People's expectations shape their perception of brands. For State Farm, they arrived at an inflection point for how to stay relevant in a growing innovative field. New companies like Lemonade were changing the game when it came down to insurance products and services. This was the moment to help State Farm rethink their business models from selling products to offering self-services that customers could enjoy, be proactive in, and have more control in the palm of their hands.
As a Senior Designer, I was involved in strategizing a few different opportunities to help drive a holistic approach for customers through innovative offerings such as claims handling through the Becky AI system and the State Farm mobile app.
Often when a driver gets an accident, there are several steps they must take in order to start filing a claim. This tedious process would often overwhelm the call centers of State Farm. Agents would spend hours trying to navigate drivers through a tedious process where several of these tasks could be automated.
The opportunity in itself was how might we expand the capabilities of file claiming by leveraging disruptive technology such as AI to automate processes while saving time for both the customer and the employee.
As part of the discovery process, I had the opportunity to speak with agents at State Farms call center. This was important because it really helped us identify where there were areas the AI system Becky could handle vs what needed special attention from a live agent. And what we noticed was that often because the systems are so fragmented and disjointed, agents had special short cuts to really find ways to save time.
For example, an agent when helping file a claim for a customer, might jot all the information down in a notepad because a customer isn't giving information in a linear flow for them to jump from one form field to the next. These insights helped us better understand what Becky could triage vs what the agent might be better off doing.
From there, I focused on coordinating a future vision workshop with the primary stakeholders for State Farm. This was an opportunity to present our research findings, and then work with State Farm on visioning what the future could look like for claims handling with both the AI Becky and live agents. A two day workshop was held to empower our stakeholders in thinking through the nuances and areas of improvement.
Several activities included 9 Box brainstorming, Brand Affinity, and Round Robins. This was helpful because it was the first time where several of these stakeholders met in person across the various organizations, and when they worked together they challenged one another on how to see the future.
Lastly, my team and I then started to map out the experience for the future of claims handling based on the vast amount of information we gathered from our discovery and workshop.
I focused on not only just the happy path, but also looked at various areas of circumstance where a live agent should take over when the AI Becky could not satisfy the needs of the customer. This would ultimately lead to creating a Service Blueprint for State Farm.
The Service Blueprint is a diagram that visualizes the relationships between different service components that are directly tied to touch points in a specific customer journey. It often is an ideal approach to experiences that are omni-channel, involve multiple touch points, or require a cross-functional effort (that is, coordination of multiple departments).
Here we focused on one key scenario for State Farm which was COL-390 (single car front end collision). The Blueprint created for State Farm was taken one step further by showing not only what the customer could experience when they filed a claim, but also what did the lens look like for the AI system Becky on the other side.
Then what helped State Farm was also looking at various swim lanes across the stages of COL-390. We focused on opportunities in which Becky could handle triaging information, we looked at when Becky might need to hand off to a live agent, and what other services from State Farm like Photo Capture Assistant could aide in the claims handling process.
The work done here has had a huge impact with State Farm. The strategy for helping create the future of claims handling has pushed the State Farm stakeholders to think through the experience from a customer-centric lens. Alongside, I helped State Farm increase conversion in their app downloads which house the Becky AI system. Since 2018, 2.7 million users have downloaded the app, 140k customers have been assisted, and it has been a recipient of the 2020 Webby Awards.
