As we build our first ground-up product, a Business Owner's Policy (BOP), I joined the exploration team to help uncover not only how to best tailor this coverage to small businesses, but also how to best translate this value to our target business owners.

Quite literally starting from the ground up, before starting any market research, I worked with stakeholders do empathy mapping and align the team on objectives, goals, and to get each stakeholder to try to come at this obstacle through the lens of the customer.

From there, once our initial groundwork was set, through competitor analysis and market opportunities, we began to align on who our best target market should be and what this product should look like.

As always, uncovering the whys behind human behaviour is a critical point, in my opinion, to creating the best experience for customers. This product had many similarities to another product we currently offered (General Liability Coverage), and we needed to understand why, if at all, prospective buyers would know they need this coverage as opposed to that coverage, and what would be their reason for determination between the two.

As our research and knowledge grew, we branched out to further developments: qualitative interviews, expert interviews with insurance agents, desk research about the psychology behind recommendations and advice. I wanted to learn how we could best introduce optional broadening endorsements (in other words, "add-ons" or "upsells"), as well as how to create the best design, description, usability and accessibility of this product and journey.

From the beginning, I had many exciting challenges to face and opportunities to create the best possible product for our business. Again, as the researcher responsible for the New US Products domain, I was charged with this project start-to-finish.

Day one, my goal was to understand and align the stakeholders and their various proirities from various departments of the business. I conducted various stakeholder interviews with the same sets of questions to uncover their role's perspective and goals for this project.

From there, it was also important to me that our stakeholders were all able to see this product from the perspective of our future and prospective users. In order to achieve this, we did an empathy mapping workshop of our personal insurance-buying experiences. (Surprising next to no one, we learned that insurance buying is, at best, a neutral experience and at worst, excruciating.)

To continue laying groundwork, I needed to understand our competitors. Many close competitors already sold a product very similar to what our goal was with our product. I did various competitive research to find out what worked well, what didn't, what was confusing, who had the best information architecture, landing page, use of imagery, most accessible questionnaire, etc. This information helped inspire us on what aspects we wanted our product and site design to mimic, and which aspects to improve and how.

With this internal and desk research was in progress, it was time to dive into our customer, our product, and our specific research.

Based on market opportunity and other business priorities, our target market had previously been identified. With these broad trade definitions, it was my responsibility to uncover the personas of these business owners. To best understand this audience, multiple rounds of qualitative research were done, both internally and via an external agency.

Depending on the trade we focused on, and for this project there were 3 main targets, the personas vastly differed. One was very knowledgable about insurance types and coverages and preferred extensive coverage, regardless of cost. One had a very basic understanding of insurance needs, wanted 'standard' coverage, and was definitely more concerned about cost. Finally, the third target market had a very limited understanding of insurances and, unfortunately, had the greatest risks associated with their business.

One thing our participants did all have in common, however, is that they all used insurance professionals when buying this more complicated insurance product. This was an unexpected hurdle as our company is an online service that participants (ideally) would complete and purchase independently. Uncovering this barrier was an exciting challenge to work on next.

As I've mentioned repeatedly, one of my biggest passions surrounding my research, is understanding why. Discovering that all of our participants, regardless of current coverage, age, gender, business type, and more, used insurance professionals to buy their insurance was a new exciting obstacle for us.

With a large scale project like this, the methods of research options are seemingly endless. However, due to the engineering timeline delay that I was able to use to my advantage, I was able to schedule some expert interviews with insurance professionals that work with small businesses like our target markets.

I conducted some qualitative interviews with agents to see what value they interpreted they brought to small businesses as well as what, if any, impact COVID had on these often in-person consultations. We worked with these experts to uncover why small business owners buy insurance, what their motivations are, and why, unlike so many other services today, there is such a hesitance to purchase online.

With these experts, we went through the agent quoting process (both from the agent perspective and the customer perspective), why they thought small business owners used agents, and the 'personal touch' aspect that so many owners referenced in their interviews.

Once the target market and expert interviews were all conducted, I again brought stakeholders together for affinity mapping and uncovering the recurrent themes and insights. From there, I presented these findings, summaries, and recommendations to our broader team and company as an update on where we stand.

While the product launch for our Business Owner's Policy has been repeatedly postponed, we have had some success stories with the research already.

For starters, the relationship between call center agents and our journey has been more deeply evaluated both for BOP and through all aspects of our business. The understanding that customers lean on these experts has changed the mindset around our call center from more of an 'as needed sales tactic' to an asset that customers appreciate.

Also, through my research on reviews, advice, and recommendations (see below), our marketing department has completely revamped our social media for the US market. Prior to this, our last post was November 2019, and now we are posting business advice multiple times a week.

Another result of this research, we have launched a program to get more reviews from our customers in order to show prospective customers the satisfaction of others like them. We have always had reviews on our site, but before and after my research we went from a total of nine reviews, to 385 reviews and a rating of 4.7 stars.