From Hold to Handled

The UK's largest retail bank faced acute pressure in home insurance contact centres: high volume, rising cost, frustrated customers. Three call types (amendments, cancellations, policy or cover queries) consumed nearly 75% of total handling time and over 250 FTEs. Average resolution ran from about six minutes to well over fifteen, leaving little slack for good service.

My JTBD research identified three needs: customers wanted to amend cover (add contents, change excess) without 20-minute waits; agents needed faster access to policy details during calls; operations needed consistent data capture across four group brands. I led discovery that included contact centre shadowing across Halifax, Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, and MBNA, call recording analysis on repeat questions, and stakeholder mapping showing each brand on different back-end systems.

Constraints: no changes to core policy admin systems; flows had to work for all four brands with minimal forking; regulatory compliance required specific disclosures at amendment. Success metric: handling time reduction above 60% for target call types, with digital self-serve crossing 50% within six months.

As design director I led strategy and team coordination and owned hands-on design of progressive disclosure on amendment flows, asking for information only when the customer's path required it. Bespoke flows per brand would have put Halifax, Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, and MBNA on diverging maintenance paths with inconsistent experiences. Generic CRM forms with agent scripting would have perpetuated hold times. I built one design system with rule-based flows for self-serve and agent use across all four brands.

I aligned the team on shared components, validation patterns, and error states so updates propagated across all four brands without rework. I designed amendment flows to open with one question ('Do you have your policy number?'), then branched to collect only relevant fields. I carried clear next steps in mobile-first layouts, disabled primary actions until forms were complete, and plain-language summaries before submission.

Self-serve for policy queries reduced phone volume without pushing complexity onto customers. Agents stayed free for fraud, claims disputes, and vulnerable customer support. I prototyped quickly and tested with 200+ people across all four brand customer bases before rollout. Rule-based routing meant the first payload matched how dispatch and servicing were sequenced, not a generic CRM shape agents had to rewrite.

Validation started in the field. Pilot launched with Halifax first (highest volume), instrumented handling time and completion rates, then rolled to Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, and MBNA sequentially.

Lloyds moved the heaviest insurance jobs into digital self-serve: the same routes that had consumed three-quarters of handle time. Average resolution time fell by about 75% for targeted call types. Digital self-serve crossed 60% within six months, exceeding the 50% target.

Because I designed progressive disclosure on amendment flows (one starter question, then only relevant fields), customers completed amendments in under four minutes on mobile instead of fifteen on phone, and agent satisfaction improved as teams handled judgement-heavy work instead of repetitive data entry. Completion rates on amendment flows stayed above 80%. Directionally, the programme freed capacity equivalent to roughly 60 FTE across targeted call types as volume shifted to digital self-serve.