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FFFran de la FuenteStrategic & Service Designer

MAPFRE · Insurance & Protection

Designing a global insurance onboarding experience without imposing a global solution.

A modular welcome system capable of creating consistency across more than 40 markets without limiting the autonomy of each business unit.

Role
Head of Design Strategy
Duration
4–5 months
Capabilities
CX Strategy · Strategic Research · Service Design · Stakeholder Alignment

01CONTEXT

A shared experience for more than 40 autonomous markets.

MAPFRE needed a common foundation for welcoming new customers across more than 40 markets, each with different levels of maturity, sales channels and cultural realities.

The organisation itself added another layer of complexity: the corporate team could provide direction and tools, but each country retained a high degree of autonomy over its business. A single solution would have been difficult to adopt.

The response also needed to work across the main verticals —life, health, home and motor— and adapt to very different distribution models, from direct contracting to external agents and multi-brand brokers.

Markets
40+
Main verticals
4
Channels and distribution models
Multiple
Autonomy
Local

02REFRAMING

The customer had already bought their MAPFRE insurance. But we still had to prove they had made a good decision.

I framed the welcome as a zoom-in within the customer’s complete journey, rather than an administrative communication sent after contracting.

It was the first opportunity to build trust, make the acquired value tangible and prepare the customer to use their insurance when they truly needed it.

  1. Contracting
  2. Welcome
  3. Relationship
  4. Using the insurance
The welcome prepares customers to use their insurance

03RESEARCH

To design the experience, we had to understand three systems at once.

01

Market

We purchased insurance policies and analysed real experiences through benchmarking and mystery shopping to understand how other insurers approached the welcome and which mechanisms helped customers after purchase.

02

Customers

We conducted interviews and focus groups across life, health, home and motor to understand what customers needed immediately after contracting and what people who had already used their insurance had learned.

03

Organisation

We interviewed stakeholders from different markets and facilitated a LEGO Serious Play co-creation session to understand internal constraints and build a shared direction.

WHAT NEEDED TO BE SHARED, FLEXIBLE AND LOCAL

Triangulating market, customer and organisational perspectives allowed us to distinguish what needed to be shared, what depended on the product and what should remain a local decision.

04KEY INSIGHT

Confirm. Prepare. Surprise.

We understood that a good welcome had to do three things at once.

01

Confirm

Everything is in place.

Provide unequivocal confirmation that the insurance policy had been purchased and was active.

02

Prepare

I know what I have and where to begin.

Explain the coverage simply and leave a clear point of entry for the moment the customer needed to use their insurance.

03

Surprise

I have more value than I expected.

Make services and coverage that often go unnoticed visible —legal assistance, home repairs, pets, dental care and cybersecurity— because they could reinforce the sense of having made a good decision.

I do not need to remember the entire process. I need to remember where to begin.

During the research, the old fridge magnet with the insurer’s telephone number came up repeatedly. People did not necessarily want the magnet. They wanted what it represented: a recognisable starting point for action that removed the need to think too much in a stressful moment.

05STRATEGIC DECISION

We did not design a Welcome Pack for 40 countries. We designed the system each country could use to build its own.

The diversity of markets, products, channels and capabilities made a closed solution unviable.

Modularity became the structural principle of the solution: a shared core protecting the experience and brand, accompanied by modules configurable by market, insurance product and channel.

  1. 01SHARED PRINCIPLES
  2. 02WELCOME CORE
  3. 03CONFIGURABLE MODULES
  4. 04EACH MARKET BUILDS ITS EXPERIENCE

06THE SYSTEM

The best way to scale the solution was not to create another system.

Rather than building an independent library, we integrated the welcome experience into the corporate design system MAPFRE already used.

Each module was designed to be reused across life, health, home and motor, and adapted to emails, digital confirmations, web environments and physical communications.

This allowed teams to build tailored experiences without starting from scratch or creating new parallel solutions that would be difficult to maintain.

  1. Corporate Design System

  2. Welcome Experience

  3. Reusable modules

  4. Products and channels

07MAKING IT CLEAR

Consistency was useless if customers still could not understand their insurance.

We worked with a specialist UX Writer to simplify the language and make coverage easier to read and understand.

In parallel, a new illustration library aligned with MAPFRE’s corporate language was created to support infographics and explain complex concepts more clearly.

The solution was initially prepared in Spanish, Portuguese and English.

08ADOPTION

Alignment did not happen at the end. It was built into the process.

INVOLVE THE TEAMS

Internal research and co-creation meant that the main decisions were developed with MAPFRE’s own teams.

BUILD TRUST AND ALIGNMENT

Data, customer and stakeholder perspectives, and shared work reduced divergence in the final phases and enabled rapid progress over a four-to-five-month project.

ENABLE ROLLOUT

To support rollout, the corporate team prepared training sessions with the different countries explaining how to use and adapt the system.

09IMPACT

Create global consistency without losing local autonomy.

Local capability

Markets without specialist Customer Experience teams could access professional, brand-aligned materials from day one.

Global consistency

The corporate team gained a way to create consistency without removing each business unit’s ability to decide.

Internal reference

Global leadership recognised the project as a high-value initiative, and it became an internal reference for both its method and outcome.

10MY ROLE

Head of Design Strategy

I led the strategic and methodological direction of the project from framing through to presenting the solution to senior leadership.

I defined the methodological approach, managed research resources, participated in fieldwork and led the synthesis and validation of insights.

I also facilitated sessions with senior stakeholders, built the strategic narrative and presented the findings and solution to MAPFRE’s leadership team, while overseeing content and visual design work.

Key responsibilities

Strategic framing

Research direction

Sensemaking

Facilitation

Executive storytelling

Design direction

Team

Project Manager · 2 UX Researchers · UX Writer · UI Specialist

11REFLECTION

Before designing a solution, I need to understand the organisation that will make it real.

Who decides, who has autonomy, who can accelerate or block change, and how different teams relate to one another shape both the methodology and the solution.

At MAPFRE, imposing a rigid response would have hindered adoption. Working from the organisation’s reality and involving its teams made it possible to build a solution they could feel was their own.

Designing a good solution also means designing the conditions that allow the organisation to govern, pilot and implement it.

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