Helping small businesses get their feet off the ground and manage operations.
Suncorp’s Small Business Portal provides tools that helps small business owners start and grow their own business. The Suncorp Customer Propositions team researched growth opportunities to build value for key customer segments, which they had broken up into five streams.
We were engaged to design and build key opportunities within the Small-Medium Enterprise (SME) space, focusing on startups and wheels-based businesses as they were often undervalued and consequently under-serviced. This meant that the current tools aimed at helping small business owners were relatively sparse and poorly designed.
Due to this, we focused on exploring and building tools and platforms that provide long-term value for small business segment.
Suncorp identified two core moments within the SME customer segment: the initial moment of starting their own business; and reaching the point where they were ready to significantly grow their business. With this target focus, we split the experiences into two digital products.
For new business owners, we built Start Company, a platform driven by an expert system that guides users through setting up a business.
For existing SME customers, we built Virtual Business Manager (VBM), a micro-app ecosystem that allows customers to connect operational utilities and complete business improvement worksheets.
Design & Delivery
Our design of Start Company was a function-driven experience, educating the user with a no-obligation, self-service approach in the form of actionable 'blueprints'. We developed a concept leveraging previous learnings and built an MVP to increase understanding and viability of this market segment.
Virtual Business Manager underwent an early pivot to become focused on features that users needed, such as scheduling & invoicing, with worksheets to increase sales, referrals and increased margins. Conducting tests in users’ typical work environments using a live prototype, we found users were extremely time poor but willing to give a larger investment of time in order to make a positive change to their business. This drove a pivot to align project success criteria with user needs - Micro Apps.
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