MetLife Japan

Reinventing insurance sales

Challenge

Design an insurance application in Japan to be the foundation of a global sales platform

MetLife wanted to reimagine what insurance sales could look like for a global market. They came to us to design and develop an insurance sales application that would not only yield greater profitability for their business by streamlining operations and better enabling sales but would serve as the foundation for a new global sales platform that would reinvent insurance sales.

The plan was to start in Japan, one of their largest and most complex regulatory markets. If they could design and launch an application that accommodated the constraints and many use cases of this market, they’d have the foundation needed to roll out the platform globally.

Services Provided

User research

User experience strategy

Experience design

Platform consultation

Product strategy

Industry
Insurance
Insight
When the user experience is lacking, agents create their own hacks—mostly using paper, as it offers a flexible method for selling insurance.
Approach & Solution

Thinking globally, starting locally

We performed a strategic discovery focusing on the agents who would use the application on a daily basis. Through ethnographic research and prototype testing in five cities across Japan, we discovered that in fact, agents weren’t using many of the tools created for them at all, instead creating their own tools, brochures, and hacks just to do their jobs. This opened our eyes to the gap between what managers thought agents needed and the real needs of agents on the frontline.

Navigating a complex sales journey

End-to-end customer journeys are seldom linear. For agents in Japan, multiple meetings and a range of actions and interactions take place before a transaction occurs.

Advocacy and adoption

To support agent adoption and the success of the new application in Japan, we worked with our client to plan and execution of series localized content to support training and rollout.

 

This included creating multiple teaser videos to boost agency enthusiasm and adoption of the new tool and process, a series of product tour videos, a responsive UI training website, and a promo script handover to MetLife.