AXA Australia
Australia’s recent Financial Services Reform Act means that financial service providers need to provide clear communication to clients about their products. An effective network of financial planning advisers:
- Provides better service to clients
- Helps companies achieve their edge in an increasingly competitive market
Over the last few years, we have worked with AXA Australia to achieve this. We started by redesigning extranet sites that provide advisers with client and research information – as part of migrating these sites to a new IT platform and content management system.
Our brief for this redesign was to:
- Make it easier for advisers to do business with AXA
- Increase usage of the sites by advisers and their staff
- Reduce costs within the AXA call centre, by improving users’ self-sufficiency .
We do this by ensuring easy, flexible and efficient access to a large pool of information.
The “so what” factor
We began by reviewing the current site design to help AXA understand why they weren’t achieving their goals. We call this the “so what” factor:
- We don’t “just find issues”
- We help our clients find solutions that will achieve their business goals.
From there:
- The advisers and their staff were involved in focus groups and field studies to explore their needs and priorities, and to understand the ”real world” work that the sites need to support.
- We developed a user-centred information architecture (based on card sorting activities) and then created several design concepts. Advisers were involved throughout to evaluate and refine these concepts to ensure that the design was focused on their needs.
- Once the information architecture and interaction design were stable, a new visual design was developed.
“…that’s what’s missing from a lot of design projects”
Following rollout of the redesigned sites, AXA assessed whether the redesigned sites met advisers’ needs to identify the benefits of following a user-centred process. They found that:
The sites are now a significantly better business tool for advisers – easier to use with considerably better satisfaction levels.
AXA’s internal reputation also improved – advisers were impressed because they were consulted with active collaboration in designing their work tools.
Responses to the re-designed sites included:
“This tool should make me more efficient – and it does.”
“I use it a lot more – it’s much easier to get around and find things. It gives me the confidence to try somewhere to find something I want.”
“It’s a logical process you’d never given any thought to before. That’s what’s missing from a lot of design projects.”
AXA and Hiser continue to improve service delivery
We continue to work with AXA to develop and validate business solutions to deliver business results. This includes working with AXA stakeholders, financial advisers and their clients to ensure ease of use and effectiveness of:
- Paper-based policy application forms
- Online tools that support the operation of advisers’ practices.
