Co-operators - Design jam
2026
One welcome, every channel, from day zero
A one-week design jam solution for Co-operators, a Canadian insurance company, redesigning the client onboarding journey with an AI-powered welcome email, self-serve portal, and phone experience so no new policyholder falls through the cracks.
Overview
Redesigning the first 30 days of a new policy
Co-operators is a Canadian insurance company that binds over 134,000 net new home and auto policies a year across three channels — Advisor, Agency Contact Centre (ACC), and Digital. The Spring 2026 Design Jam, hosted by the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, challenged student teams to fix what happens (or doesn't) right after a client signs.
Our three-person team split the work across research, design, and storytelling over a single week, working toward a 3-minute pitch: Jiahan led research and competitor benchmarking, I led the journey maps and wireframes, and Victory shaped the narrative and pitch deck.
The Impact
We proposed a single AI-powered onboarding system anchored by one universal trigger, a compliance-safe personalized welcome email, a self-serve onboarding portal, and an AI-assisted phone line — designed to close the gap between 134,000 new clients a year and the roughly 2,000 who currently receive any welcome communication at all.
Problem
Most new clients never hear from Co-operators at all
Onboarding after a policy is bound is fragmented, inconsistent, and in many cases completely absent. What a client receives depends entirely on how they purchased, and even then, communications tend to arrive late, contain limited information, and feel disconnected from the moment they actually bought the policy.
The root structural issue: onboarding emails are classified as marketing, not servicing, communications. That single classification means 53% of clients who've opted out of marketing get no welcome email whatsoever, despite having just paid for a policy.
No cross-department alerts
5,726
53%
Research
Everyone else treats onboarding as a journey, not an email
Include account numbers and deep links for easy access, and preview upcoming communications to set expectations early.
Pre-populated templates for consistency across every touchpoint; EQ Bank offers theirs in both English and French.
Prompts users to register online and file claims immediately after purchase.
Ideation
Four pieces, one connected system
Co-operators posed two brainstorm questions: what should the ideal onboarding journey look like, and how can AI meaningfully enhance it? We answered both with a single connected system rather than treating them as separate problems.
Recognizes callers by policy number, offers a personalized menu, and redirects self-serve tasks to a direct portal link, keeping a human advisor as the last, not first, option.
A smart email merge assembled from a library of pre-approved, compliance-cleared content blocks in English and French. AI never writes new copy, zero compliance exposure, and zero added risk.
Language selection up front addresses the language barrier that showed up repeatedly in our research, beyond just English/French.
Designs
From bind moment to confident client
The welcome email
The full onboarding portal
We mapped the full 9-stage journey from the moment a policy is purchased to when a client feels settled a month later, then built wireframes for the two most important touchpoints: the welcome email and the onboarding portal.
Servicing email clients now receive, within 15 minutes of binding, policy details, next steps, and a direct link to the portal, styled to match Co-operators' brand system.
Low-Fedility
High-Fedility
The 9-stage onboarding journey
Outcome
