How to design a best-in-class insurance claims experience
As a product designer at Getsafe, my goal is to design a delightful and easy-to-use insurance experience that people love to use when they need it. To achieve this, we need to listen to our customers to create solutions that address real customer problems. In this article, I want to share how we started designing the most important touchpoint we have with our customers. The claims experience is what defines the insurance experience – it’s the moment of truth.
Why it all started
Getsafe is growing fast. Recently, we reached the milestone of serving over 250,000 customers.
At Getsafe, we looked at things from a customer perspective and defined three key jobs-to-be-done: Buy, Manage, and Claim. As our customer base grows, the latter part of the customer journey – the claims experience – is becoming more and more important. This so-called “moment of truth” is one of the most important touchpoints, both from a customer and a business perspective. It is the moment when customers need our help. The moment that shows if your insurance is there for you and supports you when you need it. The moment our customers have insurance for. That’s where we step in and offer the customer the best possible experience we can.
Because the claims experience is so important for us and our customers, we decided to make this a key priority for this year. We chose the timing to tackle this with our strategic context in mind: Just a few days ago we received our insurance license, which will give us control over the whole value chain of insurance, especially in terms of regulating claims for our customers.
How to start
To design the foundation and make our claims experience one of the best-in-class, we had to understand our customers’ problems and needs. Internally, we put together a claims squad consisting of designers, product managers, developers, and data analysts to drive the project.
To get a general understanding of the claims process, I started with some research. I spoke to more than 25 customers and internal stakeholders in a series of interviews. Those interviews laid the foundation for the next step: a design sprint.
The design sprint
The design sprint method allows you to focus on a problem, develop a mass of solutions, create a prototype, test, and validate with real customers in just a few days.
To ensure that everyone was on the same page, I sent a summary of the most important findings from my research to the sprint participants. One challenge was getting all colleagues to commit for a whole week. I divided the sprint into four days and only involved my colleagues on the first two days in order to maintain full focus.
Day 1 – Understand the problem
We used the first day to understand the problem as deeply as possible. As a result, we defined the top three problem areas and how we could solve them.
- No expectation management and guidance
How might we provide the right information for every customer at the right time through the entire claims journey? - No transparency
How might we communicate and share all relevant information (documents, status updates, etc.) in the simplest and most understandable way? - Break in medium (communication)
How might we ensure that the user has minimal medium breaks throughout the complete claims process?
We derived the following user needs from this:
- It should not require much effort from me
- I want to know what is happening to my claim
- I expect a consistent communication
What we learned was that in the moment of truth customers didn’t know right away where to file their claim in the app. It was hidden in our service tab. In addition, customers couldn’t find their submitted claims in the app. Open and closed claims, claim history, as well as status updates, were not visible at all. Customers only file a claim in the app. After that, the process happens via email. We wanted to change that.
At the end of the first day, we asked ourselves what the future of our claims experience could look like. We defined a long-term goal for this.
In two years’ time, our claims experience solution is so much better than anything on the market. It can be sold as a service to other insurance companies.
Day 2 – Create solutions
We started with a quick recap. Based on what we had learned, everyone created their own concept of what the claims experience should look like. To get the best results out of everybody, we used the methods of Lighting Demos, 4-Part-Sketching, and the final concept sketch. Everyone pitched their concepts and we voted on the best ideas as a team.
Day 3 – Build vision prototype
From all the great ideas the team voted for, I designed the first prototype. Rapid Prototyping at its best. Within one day, we created the following result.
Day 4 – Test with real customers
After testing the prototype with some customers the next day, we discovered three interesting insights.
- Our customers really liked the messenger-like communication in the App
- Our customers perceived the status updates and the associated “next actions” as very useful
- Our customers very quickly found where to file a claim
What to focus on?
From the three key testing insights, we were able to identify opportunities that we can implement quickly and easily, which provide real value for our customers. To support our insights from the qualitative research, we also took a look at reviews, customer satisfaction scores (CSATs), and customer effort scores (CES). The results of the quantitative research also clearly showed what our customers want.
To make our first iteration measurable we set up a hypothesis:
We believe an increase of our CSAT will be achieved if customers that filed a claim successfully see their claims progress through status updates in the app.
Ship the first iteration
The first iteration of our claims experience serves to learn from user feedback as quickly as possible and thus prevent undesirable developments that ignore user requirements. In this context, it is important that the iteration offers an initial “usable” benefit so that users actually use the product.
Our minimum usable product (MUP) includes a brand new claims tab that allows our customers to more quickly and easily file a claim in their specific situation. The basic premise for all other improvements in the future was to bring claims into the app in the first place. Our customers can now view open and closed claims, download the settlement letter, or view the chat history. For more transparency, we added status updates so our customers always know what’s happening with their claims.
Resulting impact
It is still too early to say whether our initiative has a direct impact on increasing customer satisfaction or not. Generally, the CSAT score is highly dependent on whether or not the customer ultimately receives a payout for the submitted claim. Therefore, it is quite tricky to measure success here, since the entire claims experience is a very emotional matter. Nevertheless, it can be said that the process can have an impact on customer satisfaction by creating a fast, simple and transparent experience where the customer’s worries are taken away at any time.
What we learned — and what comes next
At Getsafe, we believe that company growth is only possible if you serve your customers much better than other companies. That’s why we always try to look at the entire customer journey, always focus on the customer, and pay attention to where their problems lie. Sometimes you just have to start and not be afraid to release even small improvements. If this offers value for the customer, it’s always a win.
We are very proud to have laid the foundation for the claims experience. For all further improvements in the future, it was essential to show claims and status updates in the app in the first place. Now that we have our own insurance license, we have even more control over the entire claims process and can integrate even more great features into the app to support our customers in difficult situations and create the best possible experience. The foundation is in place. So stay tuned for more.
Interested in joining our Design Team?
If you’d like to join us on our journey of building the insurance of tomorrow, have a look at the design roles we’re looking for here.
