Manulife Japan lauded at Asian Innovation Excellence Awards 2025 for customer-centred design

Human-centred design system improves digital platforms and enhances customer experience.

Manulife Japan has been awarded Japan Customer-Centric Innovation of the Year - Life Insurance in the Asian Innovation Excellence Awards 2025 for its Japan Design Standard: Human Centred Design System. This initiative introduced a scalable, customer-focused framework that ensures consistency, usability, and brand integrity across all digital channels and touchpoints.

The system integrates design thinking into every customer interaction – from mobile apps to sales enablement tools – enabling teams to deliver faster, more user-friendly solutions and build stronger trust and loyalty with customers.

Manulife Japan adopted a human-centred design approach based on the 4Ds framework: Discover, Define, Design, and Deliver, supported by agile phases such as alignment, opportunity exploration, validation, prototyping, and measurement. A thorough review of customer journeys, combined with feedback from call centres, surveys, and test groups, helped identify key customer needs and pain points.

Amongst the innovations, customers can now instantly download important documents through the Customer Website, increasing convenience and reducing reliance on customer service calls. This feature contributed to a 10-point rise in the website’s Net Promoter Score compared to the previous year, reflecting higher customer satisfaction with faster service.

Strong collaboration across marketing, customer support, IT, compliance, and sales teams helped align goals, resolve issues quickly, and create compliant, user-friendly solutions. The design system reduced development time by 30% and supported brand consistency across mobile, web, and sales platforms. 

By placing customers at the heart of its design system, Manulife Japan has delivered meaningful improvements to its life insurance services, reflecting its commitment to innovation and customer experience.

The Asian Innovation Excellence Awards honours companies that achieve measurable outcomes and address key challenges through innovation and operational improvement, recognising initiatives that drive meaningful progress across diverse industries in the region.

The Asian Innovation Excellence Awards is presented by Asian Business Review. To view the full list of winners, click here. For more information on the awards programme, you may contact Julie Anne Nuñez-Difuntorum at (+65) 3158 1386 ext 242 or at [email protected].