VANESSA ERICKSON 

• While I was the primary point of contact for the bank as it related to the Virtual Agent content, I was also a former USAA phone representative and know first hand what it’s like to hear from our members who are impacted by catastrophes. Having that soft spot and genuine empathy for our membership lead me to also be the point of contact for our partners in Claims.

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• My colleague Veronica is the point person for claims. She and I had standing meeting times each week to determine what we were going to work on next and then bring people in to get it done.  I walked in for our regular meeting on Monday, August 28th, 2017 after Harvey had just made landfall the Friday before. Veronica said that we were seeing a lot of claims starts and a huge drop off of people completing them. Knowing people have surely been impacted she said, can you just search for the words, hurricane and Hurricane Harvey to see if our members are asking us about it? We immediately got results, however they weren’t as high as we expected.

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• I then suggested we might want to look up the word "flood" and see what that returns. Bingo! We had hundreds of results and everything from “Am I covered for flood?” to “Help, my house has flooded and I’m stranded on my roof”. We both knew we had to drop everything and design a conversation to help our members in need.

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• Through collaborative co-creation of content with product, digital, legal, and compliance (with a few escalations to the catastrophe teams) we had crafted responses for auto, renters, and homeowners flood coverage within a few days. We promptly handed our designs over to a small team who pivoted their work to get this content into production to help our membership. We did our quality assurance testing Thursday and fixed the small defects.  

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• Despite everything we had, we received strong pushback from some team leaders about pushing content to production so close to a weekend. Another colleague of mine, Richard, also on the Virtual Agent team really took the stand and said we are going to make this content live for our membership because they need it. I chimed in saying that it was the right thing to do. On that same call, we had commitment from Richard, myself, Veronica, and another new team member Chauntae to volunteer to continue to validate everything went fine post deployment in production on a Friday evening. I was testing the production environment, links and behaviors at a baseball game that night and so happy to see the content was available to help our members in their time of need.

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• As you can see from the data below, in just a week we had deployed new content and helped quite a few people. That number continued to skyrocket over the days and weeks to come.

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• The immediacy having been addressed, I started to look at the digital experience Veronica had on her claims page. We used Tealeaf to watch members who asked our Virtual Agent about flood coverage go through the claims flow. What we found is that there was no option which seemed to make sense if the member experienced flooding. They had water damage from an appliance or water coming in from the roof, but nothing even explaining what flood is or what they should select to report the damage.

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• The screen you see below is now the page claims digital created to respond to hurricane or flooding events and they’ve added a section titled “Am I Covered for Flood Damage?”.  This link takes members to content the claims team pulled directly from our Virtual Agent flood responses and has been highly utilized by the membership experiencing hardships.