Building service design capability across a global corporation.
Client:
Zurich Insurance
Sector:
Financial services
Category:
Research and design
Facilitation and capacity building
The Challenge
My client, a global insurance provider, was going through a cultural and business transformation period where the main goal was to gradually turn the business into a more customer-centric, innovative, and agile organization. For this, they decided to create a team at the Group Level comprised of service design and agile specialists.
As the second design hire and third team member, my role was to contribute to setting the strategy for the team and starting to deliver against our organization’s mandate.
The Approach
To realize our mandate, we positioned ourselves as a critical supporting function for business units across countries. We activated this transformation with a collaborative approach, tapping into emerging pockets of change, focusing on delivering projects to show value, together with capability building and community engagement activities for scale. The following are highlights of our approach and deliverables:
Project delivery: end-to-end advisory services for departments at both group and country levels, working to solve real challenges that delivered immediate value to customers and the business. These spanned from stakeholder alignment and strategic workshops to service improvement and new venture design projects.
Capability building: definition of organization-wide design and agile methodology, creation of toolkits and resources to guide implementation, delivery of online and offline training and mentoring sessions for colleagues worldwide.
Community engagement: setup of a global community of practice, regular sharing of updates and thought leadership pieces, and launch of an internal unconference to celebrate wins, learn together, and foster cultural change.
"Olga excelled in both the design and application of the service design and agile framework we created at Zurich. She was able to convince senior key stakeholders at the group and business unit level of the benefit of adopting the methodology we created as well as working in a hands-on way to pioneer its use and prove the benefits through its practical application. Olga’s contribution was pivotal to establishing a design-led and prototyping-driven approach in Zurich and blazing the trail to design and test around customer needs. I greatly appreciated Olga’s experience and how she could communicate the benefits and engage across the group at different seniorities showcasing her passion and commitment.”
— Antony Elliott, Group Head of Business Transformation, Zurich Insurance
The Outcomes
Within two years of establishment, our team managed to gain the awareness and trust of the business units which led to an increasing pipeline of project delivery requests - demonstrating the value of the new method and establishing it as a key approach to achieve the organization’s customer-centricity goals. Our training and resources found home in the global learning and development academy and the business continued to invest in growing the team. Today, two core teams exist to serve colleagues worldwide.