Mapping the Insurance Onboarding Process
No one ever accused health insurance of being simple. When a large health insurance company approached us to create service design blueprints, we quickly understood three things:
Onboarding in its current state was happening to members, not something they were taking a truly active role in. The real need was for communication touchpoint maps.
The onboarding process varied widely across line of business, customer, and policy holder. They didn’t just need touchpoint maps: They needed a scalable system for creating and maintaining them.
The touchpoint maps would be shared broadly across a large organization, which meant they had to be self-explanatory and interconnected.
A core team consisting of myself and two insights experts conducted dozens of interviews and working sessions and poured over existing documentation to create a cohesive picture of their current state.
My role: As the design lead, I worked closely with the client to uncover their true needs; collaborated with the Insights team to understand and document the current state; created strategic recommendations based on findings; and oversaw a visual designer and shared production responsibilities.
Every Call, Every Postcard, All At Once
To begin to consolidate and improve the member onboarding experience, our client needed a comprehensive, cross-channel list of touchpoints. This streamlined format helped reveal times when members were receiving too many communications—or too few.
It also drew our attention to duplicate touchpoints that could be cut first, as well as touchpoints that were part of the core experience across lines of business. When making recommendations for process improvements, I focused on this core experience as the most efficient way to have a broad impact.
A Journey of a Thousand Journeys
With hundreds of different onboarding journeys to account for, I knew we needed to carefully balance democratization of the process with the ability to scale and adapt.
After early experiments in Miro, we landed on Figma. It was used widely in their organization, and the component system made it easy to adapt to new priorities without hundreds of individual style updates.
A carefully-crafted auto layout system allowed anyone to quickly and easily add, remove, or reorder touchpoints to try out a new idea.
A Map For Your Map
Knowing the touchpoint maps would be used beyond the initial team, I wanted to make sure anyone could readily pick them up without a warm handoff. I created usage instructions, an icon key, and an “anatomical” breakdown of the columns.
Since this document was part of a larger effort, I included links to supporting documents. Having encountered numerous acronyms and keywords during discovery, I handed off a centralized glossary that could be linked from each touchpoint map and updated by the team as needed.