1.overview
Streamlining Commercial Insurance Quoting.
Today State Farm recognizes that sales conversions vary depending on customer and agent. Business Owners Policies (BOP) quoting process was complex and inefficient, reflected by a low System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 27. Today agents cannot proceed to the next chapter/page of a quote until all questions are answered which causes agents to interupt the conversation. Agents found it frustrating and time-consuming, often avoiding offering business insurance altogether. This feature streamlines the quoting process by allowing users to progress through a business line quote while actively engaging with the customer. It improves user experience by enabling seamless quoting alongside customer interaction, with visibility into next steps and a faster path to completion.
challenges
Agents faced difficulties navigating the quoting process, causing delays and inefficiencies. The key challenge was enhancing functionality without major design changes.
Problem
Agents avoid offering business insurance because the system is time-consuming and difficult to learn. The lack of a save-and-return feature further reduces their efficiency and willingness to use it.
My role
Design discovery, heuristic evaluation, stakeholder alignment and user research
focus areas
UX Design, Interaction Design,
User and Business Research,
2. Key Challenges
Discovery.
Lack of flexibility: Agents couldn’t pause or skip questions, which hindered their ability to quickly gather the necessary information.
No visibility into unanswered questions: Agents couldn’t easily see which questions were incomplete or required further input, making it hard to finalize quotes efficiently.
“We don’t offer Business insurance because the process is painful and time consuming. “
“As an agent, I want to quote, bind, take payment, and issue through Straight-Through Processing (STP) to save time.””
3. Ux strategy
Research insights.
While I didn’t conduct the initial interviews, I collaborated closely with the research team, reviewing video interviews and user feedback collected from agents. In addition to this, I conducted competitive and comparative research to benchmark existing solutions and identify best practices in the industry. These combined insights revealed key pain points—such as frustrations with the lack of flexibility to pause or skip questions and limited visibility of unanswered fields—which informed the design of a more intuitive, user-centered solution.
Agents avoided selling business insurance due to system complexity and time constraints.
No option to pause and resume the quoting process.
Agents wanted a way to quickly skip questions and return to them later.
Lack of clear visibility for required and unanswered fields.
4. Iteration
Key insights.
After the first iteration of user feedback, I received the following insights to better frame the feedback.
“I want to be able to skip ahead and answer questions later, without losing my progress.”
“I need clear indicators for required and unanswered fields so I can quickly see what I still need to fill in.”
5. At a Glance
Key features.
Save and resume functionality: Enabled flexible quoting workflows by allowing agents to pause and resume their work at any point.
Clear visual cues: Added prominent visual indicators to highlight required and unanswered questions.
Dismiss modal warnings: Agents were given the option to dismiss unnecessary warning modals to reduce interruptions.
Simplified interface: Focused on reducing cognitive load and optimizing the layout to minimize unnecessary steps, making the interface more intuitive and faster to navigate.
6. final call
Closing
Winning moments
Increased business insurance sales: The simplified quoting process reduced friction, directly contributing to higher business insurance sales.
Stronger cross-functional collaboration: The project fostered improved collaboration between design, product, and engineering teams through continuous, iterative feedback.
Enhanced agent efficiency: The redesigned process saved agents an estimated 20% of time, making the quoting process faster and more efficient.
Improved agent satisfaction: The new system led to higher agent satisfaction, with positive feedback about the enhanced usability and smoother workflow.
Lessons learned
Dropdown navigation: Initially, we considered adding a feature to the existing dropdown menu to let users skip over incomplete sections. However, this wasn't feasible due to system constraints.
Stakeholder engagement: Engaging with the development team early helped uncover that certain features, like the dropdown enhancement, couldn’t be implemented within the existing system, prompting us to rethink our approach.
Embracing alternative solutions: Given the constraints, we explored other ways to streamline navigation and address the skipping/visibility challenge without disrupting the existing design, leading to a more refined solution.