A backoffice that cares

A backoffice that cares

When your product relies as heavily on whitegloved experiences to bring value to customers as Tint does, you need to get your ducks in a row. 

We needed to speed up the work and un-silo the knowledge of our account managers, and enable them to do their best work in a click-no-code manner through self-serve. This would free up their time for them to focus on being strategic partners to our customers, improve productivity and bring down time to value.

That meant we had a lot of stakeholders: account managers, finance, solutions engineering and the product organisation itself. All the more reason to gear down and create one single source of truth for customer information.

As a bonus, this could potentially mean easier customisation and testing of our customer’s experience of our product, since configuration would be through easy settings vs complicated feature flags.

What did it cover

Post-sign onboarding, product and risk structure configuration, pricing, billing, user management and customer support.

Problem definition 

  • identify key aspects of customer information relevant and specific for each vertical, creating a comprehensive template for each one

  • all involved parties need to use the same source of truth, be it in a spreadsheet or productivity tool 

  • the template needs to be fully flexible for new verticals 

  • A safe and compliant internal back-office tool 

  • Admin 1.0 had been used so far as a testing ground for features before they go live  – there were a lot of features in it that already exist in the Tint app and needed to be sunsetted in admin

  • A lot of the most complex use cases (like configuring pricing, products and protection through models) can only be done by a Solutions Architect

  • We want all of those types of tasks to move into a new role, Account Manager

  • We need a way to configure complex risk structure and a multi underwriter, multi-capital provider model 

  • maintaining Admin today is difficult, since it is still in MUI 4 and doesn't use Typescript or GraphQL – or our new Design System

Research

Through internal stakeholder interviews, our key findings were:

  • All critical customer information and documents are stored in Google drive today. This creates a challenge in itself because: 

    • people have to rely on common sense and naming conventions to know what is the most up to date file 

    • to find the correct file or folder, they'd have to already know who manages the account to ask them 

    • the documents are long (min 8 pages long) and unstructured, so it's hard to find the information needed easily 

    • the documents are scattered in different folders depending on ownership (legal, finance, insurance), and there's little sense of shared knowledge or information across them 

    • it's a lot of clicks to find anything

  • Insurance Product Managers mostly don't do any pricing or product configuration today. All of them find it over technical and daunting, and are wary of adding it to their responsibilities. Most people didn't know the current Admin exists, and those who do have only used a very limited set of features. 

  • All participants saw the value in having this customer information at hand, specially things like points of contact, risk structure and variable fees 

  • Insurance Product Managers mostly use the Tint app to analyse program profitability based on cases data The approach is achievable and won't require too much work on the Engineering side (according to Julien)

Meet the new Backoffice

The first version of CARE (Customer Admin Relationship Experience) was launched in October 2023, 3 months after its initial inception. It focused on customer management, and laid down important groundwork for how we think of customer configuration.

As a part of it we did extensive work into roles and permissions, not only identifying and mapping all our customer types and verticals, but also in internal needed permissions to ensure end-user data was kept compliant and secure.

Content played a massive role in this work, as a big part of it was communicating at the right level for each customer tier. We had the opportunity to create unique landing pages and different levels of control for each customer type, and if we were going to use language around upgrading, I wanted to make sure that we were working in tandem with marketing for a cohesive approach. This wouldn’t be possible without this collaboration, implementing event tracking and actually following up on the data.