Defining a world-class broker experience

Zurich was opening a new flagship office at Mark Lane in central London, home to its London Underwriting Centre, and wanted it to deliver a premium, user-centric experience: from the ground-floor reception up to the lounge, café and outdoor space on the tenth floor. The existing experience frustrated the people who used it. Some of the pain points were universal rather than Zurich-specific, brokers signing in twice to get into the building, then waiting while their host was found, but together they got in the way of doing business. The opportunity was to rethink how people do business at Zurich, and design the space to support it.

I led a study of how people actually behaved and interacted in the London Underwriting Centre, and synthesised the findings into personas and a user journey model, drawing every journey together into a single experience map. We used that map to find the issues, and the opportunities to improve the experience in ways that were innovative, cost-effective and true to the brand. From it we built a brand experience strategy: a set of experience principles, a future experience map, prioritised requirements, and a roadmap to deliver a premium experience on the tenth floor. The organising idea was to facilitate intelligent connections, between people, and between people and the building itself.

We defined a future-state user journey that resolved the most difficult points in the experience and surfaced several critical gaps that would otherwise have been missed. Underneath it sat six brand experience principles, giving every decision about the space, then and in future, a single experience vision to align to.

The future experience map became the reference point for every brand experience decision in the building, giving the architects and facilities team a unified experience to build towards, differentiated through design and technology. The six experience principles proved successful enough that Zurich adopted them as the cornerstone of both its Environments and its Digital guidelines, well beyond the Mark Lane building.