Helping small businesses get their feet off the ground and manage operations.
Helping small businesses get their feet off the ground and manage operations.
The opportunity
The Suncorp Customer Propositions team researched growth opportunities to build value for key customer segments, which they had broken up into five streams. We were engaged to design and build key opportunities within the Small-Medium Enterprises (SME) space, focusing on startups and wheels-based businesses. These businesses were often undervalued and consequently under-serviced and the tools aimed at helping small business owners were relatively sparse and poorly designed.
The Suncorp team was interested in exploring tools and platforms that would help service small business owners, creating long-term value for their customers so that is where we focused.
The solution
Our design of Start Company was a function-driven experience, educating the user with a no-obligation, self-service approach in the form of actionable 'blueprints'. We developed a concept leveraging previous learnings and built an MVP to increase understanding and viability of this market segment.
VBM underwent an early pivot to become focused on features that users needed (such as scheduling & invoicing) with worksheets to increase sales, referrals and increased margins. Conducting tests in users’ typical work environments using a live prototype, we found users were extremely time poor but willing to give a larger investment of time in order to make a positive change to their business. This drove a pivot to align project success criteria with user needs - Micro Apps.
Our Expertise.
Services
Research
Expert interviews
Ideation & concept validation
Design
Prototyping
User testing
Web application development
Alpha trial
Technologies
React JS
Node JS
Redux
Express
AWS
What we did.
Research & Design
Suncorp identified two core moments within the SME customer segment: the initial moment of starting their own business; and reaching the point where they were ready to significantly grow their business. With this target focus, we split the experiences into two digital products.
Delivery
For new business owners, we built Start Company, a platform driven by an expert system that guided users through setting up a business.
For existing SME customers, we built VBM (Virtual Business Manager), a micro-app ecosystem that allowed customers to connect operational utilities and complete business improvement worksheets.
