Embedded Insurance: how can you bring value to your members with products integrated into their journey?
Most people are stressed before travelling. Even people who are frequent travellers always have a bit of anxiety when their trip arrives.
It’s a pure human reflex: you’re going out of your daily routine, so there is always a bit of unpredictability.
No matter how you travel: plane, train, bus, carpool… There is always some uncertainty.
- Can I cancel my trip in case something unexpected happens?
- What should I do if I miss my connection because my bus is delayed?
- What should I do if I’m carpooling with passengers and the car breaks down on the highway?
Travel companies have offered insurance to their customers since far back, but with the emergence of new ways of travelling like carpooling, insurance products, and the way we provide them, needed to be reinvented.
At BlaBlaCar, we quickly realised that our members, like everyone traveling, needed to be reassured against the unexpected.
As a company, our objective is to take care of our community of over 100 million members. Therefore, it was crucial that we come up with a solution to fill the needs of our drivers and passengers.
Taking care of your members by proposing affordable and transparent insurance products is possible
Insurance products have for a long time been seen as complex products, not always really useful.
Our vision at BlaBlaCar is that insurance products should be:
- Clear.
- Valuable for our members.
- As affordable as possible, since our mission is to help our community to make savings.
By offering great insurance products, based on the needs of our members, we strongly believe we can:
- Tackle our members’ pains.
- Improve the overall product experience.
- Increase our members’ NPS.
And create a virtuous circle by tackling the main pains and fears of our members.
Embedded Insurance: the way to go to cover your members at the right moment of their journey
We believe one of the smoothest and most valuable ways to sell insurance is to do it inside your product experience.
Rather than redirecting your users to an external platform to subscribe to insurance, you integrate insurance into your product.
That’s what we call “embedded Insurance”. This includes optional products that are directly integrated into the user journey of our members, giving them the possibility to add complementary protection to cover their trip.
Approaching insurance as an embedded product has several benefits:
- Our members don’t need to go to an external platform to subscribe, they stay inside the BlaBlaCar app or website.
- It reduces the time to subscribe, you only have to click once to be covered.
- The payment is simplified: included in the trip price or deducted from fees received by our drivers.
- And it helps our members quickly complete their flow, without being distracted.
Insurance products are often complex to understand, so our challenge is to help our users quickly know:
- Which coverages do we provide?
- What is the price of the insurance?
- How can I subscribe?
- How can I claim in case of an incident?
At the moment, we provide two embedded insurance products to our members:
👉 Insurance for Carpool drivers in France & Spain:
- Covering damages up to 1500€
- Towing of your car and guaranteed arrival at destination in case of breakdown
👉 Insurance for bus passengers in France:
- Covering cancellations, delays, and missed connections.
- Luggage lost or damaged.
- Medical expenses and repatriation fees.
Let’s look at a concrete example to understand visually what “Embedded Insurance” means
When our drivers publish a carpool ride on the BlaBlaCar app or website, they enter into a trip publication flow.
- They start by adding some information about their carpool trip (road taken, trip price, number of passengers).
- Directly after the trip details are filled out, we suggest optional insurance to cover their trip, with as little friction as possible (2nd screen of the illustration).
- An additional screen (3rd screen) explaining how payment and cancellation work is available to help our drivers fully understand what they subscribe to, how the process looks like, etc.
The goal here is, on one screen and in a few words, to clearly present:
- The coverages.
- The price.
- Additional information about payment & process.
Our drivers can then cover their trip, or dismiss the insurance, in just one click.
Easy, fast, and understandable.
How can brands adopt embedded insurance into their user journeys?
Embedded insurance products should be treated as a core part of your product, as a feature.
Providing insurance to your users only for the sake of doing it is not the way to go.
- First, think of the value for your users: can we provide a complementary product protecting our users against unexpected events?
- Then, think about a smooth user journey: how can we integrate this insurance into our user journey without degrading the overall experience?
- Finally, be clear about what you offer: how can I explain, precisely but concisely, what the product is about? What is the value I provide to my users?
Embedded insurance opens the doors of a world where insurance is easy to buy and understand for users. So jump on the train now to delight your users with a wonderful customer experience!
Thanks to Victor Rubin, Guillaume Clochard, Gwenael Moy, Nicolas Chandou and Berivan Kilavuz for their contribution to this article!
