in What Is? And What  If? stages. It was selected so we can easily build empathy and reach the customers emotionally.  By creating stories, whole team, especially designers and motor insurance product owners could  better understand what customers want from a website and from a product.     Application     As you probably already know, our personas have been created to represent the different needs,  goals, motivations, and behaviors of our prospective and existing customers that might use our site  and products. This allowed us to produce highly relevant content that is used to create SEO  strategies or write highly targeted copy for advertising campaigns. Storytelling of who personas are,  how they search for insurance, what impacts their buying decision, helped us ‘walk in their shoes’.  We, my team, were personas, we felt them, thought like them, and bought the insurance like them.  We knew where they work, where they live, their age and their interests…All the stories were both  verbally documented and visually represented. These stories helped us understand what different  users of a website were going to be doing at various stages – and accordingly helped us design a  website that is user-friendly, intuitive and that would convert more visitors to customers.     Insight    By applying this tool in building customer centric digital journey of buying a motor insurance, we,  for sure, gained better insights, which are at the heart of innovation. By clearly storytelling on who  the customer was, we sparked another level of empathy, that contributed to a much more human  journeys. We all agreed that such a simple yet powerful tool managed to connect all the steps or  events of the end-to-end journey of buying insurance into a holistic experience. By using this tool,  team members clearly understood the underlying problems that customers face when getting the  product, and we applied this knowledge in reflective practice to formulate the solution which was at  the end tested by our end users.     Approach     Storytelling tool was used in conjunction with other design tools. What we have learnt was that  there’s no fixed template to follow when applying design thinking. Sometimes, you need to go with  a ‘gut-feel’ on what tools suit the situation and stage of the process better. In our company, that was

the first time we have applied storytelling and design thinking in general. Now, we tend to apply it  on even smaller changes or journeys we are building. Each project is different and needs a different  approach on how to apply elements of design thinking. With each application of design thinking,  team is getting better, we are learning what went wrong and what went ok. During and after each  project, we have our retrospective informal sessions when we discuss positives and negatives.     Storytelling not only impacted better end customer product or service, but also improved team  engagement and excitement in delivering customer focused solutions. This aspect is sometimes  even more powerful – how the team members are working together in an engaging and fun  environment when delivering exceptional customers’ solutions that will improve customers’  everyday life.

