We helped Canada Life with product development by mapping the customer journey of its current, and a potential new offering.
Canada Life is one of the largest providers of Annuities. Following pensions liberalisation the business considered diversifying into investment based pensions. CJC was retained to help them map the customer journey for its existing offering and for the potentially new product. We used a gap analysis to help the company understand the capabilities it would need to develop, and the changes it would need to make to serve these new customers.
Customer journey mapping and product development
Customer journey mapping can help with product development. It allows you to develop a deep understanding of the service needs the new offering will demand.
For Canada Life our first job was to map the customer journey for their existing Annuity product. Working with cross functional teams we helped them understand the strengths and weaknesses of this existing offering. This allowed us to deliver immediate quick wins through a prioritized action plan to improve the existing customer journey.
We then got the business to focus on the needs of customers of the potential new product. Using existing industry research we helped staff understand customers’ attitudes and concerns about investment based pensions. This insight proved invaluable in our work with the team to map the ‘To Be’ journey of these new customers.
These maps gave them a detailed understanding of the new capabilities the organisation would need in order to meet these customers’ needs. The capabilities included:
- Dealing with stressed customers as a result of market volatility
- Generation of new content
- How to provide information, without straying into advice, so customers could make informed decisions
- Speed of response
- And the proactive provision of outbound information
Our involvement concluded with a detailed report presented to the Senior Leadership Team. This outlined the changes and capabilities different functions would need to make to adequately serve this new market. For the first time the business was able to make an informed decision about a potentially huge change it was considering.
