Pension tracing specialist service ‘My Future Now’ was acquired by L&G in 2019 and they brought their Pension Tracing Backend platform for our internal agents.
As a lead designer I was tasked to evaluate not only the Pension Tracing platform itself but also the whole process of pension tracing to identify any opportunities for improvement.
The business goal was to improve efficiency by reducing the current pension tracing time by 50%.
After the successful design and launch of Print and Post streamlining process, the average pension tracing time was reduced by more than 50% from 58 minutes to 27 minutes, which meant that the number of pensions each operator could trace more than doubled per month from 114 to 238.
Our successful agile team was rewarded for becoming one of the finalists of the best software testing project award in an agile environment by KPMG Best Agile Project in 2021.
My Role
Worked as a lead UX designer, responsible for holistic service design from consumers applying to trace their lost pensions to agents tracing the customers’ pension requests, and to the senior managers managing the agents.
Worked in an Agile team which consisted of Product Owner, Business Analysts, Solution Architect, Scrum Master, Frontend Developers, Backend Developers and QA Testers.
Challenges
Understanding the pension tracing process was quite challenging at first due to the very complex process with multiple scenarios.
In terms of printing and posting process, getting the right person in the office at the right time to pick up a task to generate the letter along with the cover letter saved offline was difficult especially during the COVID-19 pandemic as most of the agents were working from home and had limited access to the office.
Sending letters was time-consuming and costly and created waste due to printing unnecessary duplicate cover letters.
As the agents record manually after sending the letters it was difficult to track which led to mistakes so that many pensions were not progressed to the next stage which resulted in lost business.
Solutions
Merged multiple Hardcopy Letters of Authority with one cover letter to reduce printing and posting costs and resources.
Set up the virtual “Post Room” for focused Printing and Posting tasks.
Introduced the functionality for accurate automatic marking and tracking of progress.
Hardcopy LOA is only one of many letters agents send out, so it was a great start to designing an expandable and re-applicable design process.
Kick-off
Met with the product owner and was informed that his business goal was to enhance the experience of the pension tracing app for the agents while reducing the pension tracing time.
In addition, as it is an internal backend application, the decision was made not to change the appearance of the app to match L&G design guidelines but to focus on efficiency and usability.
Led a Kick-off workshop with the agents (users), development team and stakeholders to get familiarised with each other and to align the objectives.
Provided the UX strategic plan to inform the design process, get an agreement on the design activities and set the expectations of outcomes.
Discovery & Define
Ran several workshops with the team to collate pain points and prioritise them collectively.
Conducted multiple user interviews to understand the complex pension tracing process but it was crucial to understand it fully to define the user’s pain points.
Established user-profiles and AS-IS user journey mapping through user interviews.
Subsequently established Epics and Stories.
Priority 1. Improve the printing and posting hard-copy letter process
During the design workshops, we agreed to prioritise improving the process of the agents sending the request to multiple providers to transfer customers’ pension(s) to us.
Design, Test & Iterate
Jobs To Be Done:
As a Pension Tracing Operator, I want to create an automated cover letter for the Letter of Authority (LOA) and pre-populate the details so that I can save time.
As a Pension Tracing Operator, I want to create a single file with one Cover Letter and Multiple LOAs so that I can save time and resources.
As a Pension Tracing Operator, I want to send a merged LOA PDF to Postroom (Print & Post) tab automatically so that the next person can print and post easily.
As a Print & Post Admin, I want to mark the ‘Send Hard LOA to Customer’ task to complete quickly and easily so that the Pension Tracing Operator can move on to the next task.
As a Print & Post Admin, I want to log the ‘Send Hard LOA to Customer’ task to complete automatically so that I can accurately and easily record the progress.
As a Print & Post Admin, I want to find ‘Send Hard LOA to Customer’ tasks quickly and easily so that I can mark them ‘Complete’.
As a Print & Post Admin, I want to download the merged LOA so that I can print and post easily.
Consistently discussed with the agents to get direct feedback and iterated the designs accordingly.
Designed the feature to merge hard-copy Letters of Authority with a single cover letter.
Set up the virtual “Post room” for focused printing and posting tasks.
Introduced the functionality for accurate automatic marking and tracking of progress.
