Global Insurance Company

Overview

The client is a Fortune 500 company providing financial protection to more than fifty million people and the largest provider of supplemental insurance in the United States. Its agents sell through personal microsites, and in 2019 the way those sites were made had stopped working: an agent requested a site by email or phone, IT built it by hand, it took weeks, and the marketing material on it was often outdated and had never been approved by the corporate content teams. There was no way to see how many sites existed or how they performed. Adoption was low because agents had learned not to bother. Working with the client's UX architect, I led the redesign of the whole agent microsite experience.

What we found

Three groups with three different problems. Agents wanted a site in the time it takes to fill in a form, with their own name, territory and products on it, and some control over what it said. Marketing and legal wanted to see content before it went live and to change it once rather than on every site. IT wanted to stop building websites by hand. The discovery interviews produced the before-and-after map on this page, and the middle lane of it, approve once and inherit everywhere, is the decision the rest of the design follows from.

The design

A greenfield Sitecore 9.3 implementation on AWS. Single sign-on against the existing Active Directory, so an agent's details were already known when they arrived. A four-step builder: about you, prefilled from the directory; products, filtered by the state licence so nothing unlicensed can be published; approved content blocks from a library, where the agent chooses the order and marketing owns the words; then a preview of the actual page before publishing. Products come from the PIM, contacts from the CRM and appointments from the scheduling system, so the site stays accurate without the agent doing anything. An automated workflow lets marketing draft, legal approve with state applicability, and the library release, and every site inherits the change on its next publish. Google Analytics and Sitecore's own analytics are aggregated, so an agent sees their numbers and corporate sees the same numbers rolled up by region and product.

What happened

Within 48 hours of launch, 600 agents had created 1,800 microsites. In the first twelve months more than 5,000 agents deployed over 60,000 sites. Traffic to the sites rose more than 250 percent quarter over quarter in the first 90 days, portal usage rose 31 percent, and revenue for the products covered by the microsites grew 4 percent year over year. An iterative release schedule replaced the wait for new features. The client's own words: the launch of the agent portal has been the single most successful digital transformation project in the history of the company.

Delivery

A team of twenty five with four direct reports, over eighteen months, across North America. Accessibility to WCAG 2.0 AA and GDPR-aligned data handling were built in, and compliance sign-off was a release gate rather than an afterthought.

Why it matters

Self-service only works when the thing being served is governed somewhere else. The builder is simple because the library, the licence filter and the approval workflow do the hard part before the agent ever sees a screen. The wireframes on this page are reconstructions of the delivered design, drawn for the portfolio; the launch figures are the client's.