Design for the Future for Swiss Life

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Message Design for the Future Swiss Life, founded in 1857 as Schweizerische Rentenanstalt, is one of Europe’s leading providers of life insurance and employee pensions. The group offers comprehensive advice and a broad range of products to individuals and corporations through its staff, sales associates, independent brokers, and banks in Switzerland, France, and Germany. Recently, Swiss Life leadership decided to organically grow business from within. The company asked IDEO to initiate new ways to offer a more holistic, targeted, and superior customer experience. The organization’s goal: To go beyond providing product-oriented life insurance and to become a customer-centric supplier of secure, stable financial services. As part of a larger strategic plan in 2011, the Swiss Life/IDEO team created an interactive “Experience Exhibit” at the annual General Management Meeting (GMM). A team of senior IDEO designers participated in GMM to help guide participants and to act as a sounding board. GMM participants also received a deck of 39 pocket-size cards that reinforced content, tips, and best practices. The Experience Exhibit at GMM 2011 gave managers an opportunity to develop deeper empathy for their customers and glimpse what “customer-centric” could mean for Swiss Life as an organization. Its content was divided into three parts: people as inspiration, from needs to solutions, and business relevance. The ‘people as inspiration’ segment provided managers with insight into four different types of potential Swiss Life insurance buyers—and their experiences, behaviors, and opinions about savings and pensions. This segment’s multimedia videos, sketches, mind maps, photos, and quotes left room for interpretation and encouraged discussion among GMM participants. The ‘from needs to solutions’ aspect of the exhibit highlighted IDEO’s human-centered design research findings around five basic needs—trust, sustainability, transparency, relationship, and flexibility—and helped participants find potential solutions to address these needs. The ‘business relevance’ portion of the exhibit drew inspiration from real conversations with Swiss Life customers and distilled their needs into an ideal customer journey. These findings presented communication opportunities for Swiss Life, and offered pointers for all participants based on their specific positions and responsibilities. The result was lasting organizational change. As Bruno Pfister, Group CEO of Swiss Life, says: “We plan to continue to use all of the tools that IDEO presented—the behavior types, the touch points, the design principles and so forth—throughout the organization to frame our overall strategy as well as individual initiatives.” http://www.ideo.com/work/design-for-the-future

Swiss Life, founded in 1857 as Schweizerische Rentenanstalt, is one of Europe’s leading providers of life insurance and employee pensions. The group offers comprehensive advice and a broad range of products to individuals and corporations through its staff, sales associates, independent brokers, and banks in Switzerland, France, and Germany. Recently, Swiss Life leadership decided to organically grow business from within. The company asked IDEO to initiate new ways to offer a more holistic, targeted, and superior customer experience. The organization’s goal: To go beyond providing product-oriented life insurance and to become a customer-centric supplier of secure, stable financial services.

As part of a larger strategic plan in 2011, the Swiss Life/IDEO team created an interactive “Experience Exhibit” at the annual General Management Meeting (GMM). A team of senior IDEO designers participated in GMM to help guide participants and to act as a sounding board. GMM participants also received a deck of 39 pocket-size cards that reinforced content, tips, and best practices.

The Experience Exhibit at GMM 2011 gave managers an opportunity to develop deeper empathy for their customers and glimpse what “customer-centric” could mean for Swiss Life as an organization. Its content was divided into three parts: people as inspiration, from needs to solutions, and business relevance.

The ‘people as inspiration’ segment provided managers with insight into four different types of potential Swiss Life insurance buyers—and their experiences, behaviors, and opinions about savings and pensions. This segment’s multimedia videos, sketches, mind maps, photos, and quotes left room for interpretation and encouraged discussion among GMM participants.

The ‘from needs to solutions’ aspect of the exhibit highlighted IDEO’s human-centered design research findings around five basic needs—trust, sustainability, transparency, relationship, and flexibility—and helped participants find potential solutions to address these needs.

The ‘business relevance’ portion of the exhibit drew inspiration from real conversations with Swiss Life customers and distilled their needs into an ideal customer journey. These findings presented communication opportunities for Swiss Life, and offered pointers for all participants based on their specific positions and responsibilities.

The result was lasting organizational change. As Bruno Pfister, Group CEO of Swiss Life, says: “We plan to continue to use all of the tools that IDEO presented—the behavior types, the touch points, the design principles and so forth—throughout the organization to frame our overall strategy as well as individual initiatives.”