Case Study
Transforming Aviva: Customer-Centric Strategy
Giving Customers "SuperPowers"
Aviva's insight-led design-driven strategy drove the transformation and reimagining of this historic 320 year old global financial services company - one of the world's oldest corporations. Our mission was to recreate this brand and establish a new fintech foundation to carry it into its next 300 years of service.
To solve this problem, our research looked at customers worldwide and identified how and why, the financial services industry is getting things wrong - failing to support customers. These insights formed the core of a customer-centric strategy, which established guidance and experience principles, and placed the customer at the heart of everything. Customer-facing products and experiences were reimagined through a new customer-centric lens. This approach produced a broad spectrum of success: increased sales & revenues, reduced delivery times, lowered costs, improved margins, and increased customer engagement & brand loyalty.
MyAviva Service Platform - Connecting Customers & Brand
MyAviva is core of connection between company and customers. Data and testing show this platform creates greater customer satisfaction, brand loyalty, sales and engagement. This vast platform redesign was guided by principles and goals of the customer centricity strategy, resulting in a great user experience. All aspects of the redesign were rigorously tested to insure optimal acceptance and performance.
The Aviva Design System
ADS, the Aviva Design System is more than a design language or style guide. It's a modular componentised system of code, brand, motion and dynamics which capture the essence of the customer strategy and extend it through brand and technology into a uniquely own-able experience. The systematized modular code base allowed design and development to happen globally at unprecedented pace while aligning the brand across global markets. In its inception launch, ADS allowed teams to reduce time for design and development from 6 months to 6 weeks. We isolated and tested the affect of visual design changes and determined the cost benefit of the new design language - millions of dollars in additional revenues each month.
Customer-Centricity Across Generations
Aviva's core brand values were expressed in the customer-centric strategy. Key among these values was "Care More". The design of business and product propositions was driven by important social insights and guided by core corporate values. Caring more in this case meant caring about the financial health and future of children and the generations to come.
Propostion Statement: "Digitization of Money is making money less and less tangible and increasingly challenging to manage and understand. This has the potential for societal problems of an unpredictable scale. At Aviva we've been studying people and money and the thing we've learned is that the habits that we form as children define our futures as adults. To have successful financial lives therefore we need to help generations of children learn how money really works. In this video we summarize the research and testing we've done to deeply understand how to engage with a new generation of savers, to help empower them to have better happier lives, and we look at the playful and experiential tools which may help them and their future families have the kind of happy lives we'd all wish for."
Test & Learn - Prototypes & Product Success
New product design requires testing and validation. Every new product is a bet, and winning means placing smart bets. But if you ask people to imagine something they've never seen, and survey their responses, your results will be nonsense. People are bad at correctly imagining things they have never seen. You end up with the proverbial Ford's "faster horse" syndrome,
Prototypes make new concepts real and tangible. They eliminate guess work, improve response and help guide the product design cycle. A quick, light weight early prototyping effort can establish a great long-term solution. This video was an early test prototype used to gather critical directional feedback on the product and proposition direction.
Penny is an interactive digital piggy-bank aimed at helping children understand money, learn how to manage it, and develop the skilful habit of savings. Designing for children is a challenge because adults, especially product managers and business people, are terrible at predicting what children will like. Videos, like the concept test above, are among the agile tooling which can be used demonstrate, assess, and guide product design and development. In keeping with the principles of optimism and simplicity, this concept video added humour and humanism which surprised and delighted children and adults alike.