"My shop floor looks perfect." Well is it?
THE WHO2 GLOBAL VIEW
Picture the scene. You own a shop.
Every morning, you unlock the doors, switch the lights on and make sure everything is exactly where it should be.
The shelves are tidy. The products are lined up perfectly. The signage looks good.
Nothing is technically broken.
In fact, it has looked pretty much the same for years.
So, the shop floor isn’t a mess.
It’s “perfect”.
Or is it?
Because nobody has asked whether the right products are in the right places.
Nobody has tested what happens if you move something.
Nobody is properly measuring where customers walk, where they stop, what they ignore or where they quietly give up.
The shop may look lovely.
But customers can’t find what they need.
The most valuable products are hidden at the back.
The signs make complete sense to the people who work there, but not necessarily to
the people walking through the door.
And if someone buys a pair of trainers, the protection product is being presented at
the entrance rather than when they are standing at the till, card in hand.
Nothing looks wrong.
But plenty could be working harder.
Supermarkets have understood this for decades.
They study where people walk. Where they pause. When they smell the bread. What they see first. What they buy together. What goes at eye level. What belongs near the
checkout.
They don’t build the shop once and assume the job is finished.
They constantly test, learn and refine.
Insurance websites, quote journeys and customer portals are also shop floors.
For many businesses, they are now the main shop floor.
Yet they are often reviewed by the same people who designed them, built them, approved them or have looked at them every day for the last five years.
That doesn’t mean those people are doing a bad job. It means familiarity is
dangerous.
When you know where everything is, the shop feels easy to navigate. When you
understand the internal language, the questions feel obvious. When you already know
the product, the explanation feels clear.
But the customer doesn’t have any of that knowledge.
They arrive cold. They don’t know your systems. They don’t know your terminology. They don’t know which information matters.
And they certainly don’t care which department owns which part of the journey.
They just want to get what they came for and pay.
This is where an external view becomes valuable.
When we review insurance websites and digital journeys, we are not simply asking
whether they look modern.
We look at what the customer is being asked to do, when they are being asked to do
it and whether it makes sense at that exact moment.
We look at where friction has been unintentionally introduced. Where trust is built.
Where trust is lost. Where customers may abandon the journey. Where additional
products are presented too early, too late or without enough relevance. Where
language has been written for insurance people rather than normal people.
Where the business is collecting information it already holds. Where the journey
is technically compliant but commercially underperforming. And where a small
refinement could make a meaningful difference.
Sometimes the shop floor really is a mess.
More often, it is immaculate.
Everything is exactly where it has always been.
And that might be the problem.
The best digital journeys are not necessarily the ones with the biggest redesign
budgets.
They are the ones that remain curious. They test. They challenge. They observe.
They refine. They bring in people who are prepared to ask the supposedly stupid
questions.
Because sometimes you don’t need to rebuild the shop.
You just need someone new to walk through the front door.
So perhaps the question isn’t whether your shop floor looks good.
It’s whether it works as hard as it could.
Sometimes the biggest opportunities are not hidden in a major rebuild, a new
platform or another transformation programme.
They are sitting in plain sight.
In the wording. In the order. In the timing.
In what the customer sees, what they miss and what they are asked to do next.
YOUR SHOP FLOOR MAY BE SPOTLESS
But when was the last time someone walked it properly?
Because too much insurance is still built by people inside the industry, for customers who are not.
The views expressed in this article are those of WHO2 Global Ltd and do not constitute professional advice. All content is for informational purposes only.