The Hartford:
Gamification Sprint

Project Scope: A $100K innovation initiative to transform a utilitarian insurance portal into an engagement engine

My Role: Creative Lead + Digital Product Strategist · Accenture 2019

Overview

The Hartford's Electronic Business Center is the primary digital portal for independent insurance agents. There, they manage policies, submit quotes, and service accounts. In 2019, The Hartford turned to our Accenture team to help drive improvements to the product. While functionally robust, the platform lacked mechanisms to drive agent engagement, product education, or cross-selling behavior. Meanwhile, competitors were doing all three, building social-platform-inspired experiences aimed at millennial agents.

The Hartford’s team had already streamlined the quoting experience — reducing underwriting questions and increasing bindability — but agents couldn't feel the improvement, which was expressed in their NPS scores. The gains were invisible. Our team needed to make them tangible. I lead a Design Thinking sprint to explore how game mechanics (points, rewards, skill building, progress tracking) could be layered into the utilitarian quoting portal to transform it into an engaging platform that actively drives new business.

The Challenge

Independent insurance agents were The Hartford’s primary distribution channel, yet the company faced several engagement challenges with the EBC platform:

  • Agents concentrated their business in a narrow set of product lines (particularly Workers’ Comp), leaving significant cross-sell potential untapped.

  • Agents had limited awareness of The Hartford’s full product offerings.

  • The EBC provided transactional functionality but offered no guidance, education, or motivation to help agents grow their business with The Hartford.

  • There was no feedback loop to help agents understand their own performance or identify areas for improvement.

Additionally, Independent agents aren't employees, and as a result, the Hartford couldn’t force behavior change. The business needed agents to diversify their books, bring in higher-quality leads, and better utilize existing platform features — but the motivation had to come from within the experience itself.

Our core hypotheses: exposing key metrics (like bindability, product breakdown, and efficiency) would increase engagement and lead quality / volume.

We started with a full-day design thinking workshop. The Hartford stakeholders, top-performing independent agents, and our design team aligned on shared goals and sketched solutions in a fast-paced brainstorm. Every gamification element had to pass a dual test: did it motivate the agent, and could it drive measurable business value? Decoration without purpose was eliminated early.

We came up with 6 reusable modules designed to serve both the agents and the business:

Research & Discovery

Points & rewards
We created a mechanism to reward high-value behaviors (like quoting new lines, completing modules, and onboarding customers) in the form of redeemable gift cards.

In-product education
Rotating cards with incentives attached (bonus multipliers) spotlighted product lines — which agents might previously have been unaware of.

Bindability metrics
We surfaced performance data that agents didn’t have access to previously — bindable quote percentages, efficiency stats, and peer benchmarks.

Role-specific views
We mocked up an experience specific to agency leaders with team-level (rather than personal level) gamification — giving Principals reasons to champion the platform with their teams

Skill trees
We built out progressive learning tracks borrowing from typical gaming conventions. Visible progress indicators positioned product education as achievement paths.

Book analytics
We built visual portfolio breakdowns flagging concentration imbalances with actionable recommendations to diversify across other product lines.

We validated medium fidelity prototypes with a test group of independent insurance agents

Outcome

User testing validated that agents intuitively understood the gamification layer and saw genuine value in features they'd never had or never noticed, particularly real-time bindability data and book-of-business analytics. The project delivered UX wireframes, a recommended use case inventory, and a behavioral design framework that informed The Hartford's next-generation agent platform. It also proved a broader thesis: that gamification in B2B insurance was effective, with nuance. It wasn’t about badges — it was about surfacing the right data at the right moment to make better decisions feel rewarding.