The power of scenario building in a prolonged crisis
Context & Objectives
Faced with challenges from the Covid-19 pandemic, a leading Belgian health insurer had to adapt their services and offers in the short-term and long-term perspective.
The client needed better insights into how changes in customers’ behavior due to an ongoing economic and social crisis might impact business and how to adapt their operations and services. Feeling overwhelmed and uncertain, the insurer contacted Agilytic to develop scenario building and testing for different commercial, servicing, and employee well-being outcomes.
Scenario building or scenario planning offers a methodology to learn about the future before it happens by presenting a whole range of possibilities to take actions and make a desirable future occur or to adapt to an unfavorable future quickly. It has been widely used by leaders in business and industry for decades to improve present decision-making and efficiently implement strategies.
Approach
We built scenarios to anticipate the mid-term perspective over the course of two years and evaluate resources and initiatives depending on the scenarios. This support was completed from an objective perspective via a step-by-step Milestones Roadmap and additional ad-hoc analysis.
First, we hosted workshops with stakeholders (process owners) to understand the current situation changes and initiatives due to the Covid-19 crisis and the future challenges they expect.
Next, we narrowed down workshop topics and identified the main factors, and estimated the impacts of certain service changes. Once we identified the critical areas, we produced mini-scenarios and selected 10 mini-scenarios based on identified factors and outcomes for each factor.
We then aligned with stakeholders to select the most likely mini-scenarios and evaluate each scenario's possible impacts.
Finally, the last and most crucial step came in our milestones roadmap: scenario building and quantification. We selected three scenarios, defined alert criterion (defined via thresholds on either internal KPIs they were monitoring or external data) to help the client identify in which scenario they are in/might be in, and evaluated each scenario's impact both in qualitative and quantitative terms and by the number of additional documents, contacts, resources, etc. required.
For quantitative measure estimations, we extrapolated data based on what happened in previous months, external numbers, and forecasts provided by external sources (e.g. unemployment rate).
Finally, we provided ad-hoc analysis with the scenario building. We performed this analysis on “non-digital” customers to support the communication agency and channel strategy. To do so, we conducted an evaluation and profiling of customers in need of face-to-face contact before and during the crisis.
Results
We presented estimations from scenarios to build awareness on how processes might be impacted in the mid-term and evaluate resources and initiatives depending on the scenarios. The key deliverables included:
Estimation of impact on KPI’s for each scenario (pessimistic, conservative, optimistic)
Estimation of resources (FTE) for each scenario
List of recommended initiatives for each scenario
With the scenarios defined, the client could better understand the impacts on their business during an ongoing economic and social crisis. Finally, we identified useful open data for other projects, including economic or consumption KPIs, to monitor the potential changes in customer behavior.
