Challenge  At our company we frequently partner up with different companies to enable us to widen our service  offering to our customer. One of these partnerships is a company that specializes in advisory  regarding precautionary measures that protects and ensures your will if anything unexpected should  happen to you. The idea is that the advisor of our company informs our customers about the offering  during their consultation meeting and creates awareness for the topic, ultimately generating leads  for our partner.

The challenge at hand is that, though the campaign has been active for quite some time, there are  too few leads generated and it has been observed that the advisors often don’t mention the offering  at all. The goal is therefore, to identify due to what reason the advisors seem to avoid mentioning the  partnership to our customers. By applying design thinking techniques, we want to find a solution in  order to increase leads.

Selection  One thesis of ours is that the customers as well as the advisors don’t understand the offering. The  advisor has the difficult task to sell a service that he knows very little about. He hesitates to even  mention it, because he could be seen as incompetent if he’s not able to answer questions the  customer has. The customer on the other hand comes to the consultation meeting with the intention  to buy an insurance not being offered a service about precautionary measures for his life. In order to  convince the customer to invest money for a further meeting with our partner, the offering has to be  very clear and the advisor has to be convinced by the service himself.

As mentioned in the Coursera video storytelling creates a cause for something. It gives a reason that  the audience understands. It has a clear sequence of events and connects emotions and values of our  customers with the underlying service by our partner. The offering has to be laid out in a manner  that the customers find themselves within the story presented by the advisor.

Thus, we chose to create a story that suits the advisor and the customer at the same time, while it  also adapts to the customer’s intrinsic values.

Application  The story that we wanted to tell should be easy understandable for the advisors and it should create  a need for precautionary measures for our customers. In different discussions we tried to put  ourselves into the position of both our advisors and our customers.

We then tried to reveal the needs of both in order to create a story. In the end we decided to go with  a story that we think both parties can identify themselves with. By pointing out a real-life example of  what can happen if people don’t discuss precautionary measures when they’re still able to we  wanted to increase engagement by both the advisors and the customers. A very famous and  illustrative case is the one of late-Formula 1 racer Michael Schumacher. Since his accident his  decision are made for him by the child and adult protection agency and not by his family. This would  be different if he would have settled such questions before his accident.

We think that by picturing the possible outcomes, customers and advisors might be able to  understand the importance of the service that our partner offers. Obviously, this doesn’t change the  terms and conditions of the service, however it provides a story that both can relate to.

Insight  By applying storytelling we thought about the underlying values of both the advisor and the  customer. We were able to put ourselves in their shoes and see the situation through their eyes. We  also revealed that there are possibly further challenges to the problem at hand, because perhaps the

lack of understanding of the service isn’t the only reason the partnership hasn’t been successful so  far. We realized that the service itself also has to be further adapted and personalized, as not all  customers have the same needs regarding precautionary measures. It all depends on their current  life situations. Consequently, it may make sense to adapt the service itself, as well as the story to  each customer individually.

Approach  Storytelling is one possible solution for the challenge at hand. However, considering the insights  generated, we would choose a mix of different tool next time. The tool we used, sheds light for a  specific perspective. By applying a different design thinking tool we would probably get different  results, however. Thus, to get deeper insights in the challenge posed in our project we will apply  further tools.

