A vision for BCAA’s customer experience transformation

For decades, the British Columbia Automobile Association (BCCA) has been a household name, serving 1-in-3 households with industry-leading products and services. But as the landscape and their customer demographic evolve, delivering an experience and value proposition that is meaningful and enduring will require meeting the needs of the next generation of members and customers.

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Customer: British Columbia Automobile Association

My Role: Lead Designer

Team
Innovation Team
Engagement Lead, 2 Researchers, Strategist, Designer

Extended Salesforce team
Account, Solution Engineering, Enterprise Architecture, Business Value Services

Customer Team
President & CEO, Chief Digital Officer, VP Digital & Customer Experience Transformation, various members of leadership team, ~50 stakeholders participating in co-creation workshop

An evolving landscape holds significant implications for BCAA

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The landscape is shifting faster than ever and the organization has set an ambitious goal of being a pioneer into 2030. Their vision? To grow their member base from 900,000 to 3 million, and further expand the BCAA footprint to 1-in-2 households.

— OPPORTUNITY —

What if BCAA could serve as a trusted partner that grows with young adults as they navigate towards independence and beyond?

— 01 —

Internal Discovery

Our first goal was to learn about the current state of 3 areas: human (associates + customers), business, and technology. We conducted a kick-off workshop to align stakeholders around opportunities for innovation, and 22 in-depth stakeholder interviews to help us understand priorities + challenges of leaders across the business.

Our most important learning:

BCAA provided great customer service, but they were not truly customer-centric

As the organization thought about how it could become more digitally capable and connect with younger generations, this would be one of their biggest challenges as they moved forward. This learning helped to inform an early hypothesis about how BCAA might add value to younger generations of customers.

— 02 —

Connecting with Consumers

I created tailored research stimulus to help participants engage with big topics more easily

I designed a range of research stimulus that would help facilitate conversations with our participants. We wanted to understand a variety of things, including their opinions on brands, how they thought about navigating big life milestones, and their attitudes towards the spaces in which BCAA had major product offerings.

Phase 1 Research: Street Intercepts

Using the research stimulus, we approached young British Columbians at the UBC campus to learn about what mattered most to them as they approached adulthood. This helped help us quickly understand general attitudes around housing, mobility, and travel, which were areas in which BCAA had primary offerings.

Phase 2 Research: In-depth Interviews

We then interviewed 8 participants, in their homes, and through DScout to hear more nuanced stories about the trials and tribulations of becoming an adult. We spent 60 minutes with each participant as they used the worksheets to talk through their approaches towards adulting milestones and their relationships with brands.

3 experience principles emerged from our conversations with young British Columbians

Insights from user research led us to 3 experience principles that helped connect the dots between young British Columbians and BCAA. This framework would inform our final vision.

— 03 —

Co-Creating with the Customer

We planned to conduct an ideation workshop with 50 BCAA stakeholders, this time including many levels of associates, in addition to leaders within the organization. The goal of this workshop was to immerse the participants in our research insights and bring cross-functional teams together to imagine an ideal future customer journey.

Research stations helped workshop participants build empathy for their customers

Workshop participants created future state journey maps as cross-functional teams

Sample workshop outputs from BCAA stakeholders

— 04 —

Making Ideas Tangible

Aligning with internal partners was a critical first step to designing a cohesive vision

After the workshop, we collaborated with internal partners at Salesforce to prioritize all the ideas and organize them into a rough outline for our vision. We drafted future state stories that showed how BCAA could leverage technology to provide an empowering, supportive, and easy experience for young British Columbians.

Bringing the vision to life meant designing a future where technology helped BCAA connect with their customers seamlessly

Over the course of a few weeks, I translated our team’s outline into a tangible vision. I began with sharpie level storyboarding of our vision, developed a visual style and designed key screens for a future mobile experience (a primary component of the vision), and organized a photoshoot to capture visuals that would support our vision story.

— 05 —

A Compelling Future for BCAA

The final deliverable for this engagement was a strategic vision that would respond to the top challenges that we heard from leaders as well as meet the needs of future generations. Using our experience principles as a guiding light, we crafted a three-part vision that helped illustrate a future where BCAA could connect with younger generations of customers and help them achieve their goal of becoming a pioneer into 2030.