The NRMA product is the best performing product within the IAG portfolio. The product has been around for decades and is held in the highest regards with its customers. Despite the strong brand and performance of the NRMA product, we were experiencing declining revenues year on year, with customer growth at an all time low.
The challenge assigned was to understand why we are losing market share to our competitors and to develop recommendations to improve the NRMA product and evolve the customer value proposition. This work was initially considered to be outsourced to management consulting firm Strategy& (part of PwC), however the Director of IAG's Design Centre suggested we run this internally as we have the skills to deliver and it would save several hundred thousand dollars running this project inhouse.
Understand where NRMA general products sit within the market and determine what we need to do in order to maintain our differentiated product status over the years to come.
To kick off the project, I ran a kickoff session so the working group can align on ways of working, objectives, and the assignment of work and deadlines. The first phase of work was to conducted Discovery on the problem to understand the specifics on what we are trying to solve, who we could talk to, and look under the hood of the NRMA products to determine how it was actually being considered "differentiated".
The first sprint was to connect with various stakeholders within the business and share what we were working on and request various material to support our work. We then spent time trawling through loads of documents, packs, and resources to understand the NRMA product from the perspective of IAG and also our customers. It was quite interesting seeing what customers were saying about our products and what was being communicated in our internal packs.
During the next two sprints, we conducted a deep dive into the NRMA competitors, both direct and indirect. We were trying to understand key feature and benefit differences between NRMA and our competitors. Our list of competitors spanned beyond the Australian market and considered non insurance players such as tech companies and startup insurtech's in other geographies.
As the weeks went on and the work progressing, we sensed some political landmines with particular NRMA product stakeholders as they wanted any product related work and decision to be signed off by their team as they had (in their view) full decision making responsibility for anything NRMA product related. They also had a view of don't fix what's not broken and anything outside of the traditional way of doing things was unnecessary and not worth the risk (not uncommon in an industry built on risk management).
I made the decision to bring the product stakeholders even closer to the work by inviting them to every standup, showcase and even scheduled 1:1 check-ins and working sessions to strengthen our relationship. The idea was to ensure the product stakeholders felt part of the decision making process and also subtly influence and shift their conventional thinking to become open and slightly more innovative.
This turned out to be a successful strategy as what could have been a political mess turned out to be an aligned front which helped influence executive leaders on our recommendations.
The next phase of the work moved into the next stage of the Double Diamond - Define / Synthesis. This involved vigorously analysing the data and learnings generated from our Discovery turning them into key insights. All our learnings from interviews / conversations with stakeholders, customer feedback surveys, and confidential IAG documents and decks were critically assessed and turned into insight statements. What was interesting was how we internally were viewing NRMA as a differentiated product because we would cover customers in more scenarios than our competitors, for example if you leave your keys in your car and it is stolen, being an NRMA insurance holder, you would be covered. This was not the case for majority insurers we were competition with. Despite this being a key differentiator, IAG was not promoting this differentiating feature as it was a risk that may induce more fraudulent claims - a decision made almost a decade in the past.
In addition to this, many feature and benefits listed in the PDS's of NRMA and its direct competitors were almost identical to what NRMA's offering. This meant that from the eyes of the customer, NRMA was more expensive than its competitors with only minor product differences. Coupled with this, new insurtech's and indirect competitors were introducing new features and benefits that NRMA had not considered implementing, thereby attracting many young millennials away from NRMA to these new modern insurance products.
Our recommendations highlighted the key insights found by our deep dive, overlayed with our competitors products and suggestions on what we could do over the next 2-3 years.
The outcome of our work was extremely well received, with great feedback from all the executive leaders. There was a decision made early on in our project to end the contract with management consultancy firm Strategy& as there was realisation that we could run a project of this scale internally without external support (businesses of IAG's size tend to rely on consultants conducting these types of projects).
Working groups were formed to implement the insights and recommendations from our pack that is still being carried out today. You will see a new and improved NRMA product over the year(s) to come. I'm proud that the work from this project I was part of helped drive this positive outcome.
"I loved the way you worked well through lots of ambiguity to develop a really great piece of work, without a lot of guidance! I loved you ability to think strategically as well as understanding the detail (i.e. Regulatory changes, Pricing, Serenity changes, etc.) I was really impressed with how you took a lot of detailed info and visualised and structured it in a way that drove really rich conversation within the EM group.I could always rely on you 100%.
I never felt like I needed to check in, because you gave me proactive updates, and you always followed up on any actions. It was clear that you were fully across what you need to achieve and had everything under control.I loved how passionate you were about the work. i.e. when you were reviewing our customers painpoints and best practice in the industry – I could see how you genuinely were interested and invested in how we could be solving these painpoints for our customers. Keep up the great work!"
Amanda K - Manager, Customer Segmentation, IAG