Employee benefits sales tool | MetLife

Improving employee benefits broker meetings, with a non-linear journey through marketing content.

The challenge

MetLife is among the largest global providers of insurance, annuities and employee benefit programmes, with 90 million customers in over 60 countries. The UK division of their employee benefits team approached financial services specialist agency, Teamspirit, for assistance with their broker communication strategy. As Senior UX Strategist at Teamspirit I was called upon to lead the design process.

The existing process relied on MetLife's sales representatives carrying 80 different paper brochures around to meetings across the country, an approach which was not only viewed as out-dated, but also had significant cost and logistical implications with regards to keeping the information within them up to date. The sales reps were also able to edit the digital presentations that they used as they wished, which often caused inconsistencies in the brand message and concern for the marketing team.

MetLife wanted to completely rethink this process, using digital methods to improve efficiency, reduce wastage and elevate the experience for the sales reps, the brokers they were pitching to and the marketing team.

Discovery

In order to fully understand the problem  that needed to be solved I first held workshops with the marketing team, who were producing the content, and with the sales team, who were using it in meetings in the field. 

From the marketing team I gained insight on their challenges around:

• unifying the brand message, when the sales team often created their own presentations where they perceived that there was a gap

• maintaining 80+ print brochures, including the costs of reprinting and the wastage

• understanding which content is valuable

From the sales team I learnt:

• about their process in these meetings and beyond; what good looks like in terms of communication with brokers and building a relationship

• where they believed there were gaps in the materials provided

• the logistical issues of carrying multiple copies of 80+ brochures to meetings

I realised that project presented an interesting perspective as it was intended for use by a small number of trained individuals. This allowed for a greater freedom within the design of the UI and had several impacts on the design direction and decisions made.

The concept

As the majority of the meetings were one-to-one and in person we recommended a tablet app with digital content to replace all of the brochures. The content would then be controlled centrally, by the marketing team, ensuring that it was easy and efficient to update and provided a consistent of the brand message. The app would also allow the sales team to tag items within the presentation to send to their client, reducing their work load for following up and providing valuable data back to the marketing team on which content was most valuable.

During the discovery phase I had noted that the meetings were heavily customised to the audience by the experienced sales team and so did not follow a consistent path through the content, instead it was adapted to cater to the broker's knowledge and interest. For this reason I felt that it was important that the app that we developed did not try to enforce one, linear path through the content, but organised the content into inter-connected themes to support the flow of the conversation.

I developed a few early concepts for the UX to evaluate with the teams at MetLife and refined them into a storyboard and prototype of the best idea.  As this app was for a small number of trained users I decided to prioritise the presentation and flow over discoverability. For example, some additional functions were accessed through tapping the MetLife logo in the top left corner. These would generally only be used before and after the main presentation and so it made sense to keep them neatly out of the way to provide a less cluttered interface for the majority of the meeting.

The outcome

The sales app allows MetLife's Business Development Managers to go into meetings with brokers armed with key marketing materials, carrying only an iPad. After the launch of the app I attended a sales conference with the team in order to gather their feedback. The new app was unanimously welcomed. The reps felt that the thematic presentation of the content and the onward journeys supported the flow of the conversations that they had with brokers. The ability to email all relevant materials at the end of a meeting greatly improved their efficiency and they felt confident that their presentations felt modern and polished.

The marketing team was similarly appreciative, as they are now able to ensure that everything that is being shared with brokers is on brand and current. The content tracking allows them to base future content on qualitative data.

MetLife have commissioned a further 2 similar apps with different content for other teams.