WMBeck Insurance Services
WMBeck Insurance Services is a family owned brokerage with a team of over 150 in cities across Western Canada. With a focus on creating exactly the right insurance packages for their clients, they depend on having access to the most current products at their fingertips as well as access to their colleagues who bring industry-specific expertise. WMB places high value on their company culture and received the 2021 award for Top Insurance Employer for their efforts by Insurance Business Canada.
Challenge
WMBeck’s internal communications were the same as many organizations — a mix of email, newsletters, and shared drives. With eight locations and increased team growth, it was becoming harder to keep important internal information in the forefront and provide an easy way to access other communications. WMB was keen to create a vibrant online area to connect and unify staff for all manner of communication.
A team of WMBeck staff from a few locations was tasked with finding a solution. Their IT department started setting up an intranet site but there was a gap in expertise in organizing information to create user flows that would make the site user-friendly as a hub of internal activity. A site strategy and web design were needed.
Approach
After in-depth discussion with the WMBeck team, we created an inventory of internal communications and data that needed to be connected in one place. We mapped user flows to ensure easy access to information from various starting points — whether from a search on the site, navigation, or another section of the site.
After confirmation of user flows and the creation of the site map, we created several homepage wireframes. These were presented to the WMB team and the user flow was checked a final time, leading to the selection of the best homepage wireframe.
Wireframes were turned into design pages and the functionality was implemented, creating a development site ready for content loading. WMB has an extensive library of documents including education, branding, marketplace, and resources that needed to be moved to the intranet, each requiring tagging for searching and sorting. We developed a process for their team to upload, categorize, and tag these documents so that they are in full control of managing their online library.
WMBeck has taken a staged approach to rolling out the intranet to their locations.
Result
The intranet is considered a great success and is functioning in all locations as a way to unite employees and create a collaborative space for their work. Analytics are enabling the team to understand what areas have the highest usage and where content can be improved. The site is expandable with the option to develop a social media styled space for purely social interactions.
“Our team had been internally working on the idea of an Intranet for a few months, when we eventually realized that it wasn’t something we were able to build on our own. That’s when we got connected with Spryberry, and we instantly felt like we were in the right hands.
From our first meeting, they understood that we had an idea of where we wanted to go in terms of design, but that we also weren’t sure on how we were going to get there. They took all our ideas and input and were able to produce a road map. Over the course of about eight months, we worked with their team to create our final phase one product. This process included meeting with different members of their team to help us finalize our ideas, both from a design perspective (colours and layout) and user experience.
The Spryberry team helped us distill our ideas into usable concepts and helped make our imagined experience into a reality. In the end, we were able to launch our initial intranet to our team in mid-October. This tool now gives our teams a centralized location to find information, as well as ways to connect with other team members across the organization. It also provides a consolidated space where our people can find important company updates. One of our goals was to reduce the number of emails that our team members receive daily. The intranet is a space to display many of the details that were previously sent in company-wide emails (important event information, industry updates, etc.) instead of taking up space in our inboxes.
The Spryberry team did a great job of guiding us through the process from start to finish. They maintained a great balance of listening to our ideas and providing their input. We very much feel like the end project is what we envisioned; Spryberry helped us bring that to life.
We have plans to grow and expand the intranet in the future and look forward to working with Spryberry again through that next phase of the project.
We would absolutely recommend Spryberry. Their team is fantastic. Every person on their team works hard, communicates well, and is a pleasure to work with.”
