Sureify Agent Portal

Designing the first version of an agent portal integrated with our data platform.

Sureify

Sureify's mission is to modernize the life insurance industry by helping companies service, engage, and sell to their customers with our enterprise product suite.

As Staff Product Designer at Sureify, I led design for several important projects, including developing the product vision for the first version of the agent portal. During my time there, the company grew from 30 to 300 employees, the design team grew from 1 to 10 designers, and revenue increased from under 100k to over 15m.

LifetimeAgent

LifetimeAgent is a comprehensive suite of digital tools that life insurance carriers can offer to their exclusive agents. It empowers agents to offer personalized service through multi-channel support. With LifetimeAgent, agents can easily access high value data and insights that help them better understand their clients and their needs. It enables agents to proactively manage their book of business, service policies, sell and track compensation in a single location.

While being optimized for desktop screens, we made sure to adaptively design for mobile as well.

Project Details

Problem

Sureify was facing a significant challenge in meeting the evolving needs of life insurance agents in our product suite. Our existing carrier panel had proven insufficient in supporting the dynamic demands of agents, therefore we needed to establish a new central hub for agent specific tools that we offered. Additionally, we required a channel to aid in the adoption of our cutting-edge digital experience engine, CoreConnect.

Objective

To enhance the ability of exclusive life insurance agents to connect with and extract value from the existing Sureify Ecosystem. By establishing a clear strategy and solution for supporting life insurance agents as a distinct user category within the Sureify ecosystem.

Role

Lead Designer

Duration

18 Months

Methods

Competitive Analysis, Expert Interviews, Qualitative Research, Figma Designs, Prototyping

Team

2 Product Designers, Product Manager, Technical Architect, Offshore Dev team

Overview

Background

In the life insurance industry, Direct-to-Consumer applications such as Sureify's LifetimeACQUIRE, offer the greatest value to applicants with a general idea of their insurance needs. Yet customers often lack the required expertise to identify their needs, parse options, and select the right product. Carriers depend on their agent sales force to bridge this gap.

Initiation

In early 2021, Sureify's president, Dan Gordon, asked me to define a strategic direction for Sureify's agent solution. I set out to understand insurance agents, their challenges, and the opportunities within this domain.

Discovery

Competitor Research

A problem arose: I could not access much of the software used by agents because of how these products are sold through demos and pitches. I therefore took an inventive approach to competitor research. I evaluated such software features and design by reviewing public training videos on YouTube, which were freely accessible. I combined the evaluation with data from industry reports to create a comprehensive profile of multiple agent products and establish benchmarks for core portal functionality.

Expert Interviews

A key insight was that agents do not generate revenue from servicing requests. They are responsible for basic support across all policies within their Book of Business. But they often delegate policyholder servicing to assistants, allowing the agents to focus on generating new business. This delegation, which tends to go to a single assistant, sometimes occurs among multiple licensed agents within a shared office. Many agents also operate with multiple agent IDs, each tied to a unique book of business. This necessitates a solution for a many-to-one relationship between agents and their system IDs.

Structuring Research

To organize the research, I created a framework of Agent Contexts. These Contexts helped to outline various actions, pain points, technology, and scenarios agents might encounter. With a basic framework in hand, I shared it with our internal team of industry experts to elicit further insights into agent requirements.

Input from industry experts defined core agent actions. It also highlighted the typical daily tasks of life and annuity agents. For example, agents often schedule callbacks for new customers or update policyholder addresses. Analyzing these scenarios revealed recurring patterns, shaping our software design and informing the functionality needed for an agent-centered solution.

Definition

Audience

Agents

Agents are the backbone of the life insurance industry.. Agents build and maintain customer relationships, serving as the main point of contact for policyholders in both buying and servicing policies.

Carriers

Life insurance carriers have been slow in adapting to the digital transformation. They lack the required expertise or internal structure to build out software teams to address these changing market conditions.

Agent Assistants

Assistants support insurance agents by handling administrative tasks such as managing paperwork, processing policy applications, and organizing documentation. They also assist with scheduling appointments, preparing reports, and handling routine communication. By taking on these tasks, agent assistants allow agents to focus on client interactions and sales, empowering agents to focus on directly serving their clients. Agent assistants may also engage in client communication under the guidance of the agent, helping to build relationships and expand the client base.

Exclusive Agents

Agents who only sell products from one carrier. They receive specialized training and have extensive knowledge of their company's offerings. These agents are loyal to their company and promote their products through marketing efforts. They are paid on commission and must meet sales targets.

Independent Agents

Agents who are not tied to a single company and can represent multiple insurers, providing clients with a wider range of options. They are knowledgeable about the insurance market and can offer personalized recommendations based on client needs. Their compensation is commission-based and varies depending on the company.

Upline & Downline Agents

Upline refers to higher-level agents in a business organization who recruited or sponsored others into the network. They form a vertical structure with those above them in the recruitment chain.

Downline refers to the agents below a person in the organizational structure who were recruited or sponsored by that person. It forms a hierarchical structure extending vertically from the recruiter to the individuals they bring into the network.

Developing Agent Domains

From this research — further informed by contexts established with our subject matter experts — I delineated distinct feature categories. At the same time, I assembled a list of potential features for the initial iteration of the agent portal. These features made up most of the "agent domains" and served as a rudimentary roadmap for added refinement.

Selecting an Approach

One potential solution was to repurpose parts of our existing 'Carrier Panel' as a central hub for agents. To assess this approach, I drafted some mock UI concepts to illustrate the agent experience. These received positive feedback. Yet discussions with product engineering revealed issues stemming from high technical debt, lack of modularity, and access management. We opted to build a new, agent-specific portal integrated into the broader Sureify product ecosystem.

Shaping the Portal

After identifying and refining the essential features and a clear strategy for the agent portal, I created wireframes for the most important screens. The primary goal was to provide stakeholders with a visual representation of the portal. This would elicit feedback and reactions so that I could refine and further define the scope of our design for the final version of the portal.

The wireframes uncovered issues around what information would need to appear on the dashboard. The reality, too, is that many agents wanted to configure the dashboard to their specific needs. An unexpectedly popular feature was the addition of a context-sensitive 'initiate' button, offering various options depending on the specific page the agent was viewing.

Design

Highlights

Impersonation

This feature allowed upline agents to view and take actions on behalf of their downline agents. It offered clear advantages over advanced user-level access controls: (1) the portal could be viewed as a downline report; and (2) agents with multiple agent IDs received person-level access instead of requiring impersonation of their alternative IDs.

Global Search

The difficulty in implementing global search on the agent portal is the high redundancy of search result data. To address this, we borrowed a pattern from other spotlight-style tools. This returned results by their association with defined, key-object types and prioritized their likely relevance. Icons for each result aided in the rapid contextualization of such types.

Status Tracking

Using progress tracker bars indicated the status of any given case. It called out what actions needed to be done, by which parties, so that blocked cases could move towards completion.

Impact

Our creation of a standardized agent portal significantly enhanced the stickiness of Sureify's CoreConnect platform within the carrier software ecosystem. By connecting the carrier's core systems to our CoreConnect platform, we were able to build pathways for agents to actively interact with policyholders atop this integration layer and solidified Sureify's role as a crucial software intermediary for both carriers and agents.

Interested in working together? Contact me!

linkedin instagram discord steam