Note
This case study is not intended to show product flows, but to share how customer research informed decision making and product strategy to meet business objectives.
Due to a recent partnership, State Farm insurance agents would have the option to sell a Hagerty membership product.
The membership provides unlimited access to digital Hagerty products, roadside service, discounts, magazine subscription, and more.
Agents would be introduced to this product during agent onboarding, and be able to offer it to their customer when quoting insurance. We needed to leverage both touchpoints to incentivize sales.
Our own insurance customers were more likely to report satisfaction if they also purchased our membership product. We felt if State Farm agents understood a similar affect could happen with their customer we would incentivize sales.
Hagerty's membership product has many benefits. At the time of an insurance sale, emergency roadside service is the most relevant and therefore what we explored leading with.
We needed to speak to agents to test our assumptions. I developed a test plan, built prototypes, created a test script, and lead ten user sessions with internal agents and five State Farm agents.
Our selling point assumptions were proved wrong. Agents instead saw value after understanding their customer's policy would not include roadside coverage without it. I added a dedicated page in the onboarding flow to clarify this as it differed from all other State Farm policies.
Agents were not familiar with the needs of a classic car lover. To make learning about the hobby and make membership benefits more engaging I used full screen video modals with 15-second clips in their onboarding.
A risk raised was that separate payment would be needed for our product after an insurance sale. Agents warned us they would likely overlook this step or skip it entirely.
Adding any logic was constrained, so I used alerts both for second payment warnings and that roadside would not included without our product.
The above design work carried a significant business impact. We pushed through roadblocks to fill gaps in our knowledge and validate assumptions. This work will not go live until 2023 New membership sales in 2023 from this partnership are estimated to be 46K, resulting in 2.5M revenue.
For future iterations I would be interested to track how often agents quote policies, what they recall about the benefits, what the click rates and watch time of benefit videos are, and if video watches increase membership sales.
"Working with Caitlin has been a product managers dream! She is curious, creative, articulate and focused on making every product or project she works on the best it can be. I highly value her insights and would work with her on any product at any company."
"Caitlin was an absolute joy to work with. She integrated quickly with the product team. She is a strong self starter. Caitlin is incredibly thoughtful and a strong thought leader. If I get the chance to work with her in the future, I would do it in an instant."
"Caitlin is an incredible talent and a joy to work with. She willing to ask the tough questions and dig deep to gain valuable insights to deliver exceptional results. Combine that with her creative artistry, Caitlin is a balanced designer that can handle all aspects of the job. Any product team would be lucky to have her."
Caitlin Sowers (Product Designer)
Meghan Driver (Product Manager)
Nick Boes (Design Director)
Development (Hagerty)
