This course is for entrepreneurial managers who are looking for tools and techniques to introduce exciting, innovative products or services to market quickly and informed by high-quality customer insights. It is applicable to a range of organizations from small-medium sized enterprises through to corporates, and across a range of industrial segments. The problem this course helps address is the constant pressure managers face to be innovative and introduce novel products and services for their customers. However, many creative ideas get ‘stuck’ in the boardroom or are subject to intra-organizational tensions or group think. This course provides methodologies to break through these challenges. We build on the widely known concept of design thinking but update it and apply it to advance business strategy and entrepreneurship. Over five weeks you will learn what ‘design strategy’ is, how it differs from traditional design thinking and business strategy, and how it can be used to improve existing products or services in your business, or introduce breakthrough ideas. We will also provide an exclusive, deep-dive into the practical application and impact of these strategies in one of Australia’s newest, most innovative financial institutions, UBank, and the global re-insurance giant, Swiss Re. Through conversations with their Senior Executive Leadership Teams, including UBank’s CEO, we will explore how they have embedded innovation through design thinking. By the end of this course, you will have a set of tools to inform product design and development for your own start-up, or to extend the product roadmap of an established organization.
The UBank/ Swiss Re experience - market research
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From the course by The University of Sydney
Design strategy: Design thinking for business strategy and entrepreneurship
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The University of Sydney
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From the lesson
Primary market research and problem statement definition
In this module we'll look at how to plan and conduct primary market research and how to analyse the results. We'll then step through how to craft a meaningful problem definition statement.
Meet the Instructors
Eric KnightAssociate Professor of Strategic Management and Innovation
Discipline of Strategy, Innovation & Entrepreneurship
So, you UBank's customers are really varied.
So, we have people that are really young and active in
savings and we also have superannuation funds,
we also too have home loan customers.
So, with all that variation,
what we see is an opportunity to really delight them.
What's common about them all though,
is that they are super involved in digital,
and they are really excited about what digital
can mean to making their lives easier and simpler.
We find that our customers and our consumers tend to be very similar.
The thing that connects them though to each other is the ability to really want to
use digital on a daily basis, be mobile savvy,
and their ability to actually look for really good interesting financial services
products that are simple and make their needs.
So, we are obsessed with collecting insights about our customers.
What we want to know often is,
we'll either talk to them on the phone,
so we listen into a lot of our phone conversations.
We'll bring them into our design conversations as well,
so we'll have like afternoon teas,
or have drinks at the end of the day with some pizza and bring customers in.
And also to these just that everyday interaction with
customers that means that right throughout the culture
of our organisation it's how do you make the experience better.
We always speak to our customers about the pain points that they experience.
One of the key things with it though is being able to do something about it.
So, there is no point in asking for feedback if you're not willing to do something.
One of the pieces
with our brand in particular that we've really driven home with UBank,
is that we try really hard.
So, we have really open conversations that say,
"We would love to fix that too,
but we can't right now, it's on our list. Or, hey did you know I will fixed this recently?"
Insights that students gathered were slightly different to what we would gather ourselves,
because we were coming at the questions just from different backgrounds.
And so what we were able to experience,
and that was a less of leading the witness because they were less familiar with
financial services and more open minded to
the opportunity of what those adjacencies could be with financial services.
And so as they listened,
they we're probably listening far
broader than we ordinarily would listen to our customers.
The problem we were given by UBank was to come up with
a fresh way of engaging new and existing customers in a savings journey.
And it was a tough brief,
incredibly tough brief but it was a great brief.
And I think with all tough briefs they're often
the best because they lead to great creative work.
So, the methodology we used for the UBank business problem was multifaceted.
For me, it was about focusing on the customer.
So, it was very customer-centric right from the outset.
For us we looked at both qualitative and quantitative ways of gathering our research.
We really put customers at the heart of what we were trying to find to ensure that
all insights that we gathered were from the voice of
the customer. And that really helped unpick the business problem.
We started with quantitative surveys,
so reached out to have 200 people to gather those initial thoughts about
savings and then we conducted
30 one-on-one interviews to really probe around what people save,
why they save, when they save, and how they save.
And all of those interviews really garnered
a common theme which helped us redefine the business problem that UBank was facing.
The research methods we chose were really focusing on the consumer and part of
my background in advertising is putting
the consumer first and foremost at the heart of the problem.
So, that was our methodology to really talk to people,
understand what they feel about banks in terms of helping them save or not,
as the case may be.
And from those insights,
we helped shape the common themes to help unpack the problem.
It helped to validate our initial findings.
We spoke to a lot of people and identified key themes which
revolved around the lack of method from banks helping people save.
And so that was the moment we thought that's the opportunity for UBank.
So, Swiss Re has a very diverse customer base.
Predominantly our direct customers are other insurance companies,
but indirectly we also reached customers of those insurance companies,
so general public and the community,
people who would purchase insurance and various types of
insurance from general products such as car insurance,
right through to life and
health insurance products, in Australia and all across the world.
Our customers and consumers are different.
So, our customers are predominantly the insurance companies that we would work for;
we would call those people our customers.
The consumers are the people who purchase
the insurance products and they are predominantly the customers of our customer.
So, as a B2B organization,
Swiss Re's customers are the insurance companies.
So we collect a lot of information about their needs through various types of meetings,
catch ups, and surveys.
We use the Net Promoter Score with our customers,
the insurance companies, to rate their opinion of
Swiss Re services and the offerings that we give them.
But in terms of meeting and finding out insights from their customers,
so the consumer of insurance products,
this is a lot more difficult for Swiss Re.
It requires either sourcing that from our insurance partners,
or going out and looking at contracting a company who would go out and do
those customer interviews which is costly and very resource intensive.
Our customer is the insurance company.
So, as a contract,
we have our work with directly with that insurance company,
whereas the consumer recognizes
the insurance company that they purchase their product from.
So that might be the home and contents insurer.
It might be the motor or the health insurer.
Those are the brand names that they recognize. For them to understand who Swiss Re is,
it's another link in the chain that's probably a little bit too far removed,
and for us a very,
very difficult channel to be able to take.
Having those customer insights
really sort of got us up to speed to say,
"This is where we should be at," and it really should be focused on things like
mobile applications and solutions that
customers want out of any service that they can get.
They know that they can have things at their fingertips,
so why can't that be the same for insurance?
Swiss Re came to us as a cohort and said,
"Design a solution that
helps ill or injured workers to reclaim
the assessment process and rehabilitation process.
Help them through that process and basically
encourage and motivate claimants to return to work."
In conducting our primary market research,
we pretty much went down the route of just talking to people.
We adopted a targeted approach to who we were going to talk to.
So, on one side,
the participants in the ecosystem.
So, we talked to insurance companies,
insurance managers, claims assessors.
We talked to GPs, physiotherapists.
On another side, the actual consumers,
the end users, the people who are on claims.
We reach out to people who we knew were on claims,
who are currently on claims.
We talked to people who were experiencing illness
and going through the process of trying to get their claims processed,
and we felt the frustrations of that.
We really wanted to immerse ourself in
the entire ecosystem from the stakeholders involved,
terms of their painpoint experience and from a consumer perspective as well,
what they were experiencing through the entire process of lodging a claim,
waiting for it to be assessed,
then getting into the process of
rehabilitation and the difficulty of
getting themselves from rehabilitation back into work.
All in all, we talked to
approximately 70 to 80 people in the space of about one and a half weeks.
That was just through our contacts,
four people in our team reaching out to
as many people as he could in that short period time.
We did toy about the idea of having a survey,
just a random survey that goes out,
but we didn't feel as though that would capture the essence of the people's experience.
Typing it down and then reading verbatim from a screen
just could never compare to us sitting at a cafe and
hearing exactly what they felt and
unpacking issues that came out from from them reliving the experience.
That just proved true and true in terms of every single conversation we had.
We would come back into room, and we just shared the story,
and it was the stories that captivated us.
It really compelled us to think we're not just solving this to
pass a university degree. We're solving
this because we want to make life better for these people.
It's not just the claimants as very
much as we would like this to help change their lives.
It was even then trying to solve for the other participants as well who are finding it
equally a frustrating process as the claimants
and try to bring that whole ecosystem together and say,
"We can do something that can change this for everyone involved."
That's why we chose that method over a random survey or any other statistical sampling.
We actually stuck with that throughout as we went
through the process of iteration and all that.
We still kept the one-on-one conversations.
Whilst it was more time-consuming,
it was more valuable.
The results of the primary market research was interesting.
We tried to go in with no preconceived notion of what the solution would be or what
the responses would be and to that point I guess,
the market research validated the fact that there was no one size fits all.
There was no one thing that you could just hang your hat on and say, "That's the idea.
That's the solution. Let's go with it."
It was very much a validation that
the experience was different amongst different parts of the ecosystem.
There was one preconceived notion:
that we thought the process was going to be a lot smoother and
a lot more streamlined because it's just part and parcel
of most people's lives if they ever got into that position.
And if so many insurance companies do this,
then it should be a pretty seamless process.
Our primary market research smashed that out of
the window in terms of saying that actually it is a disjointed process.
No one is happy about the process.
Insurers are not benefiting.
Claimants are not benefiting. People aren't unhappy.
And that really was the key takeout for
my primary market research that there is a problem that has to be fixed,
and at least at that point in time there was no solution for it.
It was insurers just saying, "This is the way it works."
Claimants saying, "This is the process,
and whether I like it or not, I have to just live through it."
Did we had to pivot a product?
No, because we were conducting primary market research to decide what the solution would be.
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