As the leading professional development organisation for the insurance and finance industry in the APAC region, ANZIIF wanted to provide a member experience platform that would reflect the quality of its services.
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The challenge
The Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance (ANZIIF) is the peak professional association and education provider for the insurance and financial services industry in the Asia-Pacific region. ANZIIF partners with a broad range of organisations and government to provide services and training that support professional excellence, enhance standards and improve community understanding of insurance and finance.
The Institute had a site that was built on version 7.2 of Sitecore. Being on an older version of the Sitecore platform, it had become unstable to the point where it was crashing multiple times a week. The site was also in need of an overhaul from a design and UX perspective. As a member-driven organisation, ANZIIF wanted to work out how to maximise the value it provides to members.
ANZIIF initially engaged Luminary to undertake a deep discovery project to uncover insights into how it could better serve the needs of its members.
What we did
The discovery phase
During the discovery phase of the project, we worked with ANZIIF to build a comprehensive picture of the organisation itself, as well as its competitors and comparators. We approached the discovery phase from both a brand, consumer and marketing perspective, as well as a technology perspective.
We worked with members and internal stakeholders to determine macro and micro challenges, as well as business goals and trends in the sector. We conducted immersion, persona and customer journey mapping workshops to glean insights into how the Institute’s website could better serve its target audiences.
User testing was conducted with a cross-section of members who represented key personas, to make sure we designed a solution to meet their needs. We continued to iterate on our prototypes throughout the process, which resulted in an extensive simplification of the site’s information architecture and menu structure.
The process also resulted in a significant shift in approach to member-only information. Where information had previously been ‘hidden’ behind the Member Centre, the new approach meant that more information was made public to give potential members more of a taste of what they could have access to by joining ANZIIF.
The build phase
The site was built on Sitecore version 9.3, using SXA (Sitecore Experience Accelerator) for rapid development. One of the key features of the build was its complexity ‘under the hood’, encompassing a large number of APIs and integrations. The most significant integrations involved a custom commerce functionality for purchasing membership and products such as short courses, and a functionality for claiming CIP (Certified Insurance Professional) points for performing particular activities, such as reading an article, completing an online quiz, or watching a video. These functionalities were integrated with a third party system used by ANZIIF, utilising APIs to establish communication with the website.
Performance was significantly enhanced in the new site by upgrading from a cloud virtual server to Azure PaaS (Platform as a Service). We also rebuilt the website architecture and utilised a CDN for better performance and security.
The result
Due to Covid related lockdowns, this project was run entirely remotely – right through from pitch to launch. However, despite this, the site was delivered and launched with an extremely high level of quality and client satisfaction.
“The Luminary team really understood our business requirements and delivered the best solutions for us,” says ANZIIF’s Head of IT, Lulu Zhang. “I’ve worked in software development for my whole career. On a large project developers sometimes misunderstand the requirements and it’s common to make changes back and forth. We hardly had to make any changes to the Luminary team’s work. When they showcased what had been done, most of the time it was better than we’d envisioned.”
From a strategy perspective, Luminary’s discovery process – led by Strategy Director Emma Andrews – gave the ANZIIF team a great foundation for both the website and its marketing in general. According to Lulu: “It was helpful for us to have that clarity of mind to go into the development phase, to really understand what our customers want. The Luminary team has really simplified the solution, the site is really fast to load, and the UX design is first class.”
In terms of performance, one of the most notable improvements has been in email marketing. While a newsletter sent to 5000 users previously would grind the site to a halt, meaning that emails would have to be sent in batches, the ANZIIF team can now confidently send to its 30,000 member database in one bulk send. “It’s flying compared to what we used to have,” says Lulu.
A big part of why we engaged Luminary is that we felt they were good in both digital marketing and technology, while other vendors were good at one or the other. The Luminary team was amazing - everyone was so positive and patient with us. It was amazing to see that consistently positive energy from the team across the 1.5 years of the project. I feel that’s because Luminary look after their staff. People gel well together. That's something you can’t fake.
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