When life turns upside down for a MAIF policyholder, what role should the insurer play?

The aim of the engagement is to inform thinking around the product and service offering related to bereavement, building on users’ lived experiences that will be formalised as a narrative. To dive into the topic, we take stock of the documentation made available by MAIF: positioning on the topic, specific offers, internal organisation, awareness campaigns, etc. The interactions between MAIF staff and prospects or policyholders are at the heart of the thinking. We therefore involve both operational stakeholders and end users. We prepare two specific interview guides, which we validate with the project team. Building on this usage data, we model the “loss of a loved one” life journey, which will summarise all the situations observed.

Interactions between MAIF advisors and their policyholders (or their loved ones) in bereavement situations happen every day. These conversations can take place in branch, by phone, or even directly at the policyholders’ home. As their areas of expertise are varied, different specialised experts may step in along the user journey. So we engage business contacts with varied skills, in touch with policyholders through varied channels and at particular moments. Talking with the business side lets us identify some of the issues encountered on the ground in interaction with policyholders. In parallel, we note watchpoints around the organisation of the different departments to handle bereavement-related situations. A mystery visit in a branch also gives us an overview of the approach in the early prospecting and information about the specific service offer. These first results help round out the interview guide for the users.

Working on a subject as sensitive as this calls for particular care in preparing the interview guide, and ahead of each interview. We pay particular attention to gathering as much information as possible about the lived situations right from recruitment, in order to adapt the way the interview unfolds.

For an hour and a half, the participants share with us everything they went through: from the first moments following the loss of their loved one to the moment they considered that the administrative side and the steps were complete. Interactions with every organisation they engaged with (including outside MAIF) for these steps are covered.

With the participants’ prior agreement, the individual interviews are recorded. As with every study, participants are told they are free to stop the conversation at any time or ask to move to the next section.

We then organise an ideation workshop with our team to present the main results and step back. The main issues tied to the loss of a loved one are formulated before defining related areas for recommendations.

Each story, unique, is broken down into different steps that people in charge of the administrative side of a bereavement go through. For each step, the stakeholders and the exchanges between them are described. As in any classic user-journey modelling approach, blockers or difficulties are set against identified needs. Through the conversations, opportunities emerge, whether reported directly by the people we met or deduced after cross-analysis. We capture a list of around fifteen main needs. These are prioritised based on the impact they represent on the life journey. The main pieces of user knowledge are then surfaced in an experience narrative. The aim is to convey the main results in the form of a story told in the third person. We follow a fictional character going through the different steps, emphasising the positive points and the blockers they run into. At the end of each step, the narrative highlights recommendations to consider to change the course of the story. To encourage adoption of the storytelling format, the narrative is then recorded as short audio clips corresponding to the different chapters of the story. A format that is easy to share and to listen to, to share user insights tied to this life event.

The opportunity to capture nearly 24 hours of recordings of slices of life from your target users doesn’t come along every day. Beyond that, the narrative picks up the most salient elements of the lived experiences. To build on this material, rich in details and nuances, we centralised all the user knowledge from the start in a research repository. For the occasion, we used Notion and its database features to archive the recordings and the interview notes with the maximum amount of description. The project team can then browse the raw data and access the full depth of the material gathered as part of the study. The ambition is at once to make discovery of this content easier and to be able to reuse it for future needs tied to the topic.