Redesigning the agent experience in an insurance CRM — unified workflows and commission tracking
Overview
Nationale Nederlanden's agents used K2 as their CRM, but managed sales across five additional platforms depending on insurance type — life, property, group policies, and anniversary renewals. Each of these was managed in a separate tool.
Every time a sale happened, agents had to switch platforms and manually re-enter client data that didn't sync. Research showed that 79% of agents need to move between different platforms as part of their core workflow. However, there was no integration between K2 and the sales tools.
I used a research package that included agent surveys, expert interviews and user segmentation, as well as a comparison of different CRM platforms. I designed interface solutions for the most important improvement, which was to make it easier to enter sales processes. I also designed other solutions that were suggested, like having one view of leads and clients or a dashboard showing expected commission. The work focused on the individual agent's perspective.
The designs went through two iterations, including a round of usability testing with real insurance agents. The final deliverable included a set of screen designs and prototypes covering lead management, cross-platform navigation, urgent actions prioritisation, and automated reporting concepts.
The main thing we did was improve the dashboard. We did that by adding a simple icon button in the side menu, which let insurance agents start selling straight from their CRM platform. There were also a few other changes, like adding a box to estimate commissions, a button to start online meetings from the platform and a new way of organising actions based on their priority.
Key design decisions
Entry points for starting a sale
Added sales entry points in the nav bar and inside client and lead detail pages. Agents can start a quote or policy from wherever they already are, without losing context.
A dashboard that surfaces action
The old dashboard didn’t show urgent actions. The redesign added tagged action items, like contact requests and payment issues, directly on the dashboard.
One place for lead and client details
Lead information was split across platforms, sometimes with mismatched data. A unified lead and client detail page pulls together insurance needs, sales status, and next steps in one place.
Commission summary on the dashboard
Agents never really knew how much they were going to earn by the end of the month, so they had to calculate it themselves. We’ve added a commission summary to the dashboard. It estimates a bonus from reported policy premiums, updates automatically from sales system data, and gives agents a running view of where they stand against their targets.