Case study · RB Partners

Partner app redesign that lifted adoption and reduced support load

100,000 insurance advisors run their income off this platform. Onboarding stalled, renewals sat unseen, and one in five advisors phoned support for tasks the portal already handled.

  • B2B2C
  • Web & App Platform
  • Insurance
  • SaaS product
Read the overview
RB Partners app screenshot
Time to first policy12 days → 4Same regulatory steps, fewer handoffs

Project overview

  • 77%
    Onboarding completionfrom 56%, +21 pts, a 37% lift
  • 72%
    Renewal case engagementfrom 61%, +11 pts, an 18% lift
  • −60%
    UX support ticketspayouts, transactions, passbook
  • 65%
    Product library adoptionof active advisors, weekly
Role
Sole product designer
Team
1 PM, 1 engineering pod
Timeline
3 months, 2025
Platform
Android app and web portal
Scope
Research to UI to handoff to UAT
Surfaces
Onboarding, renewals, dashboard, library

A partner referral incentive launched in month two, so the onboarding lift is not attributable to design alone. The renewal, support and library figures had no competing launch in their measurement windows.

RB Partners is RenewBuy's platform for independent insurance advisors. They onboard onto it, sell policies across multiple insurers, chase renewals, share collateral with customers, and track their own payouts. For most of them it is the only tool between them and their commission.

I joined the product after two years of feature stacking. Nothing on the platform was broken. Everything on it was hard to find, and advisors had learned to phone a human instead.

Constraints I designed inside

  • Regulated onboarding

    KYC and bank verification are IRDAI-mandated. Steps could be resequenced, never removed.

  • Two live surfaces

    The desktop portal could not be deprecated. Field leaders still onboarded advisors on it daily.

  • Three months, one designer

    One PM, one engineering pod, Android and web. No dedicated research or QA resource.

  • No usability lab

    Research was 12 advisor calls, 4 sessions with FLS and DST teams, and Clarity session replays.

What I owned

Discovery and synthesis. Information architecture. All onboarding, renewal, dashboard and library flows. Visual design. Prototype. Dev handoff and UAT.

What I did not own

The partner referral incentive. KYC vendor selection. Catalogue commercial terms. Android release engineering.

Editorial image · 21:9Wide environmental shot: an advisor and a customer at a table, paperwork and a phone between them. This is the moment the product exists to serve, so it earns full width.
Advisors sell face to face. Everything on the platform either supports that conversation or interrupts it.Field visit, Q1 2025

Every problem below was already visible in platform data before research started. Research told us why each one was happening, not that it was happening.

44%

of advisors who started onboarding never activated

The Android app could not capture KYC or bank details at all. Every signup routed through a field leader on desktop, so activation waited on someone else’s calendar.

61%

renewal engagement, flat for three quarters

Renewal cases sat inside the dashboard with no notification and no dedicated entry point. Most advisors learned a policy had lapsed when the customer called them.

1 in 5

advisors called support for tasks the portal already handled

Payouts, transactions and passbook checks were all on screen. Advisors could not find them, so they phoned a human. Support capacity was spent on navigation.

0

single sources of truth for insurer collateral

Brochures went out from personal WhatsApp folders. Outdated documents reached customers regularly, and compliance had no visibility into what was sent.

They were not abandoning the form. They were waiting for a person.
Synthesis note from advisor interviews, week 3. This is the sentence that moved the whole flow onto mobile.

Who this is for

Independent advisors, field leaders, and the support desk between them

4:3Advisor

Advisor

Onboards, sells, chases renewals, tracks payouts. For most, this is the only tool between them and their commission.

  • Primary user
  • Android
4:3Field leader

Field leader

Ran every signup from a desktop. The bottleneck research found, and the reason the desktop path stayed alive after launch.

  • Second user group
  • Web
4:3Support desk

Support desk

Absorbed one in five advisors asking where payouts and transactions were. Capacity spent on navigation, not on problems.

  • Cost centre
  • Ticketing

  • Advisors did not find the portal hard. They found it slow to trust.

    Every step that asked for a document without saying why produced a measurable drop in Clarity replays. That reframed onboarding from a form-length problem into a disclosure problem, and it is why each step now states what the document is used for before requesting it.

  • Field leaders were the bottleneck, not the form.

    Advisors were not abandoning onboarding. They were waiting for an FLS to reach them. Shortening the form would have moved nothing. The fix had to remove the human dependency, which is what pushed the whole flow onto mobile.

  • Support calls clustered on four screens, not thirty.

    Payouts, transactions, passbook and PRISM reports accounted for the bulk of inbound tickets. That narrowed the dashboard brief from "simplify everything" to "promote four things and demote the rest", which was buildable in the time we had.

Research artefact · 16:9Journey map or drop-off funnel showing where advisors stalled. Blur or relabel anything commercially sensitive.
The drop-off map that reframed onboarding from a form-length problem into a disclosure problem.
What the competitive teardown decided

Plum, Turtlemint Pro and Probus all completed advisor onboarding in three to four days on mobile-first KYC. None of them solved collateral distribution. That told me two things: copy the onboarding pattern rather than invent one, and treat the product library as the differentiator instead of a phase-two nice-to-have.

01

Onboarding moved to mobile, digital first

Screen slot 01 · 16:9Signup, PAN and Aadhaar, bank verification, activation.
Median time to activation moved from 12 days to 3 or 4, with the same regulatory steps in place.
Constraint

KYC and bank verification are IRDAI-mandated. The Android app could capture neither, so field leaders ran every signup from a desktop.

Decision

Full mobile flow with PAN and Aadhaar auto-fill and penny-drop verification. Each step states which document it needs and why before asking.

Cost

Field leaders lost the bulk-onboarding view. We kept the desktop path alive for two quarters, so two flows and two sets of edge cases.

02

Renewals got their own entry point

Screen slot 02 · 16:9Renewal navigation, dashboard renewal table, renewal customer list.
Alerts fire at 60 days for DST teams and 45 days for advisors, so a lapse is never the customer's news to break.
Constraint

Renewals span every line of business, and the dashboard already carried eleven competing sections, with no notification and no destination.

Decision

A bottom-nav destination, a dashboard renewal table, and a renewal customer list, with staged notifications for both user groups.

Cost

A fifth item in the bottom nav, against the usual advice to hold it at four. We paid for the slot by demoting Helpdesk to a header icon.

03

Dashboard cut to four promoted actions

Screen slot 03 · 16:9Quick actions, smart selling module, redesigned business cards.
Four promoted actions absorbed the bulk of what advisors had been phoning support to find.
Constraint

Advisors used the dashboard for four things and hunted for all of them, then called support when the hunt failed. Eleven sections competed for one screen.

Decision

Transactions, Payouts, Passbook and PRISM reports into a fixed quick-action row. The rest into a searchable secondary sheet, plus a smart-selling module.

Cost

Less-used insurer tools lost home-screen visibility, at under 4% weekly usage. Search kept the demotion from becoming a disappearance.

04

Loose collateral became a product library

Screen slot 04 · 16:9Collateral type, LOB and category filters, product list.
Sharing pulls the live file from the library, so the customer always receives the current version.
Constraint

Brochures went out from personal WhatsApp folders. Outdated versions reached customers and compliance had no visibility into what was being sent.

Decision

A product library filtered by insurer, line of business and category, with sharing wired to the library rather than the device.

Cost

No custom collateral, which several top sellers asked for. Compliance exposure outweighed personalisation, so those requests went to a later phase.

9:16

Onboarding

Signup to KYC to bank to active
9:16

Renewals

Nav, table, customer list
9:16

Dashboard

Quick actions and smart selling
9:16

Library

Filters, LOB, product list

Handoff and UAT

Tested with advisors on their own phones, not in a lab

Photo · 4:3Advisors testing the build on their own devices.
UAT round one. Two rounds of fixes followed before rollout.
Photo · 1:1Handoff session with the engineering pod.
Spec walkthrough with the pod.
Photo · 1:1Whiteboard or printed flows on a wall.
Flow review with the PM.

Impact

What moved, by how much, and over what window

  • Onboarding completion77%+21 pts · +37% relative56% → 3 monthsPlatform funnel analytics, all-India advisor base, post-UAT rollout
  • Renewal case engagement72%+11 pts · +18% relative61% → 2 monthsRenewal cases actioned as a share of cases due, all lines of business
  • Dashboard engagement+35%Baseline → 3 monthsWeekly sessions touching the promoted quick actions
  • Support tickets, basic tasks−60%Baseline → 3 monthsTicket volume for payout, transaction and passbook queries
  • Product library adoption65%0 → 3 monthsShare of active advisors opening the library at least weekly
How to read these numbers

Platform analytics and internal support dashboards, rounded to whole points, measured against the pre-launch baseline for the same cohort. Rollout followed UAT with advisors and two rounds of fixes. A partner referral incentive launched in month two, so I do not claim the onboarding lift as design-only. The renewal, support and library figures had no competing launch in their windows.

  • 01

    I researched advisors and skipped field leaders

    A second user group inside the same flow. Discovering it late forced us to keep the desktop path alive and cost two sprints. I now map every role that touches a flow before scoping, not after the first prototype.

  • 02

    The library shipped without filter analytics

    We know 65% of advisors open it. We do not know which filters they use or abandon, so phase two planning is guesswork. Instrumentation is now a line in my handoff spec rather than something I assume engineering will add.

  • 03

    I measured tickets by volume, not by difficulty

    A 60% drop in ticket count reads well, but says nothing about whether the calls that remain got harder or longer. The next version of this measurement splits volume from resolution time.

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