Taking a Scientific Approach to Customer Experience

15 minutes with Rich Warnaka.

Insurance Networking News, November 1, 2011

Justin Stephani

The shift to consumer-centric business models has been a slow process, mostly boiling down to the struggles involved in measuring the effectiveness of new methods and interfaces amidst a rapidly transforming market. Yet, Erie Insurance has found an effective way to do just that. Thanks to Rich Warnaka, an IT team and a "scientific approach," Erie boasts an operating system environment where usability testing offers a look into how consumer-centric modeling can maintain functionality and agent/consumer satisfaction.

INN: What exactly is the scientific approach?

RW: It's based on the User Centered Design Method; this method places the end-user at the center of the process so that appropriate analysis and feedback can be gained.

This approach mitigates risk because it ensures that the system matches the users' needs and ways of thinking through analysis, design and usability testing processes, which really draws from several different fields, including computer science, cognitive psychology, ergonomics, library science and others.

INN: Where did the idea for this approach come from?

RW: It's definitely a trend-at least among the big players. Progressive has a user-experience team, Nationwide, Allstate. Or look no further than Apple, this is a company that's invested a lot into the user experience of their products; that's what it's known for and that's been the big driver of their success.

So my goal: Why can't an insurance company be that successful? Why can't an insurance company step up to be the next Apple?

INN: What was the implementation process like?

RW: We noticed that there were adoption barriers to our systems and there was a lot of disagreement as to what was the cause of that. I felt it was the user-experience, so I started researching. And that's where I started to study cognitive psychology and design practices.

Basically, I begged and borrowed some money to bring in a guest speaker on the topic and, from there, created a business case around it so we could get a little more funding to conduct user analysis. That's when we spent a lot of time out in our agents' offices. I flew to different geographic regions, spent time with different levels within the offices, with principal agents and producer agents. I got to really understand the business and the different standpoints by watching the user systems and watching where they had issues-some of the cognitive barriers-and assessing the process flaws. From there, we started creating a prototype, and from there, we got funding to kick off a project. It was just a showcase project, but it got us the support needed to move on.

INN: How long did it take?

RW: We're still in the process, honestly, because it really is all about driving that change and changing the corporate mindset. Overall, we're on about year six or seven, but we've come a long way.

It's still an uphill battle. It's a change in mindset and a change in culture, but we're very lucky that our CIO is a strong advocate. It's still a struggle, but we've definitely made huge, huge progress.

INN: How do you ensure this approach is a sure-fire road to improvement? What are the specific steps involved in proving ROI before actual implementation occurs?

RW: The user analysis phase provides the underpinnings of the direction in which to take the design for a particular product. A design is then put together based on that analysis and is confirmed during usability testing. Put another way, a hypothesis is produced during user analysis and is tested or confirmed (or dismissed) during usability testing. So, unless you do not have the proper controls in place during user analysis or usability testing, you will understand whether you are headed in the right direction.

In terms of ROI, this can be calculated in many different ways-gaining efficiency, adoption of a new feature, etc.-during usability testing. Typically, we will have a prototype that we use to perform these types of calculations and validations.