We’ve worked in harmony with one of our retainer clients to reinvigorate their branding and marketing website, and highlight their variety of services using custom-built blocks, icons and colours.

Claims Consortium Group (CCG) are a leading pioneer in claims management, insurance technology, and weather data. Created in 1996, they began with a mission to revolutionise the claim’s handling industry; they also have a comprehensive range of claims handling software and data they provide to insurers, brokers, and property service organisations.

CCG’s main audiences cover a number of areas, including customers and potential clients, brokers and procurement experts, surveyors and contractors, and finally, industry experts such as journalists, consultants and trade press.

“We’re all about defying convention, sparking innovation in a traditional sector, and relentlessly chasing customer service excellence.”
Claims Consortium Group

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The Problem

This project was slightly different to anything we’ve done before, as Claims Consortium Group are an existing retainer client of ours. To facilitate the work, we scaled up their retainer and tackled the website over a number of months, beginning with a week’s ‘kick off’ sprint to give us a strong starting point.

The business had undergone much change since they created their original website; as such, they wanted to update their branding and messaging to bring it up to date, ensure it’s engaging to their audiences, and to best reflect the business changes. Their previous website also required restructuring to better advertise their services.

To make the new CCG website user-friendly for the team, they wanted to be able to create new pages and keep them updated without the need for external input. On top of this, they requested that the website be scalable and adaptable once it was launched, and to easily add new features in future phases. It was really important to us that we equip the CCG team to edit and create their own web pages, so they wouldn’t come up against any blockers going forward – as retainer clients, we’re there to support them, should they need; however, we want to empower our clients to take ownership of what we build for them.

“I had the pleasure of collaborating with The Idea Bureau on the design and build of our new website. I honestly cannot speak more highly of the team – they are an absolute joy to work with. It was a sizeable undertaking with a wide range of internal stakeholders, but Tash and Ben made the whole process so easy and seamless.”

Ruth Graves

Head of PR & Marketing at Claims Consortium Group

Our Solution

The CCG brand and messaging is much clearer now and better represents them as a business. We collaborated with Ruth Graves, the team’s Head of PR and Marketing, to put together their new page content, ensuring it flowed and demonstrated their offering to potential customers in the most effective way.

Previously, the team relied on external third-parties in order to make any changes to their website. Not only have we given them the functionality to manage it, but also the ability to do so in-house, which is a huge saving in time and cost. While the company’s last website was also made in WordPress, the build version was incredibly out of date. To bring them up to speed, we recorded bite-sized training videos and held Zoom sessions with the team to improve upon their existing transferable skills. Now, they can add new pages and create blog posts with ease.

Client:: Claims Consortium Group
Project Type:: Branding, Marketing Website
Tags:: Branding, Web Design, UI, UX, Development
Link:: https://www.claimsconsortiumgroup.co.uk/

How the website works

The difference between CCG’s old website and our new design is night and day. The team are now using WordPress as a content management system (CMS) with the Gutenberg editor, as this allowed us to build near unlimited pages with purpose-built blocks, made specifically for the platform. We underpinned this with an open-source tool called Lumberjack, as they provided us with a solid technical foundation for the project, including structure and best coding practices.

The bespoke blocks help to communicate CCG’s messaging in a number of ways: we implemented ‘hero’ blocks that showcase a service’s particular branding and colour. These hero blocks are then used across the services pages to maintain consistency and provide a high-level summary of what each service is. There are also a range of blocks to demonstrate testimonials, highlighting a service’s success and value to customers, and things like Trustpilot reviews and comments. One of the most important roles of the blocks is to signpost particular areas of the site, which improves the user journey and experience.

To lock down the security of the website, we used a variety of methods, including two-factor authentication, enforcing strong passwords and limiting the number of third-party plugins and services used.

“They brought their significant expertise to the project, while also being able to work flexibly with us in the way we needed. They understood and translated our requirements perfectly, and I’m so happy with the end result!”

Ruth Graves

Head of PR & Marketing at Claims Consortium Group

Working together

Because of the unusual nature of progressing the project on retainer, rather than in full sprints, it was a new way of working for us to adjust to. However, we collaborated very closely with members of the team at CCG, with a solid plan that included clear milestones for all of us to work towards over a number of months.
We hosted online discovery workshops for them, where we were able to create sitemaps and lists of the features and functionality they required for the website. These workshops also allowed us to understand the varied user groups and types that CCG engage with daily. Following the discovery sessions, we put together the specification for the work and agreed a timeline of what would be achievable with the team, using Notion as a project management tool.

We set up multiple areas for us to track progress and keep CCG in the loop within Notion. This helped us to achieve the key milestones we set with them for the duration of the project. Their board of directors had to agree this work at multiple points, particularly the services rebranding, the main home page and some of the most important services pages, so their overall sign off on the project was crucial.

“I’d wholeheartedly recommend The Idea Bureau to anyone seeking a dedicated, skilled and highly professional team to bring their digital vision to life.”

Ruth Graves

Head of PR & Marketing at Claims Consortium Group

Differentiating the services’ branding

CCG offer a wide variety of services to its clients – including loss adjusting, data and analytics, and surveying – all of which required rebranding to differentiate them. To achieve this was tricky; however, we managed to do so through the use of icons and colours to give each of the services its won personality, and built custom blocks that could be used across each page to give a sense of coherence across the site.

These blocks can be used by the team to put together new pages of their own; as the blocks are modular, it means they can create new structures, depending on the needs of the client. They will also inherit the brand colour of their particular services page, giving cohesion and consistency. This approach had to be scalable going forward, as the team add new services to their roster.

“Our recent collaboration with The Idea Bureau on our new group website has been a truly seamless process. Their ability to swiftly understand our vision, and execute it with such efficiency and finesse, was impressive. It’s rare to find a partner who makes the complex process of website design and development feel so straightforward and stress-free.

We’re extremely happy with the end results and I’d highly recommend The Idea Bureau to anyone seeking a partner who combines professional excellence with an incredibly smooth and enjoyable collaborative process.”
Jeremy Hyams, Founder of Claims Consortium Group

Conclusion

One of the most important elements of this work was maintaining a good handle on the project management. This is key because there’s a large variety of pages and services to deal with; consistently ensuring that both our team and the CCG teams were on the same page is really what made this project such a success.

Another important aspects to getting it right was acquiring feedback from the correct people at specific times. Knowing when to share our designs with the Board of Directors was key, as we didn’t want to waste their time or receive feedback from them when we weren’t ready to take action. We also had to give personnel from each of the service sub brands a chance to provide their thoughts on the content and page layouts for their particular areas.

From the lovely comments we’ve received from the CCG team, we’re very happy to know we’ve achieved these things, and have given them a website they can be proud of. We’re currently in the process of working with the team on a new website for WeatherNet, another of CCG’s service areas, and are delighted to be continuing our relationship with them going forward.

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