How might we enhance the digital shopping experience for Dollar General?
The Challenge
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How can Dollar General align their digital offerings with the millennial audience using their digital platform to allow for a convenient and enjoyable shopping experience?
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My Role
Service Design and Design Research
Methods
Desk research, user interviews, ethnographic observation, user journey mapping, prototyping
Covid taught us most people are unprepared
for sickness, accidents, and surgeries.
When we talk about having an HPOA on file, the main problem is the lack of awareness
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40% of our survey sample had never heard of an HPOA. The term itself confused people, and more people said they would reach out to a lawyer than a primary care physician for more information about HPOAs.
The benefits of having an HPOA are not clear for patient population
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40% of our survey sample had never heard of an HPOA. The term itself confused people, and more people said they would reach out to a lawyer than a primary care physician for more information about HPOAs.
Even the ones that know about the HPOA form perceived it as a complicated process
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40% of our survey sample had never heard of an HPOA. The term itself confused people, and more people said they would reach out to a lawyer than a primary care physician for more information about HPOAs.
Understanding the sales experience
of financial representatives (FR)
We began a second phase of research and analysis, this time focusing on further understanding the relationship between NW and its financial representatives. We spoke with Northwestern employees to understand what their operation was like and identify their biggest challenges in staying in business.
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After conducting several interviews, we developed a journey map of the experience of financial representatives from when they begin the relationship with NW until they become established sellers of NM products.
We used reasoning by analogy to identify industries that share similar characteristics with the insurance industry and find insights into how they operate and solve similar problems. In parallel, we researched industry-relevant trends, events, and external forces, then we created a series of discontinuities that could influence the future of NM.
Navigating ambiguity was a big part of the process. To address that, we used a couple of methods that allowed us to anchor our analysis and broaden our perspective on our chosen opportunity area.
Key findings
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Through the research, we found out the following
How can we help people understand the importance of being prepared?
Innovation Mission
Based on our insights, we defined the innovation mission for this project. Under this umbrella, we created multiple innovation themes and narrowed them down to 3 key themes.
Having these 3 themes, we had a brainstorming session to find solutions that responded to these themes. More than 100 ideas were generated using the Round Robin technique and then grouped based on similarities.
After a second refinement session, eight prominent and distinctive concepts emerged. Only the concepts relevant to the Client-FR experience were developed and communicated to the client as final delivery.
Final concepts
Supporting financial representatives with AI in the customer acquisition process
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Finally, we created prototypes of 4 solutions to improve financial representative relationships with clients, all supported by artificial intelligence (AI). The concepts are articulated to support financial representatives in different parts of their customer acquisition process, providing them with tools to facilitate interaction with clients and reduce operational labor time while maximizing customer value.
AI-enabled Real-time Assistance in client conversations
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For Financial Representatives who are working remotely, an AI assistant will appear on the video call platform. The AI will analyze the potential or current customer’s emotions based on their voice and facial expressions and recommend prompts to the FR to keep the customer engaged.
Automating the underwriting process with AI
With AI-enabled mobile and tablet applications, the underwriting process of life-insurance policies are 50% more efficient as the AI automatically calculates premiums that are tailored to every customer based on their current lifestyle and health conditions. To speed up authorizations, customers can authorize documents and verify thier identities via Face ID on their smartphones.
AI-enabled on-the-job Training for FRs
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AI will be used to replicate real past conversations between FRs and customers to help FRs improve and attract new customers more efficiently.
AI-enabled Client Engagement through partnership with relevant services
By partnering with lifestyle services such as gyms, or yoga studios, customers are encouraged to keep a healthy lifestyle. For each action taken to improve their health, Northwestern Mutual customers will earn points which can be exchanged for lower premiums.
What the client said
"Your work is comparable to the ones we received from top consulting firms."
"There are departments within the company that would find this very useful."
"This was Very Well Done!"
What I’d do differently next time…
🧠Deeply understand users. Although during the research phase we used multiple methods to find insights and inspiration from different sides, I feel a little more user research would have been very helpful. This was not achieved because the client did not give us access to more than a couple of financial representatives, but if this project happened again, I would go a little deeper, talk to more FRs in order to better understand their needs and design a better solution.
📢 Communicate the value of innovation work. The final presentation of this project to NM employees was made a month after we completed it, so not all team members were able to participate. I consider that the presentation and communication of the project is a key contact point to transmit the efforts, the methods and the value of the innovation work, I would have liked to be able to participate in that process as well.
🤔 Reflection and synthesis are crucial to move forward. Since we were learning some of the methods at the same time that we used them, we made mistakes in interpretation and application, since many times we did not understand how one method informed the next step. Getting specific insights or takeaways after each discussion or use of the methods would have helped us not to feel so lost during the process. For this, I consider it essential to reflect on what and why we did each thing we did in a regular basis.
Thanks for reading this far!
- Brayan