A large global insurance company wanted to explore new ways to provide value to SMEs – Small and Medium-sized food businesses (such as restaurants and bakeries) considering the low client rates in this sector, compared to other business sectors already well covered by the company.
To address this challenge, the team conducted a ten-week research and co-creation project. The objective was to understand the needs of small food businesses, identify opportunities, and develop recommendations with internal stakeholders.
As a member of the research team, I contributed to the design and execution of the research plan. My responsibilities included:
Recruiting restaurant owners, managers, and insurance agents.
Conducting user and stakeholder interviews.
Analyzing qualitative data and identifying key themes.
Developing user personas and mapping the customer journey.
Facilitating co-creation workshops with internal stakeholders.
Regularly communicating research findings and recommendations to decision-makers.
The project was structured into three phases:
Understanding users and their context.
Framing the most relevant problems and opportunities.
Co-creating and prioritizing solutions and recomendations with stakeholders.
The research combined interviews with contextual observation to understand how small food businesses operate and how owners think about insurance.
Interviews with restaurant owners and managers
Interviews with insurance agents
Hours of contextual observation and shadowing in restaurants.
By analyzing the research data, the team identified several problems and opportunities to address during the co-creation phase.
The core insight is the difference in how clients perceive value in an insurance product compared to how the insurance company views delivering value to SMEs.
Business owners associated value with practical support that could help them keep operating when everyday problems occurred. Examples included repairing a broken refrigerator, finding a reliable plumber or electrician, preventing food spoilage, or responding quickly to an operational disruption.
The insurance company primarily associated value with protection against major, low-frequency events such as fires, floods, explosions, or other events that could cause significant damage to business assets.
Based on the characteristics, needs, and behaviors identified through user interviews, the team developed five distinct user personas. These personas helped stakeholders build a clearer understanding of customers’ goals, needs, and attitudes toward insurance, fostering greater empathy and alignment throughout the project.
The personas were developed by identifying and clustering recurring behavioral patterns from the interviews. This analysis revealed key differences in how customers understood, evaluated, and engaged with insurance products. The team then created an extreme-behavior matrix, positioning each persona along two behavioral spectrums with opposing ends. This framework helped capture the diversity of customer attitudes and interactions with insurance.
We established two key behavioral dimensions, which enabled the team to position each persona within the matrix according to their specific goals and needs.
Horizontal: Does not understand about business insurance VS Understand a lot about business insurance.
Vertical: Very willing to get a SME insurance VS Not willing to get a SME insurance.
The team conducted a two-day co-creation workshop with stakeholders from multiple departments. The objective was to develop, evaluate, and prioritize recommendations based on the problems identified during the research.
The recommendations were prioritized according to four categories:
Quick wins: High-value recommendations that could be implemented relatively quickly.
Must-haves: Essential elements for a viable proposition.
Should-haves: Valuable elements to consider after the core proposition was established.
Would-haves: Longer-term opportunities with lower immediate priority.
Participants selected the most promising Quick Win and Must-Have recommendations, then explored how they could be implemented within the company’s existing processes, capabilities, and constraints.
The project resulted in a launch strategy for a new insurance product targeting small and medium-sized businesses. The strategy identified key marketing and distribution drivers based on evidence gathered from interviews with business owners and insurance agents.
The team mapped the customer journey and developed +40 recommendations based on identified pain points and opportunities to improve the existing product and inform the development of the new one. The recommendations were prioritized according to four categories:
Quick Wins | Must-Haves | Should-Haves | Would-Haves
The recommendations were also mapped to specific stages of the customer journey and relevant user personas, helping stakeholders understand when and for whom each recommendation would create the most value.
The project resulted in a launch strategy for a new insurance product targeting small and medium-sized businesses. The strategy identified key marketing and distribution drivers based on evidence gathered from interviews with business owners and insurance agents.
User personas become more valuable when they are connected to observable and measurable characteristics that can be identified in customer databases, research recruitment, segmentation, or CRM systems.
The power of visual thinking by writing down anywhere possible (whiteboards, post-its, papers on walls, windows) to foster communication and make agreements between the team members during internal discussions.
