Journey Mapping Workshop

As part of a large home transformation project, a key part of the discovery phase was understanding the context of how home insurance policies are sold in RSAs partner’s high street branches. Our original plan was to spend time in branches shadowing the staff selling policies to see first hand the process they go through and observe any issues and opportunities. Due to timing, the nature of the relationship and privacy issues, the proposal wasn’t effective so we had to establish alternative approaches.

I proposed a journey mapping workshop with a small group of branch staff to the relationship partner to try and gauge the client’s appetite. Working with a fellow designer we highlighted an outline of what we hoped to do and what we’d get out of it. After several rounds of communications regarding dates and other important logistics, we agreed to travel to an RSA office in Glasgow to run the workshop with four members of the client’s team, their line manager and an RSA relationship manager.

Understanding that there are two types of user in a branch journey (the customer and the branch staff), we thought it was important to focus on the branch staff to get as much insight from them as possible. Digitally there wasn’t much to prepare but getting a large enough paper canvas to Glasgow on an EasyJet flight was more challenging than I had originally expected. 

I lead the workshop in Glasgow, assisted by a content designer. We kicked off with an impromptu warm up exercise (choose your top 3 favourite things about Glasgow, one idea per post-it, with instructions about the ideal way to peel a post-it). After introducing the objective of the day, stood in front of a very large, empty (and slightly crumpled!) journey map canvas, I outlined how I planned to get their knowledge and insight. By only inviting the staff to document their thoughts, it kept the insight as accurate as possible while keeping other stakeholders engaged in the process.

Not knowing much about the branch experience, I got the staff to document on post-it’s the steps they went through in a quote and sale. I invited them up individually after 3-4 minute silent intervals to explain to the group their understanding of the process. We continued with this approach to document the actions involved with completing the top level steps.

With the presenting and discussions that took place, we took more time than I expected so for the next ‘theme’ in the map (pain points), I invited all the staff up to the canvas to work as a group to complete the section. After continued discussion, we continued this approach until we had completed the ‘happy moments’ and ‘questions’ sections. 

As the branch staff only had a limited time to be away from their day to day sales role, we had to cap the workshop at two hours. Despite the energy and adherence to the rules, in retrospect it probably wasn’t enough time. The insight we got on the day was very valuable to the digital team working on the design. It also helped to evangelise our approach and ways of working to parts of the business (and clients) that we haven’t worked with before, all of which gave very positive feedback.

A lot of time and discussion was spent early on getting the groups view on the steps and subsequent actions. This could have potentially been assisted by an initial phone call with one or two of the team to get an initial idea, which the team as a whole could have then critiqued and added to where necessary. 

My preference would also have been to run a follow up workshop with a partially completed ‘journey map’ with other branch staff to see if it exposed any further issues not acknowledged on the day.