Transforming claims process for enhanced user retention

Elevating form completion rates, minimizing errors, and optimizing customer care agent efficiency

Overview

Milvik Bima, a health and micro-insurance tech company serving 10 million customers across Asia and Africa, faced significant challenges with customer retention and claims processing.

As the Product Design Lead, I led initiatives to streamline the claims process, improve customer interactions, and ultimately drive retention through enhanced user experience.

Product design is not merely about creating apps; it involves problem-solving and making customer journeys easier, catering to customers with diverse needs, and creating impact as quickly as possible. This project exemplifies how a customer-centric approach, coupled with rapid implementation, creates impactful outcomes, benefiting users across different markets with speed and efficiency.

The Challenge

1. Low customer retention: Only 10% of customers were retained over a span of one year.
2. Inefficient claims process: 24% of customer care call volume was claim-related, with an average processing time of 35 days.
3. High error rate: 80% of claims were rejected or required resubmission due to form errors and incomplete documentation.

Design Goals

1. Streamline and simplify the claims process
2. Enhance overall user experience to improve retention
3. Increase service utilization through education and reminders
4. Reduce operational costs and burden on customer support

Understanding the as-is claims journey

As-is claims journey

Accelerating impact: Enhancing the paper form journey

Considering our diverse user base, including those without mobile apps and smart phones, I prioritized improving the paper form process before delving into a digital solution.

This strategic approach allowed for swift implementation without involving the engineering tech team, promptly impacting all users with an improved claims process.

The learnings from the paper form journey would later be applied to the digital journeys.

Expanding success globally: Overcoming limitations of paper forms

After a successful pilot in Bangladesh, I adapted the approach for other markets. In these countries, the underwriter didn’t mandate users to sign or fill any form. Instead, users submitted their documents directly to Milvik customer care through email, WhatsApp, or in-person, and our agents handled the claims process with the underwriter on their behalf, eliminating the need for form filling. To make form instructions mobile-friendly and more precise, I utilized Notion.

Utilizing Notion, I quickly got responsive screens for all device sizes, effectively highlighting do’s and don’ts while incorporating illustrative images, resulting in a significant reduction of errors.

Digital prototyping with Typeform

To further streamline the process, I chose Typeform to create interactive forms with conditional logic, enabling effortless navigation and reducing the workload for customer service agents. However, limitations like language support constraints and logic complexity emerged.

Adding conditional logic via typeform

Using Typeform for claims

The App Journey: Elevating Customer Experience

Opting for in-app form creation allowed us to optimize user experience, enhance data management, and deliver a more tailored and efficient claims process, significantly improving user retention and satisfaction.

Our app streamlines claims filing with a user-friendly list of claim types, clear instructions, and flexible form filling. Advanced logic checks ensure accurate submissions, minimizing errors. Guided video instructions reduce customer care calls, enhancing efficiency, and user satisfaction.

Claims flow — Please note, the claims process flow has evolved through iterative improvements based on my thought process as I detailed out the screens, user feedback and stakeholder insights.

Using logic checks on app, that were not possible on typeform

Impact

With these transformative efforts, form completion rates surged, errors nearly eradicated, and overall customer experience elevated.

• 93 of claim documents submitted correctly with all required documents in the first attempt vs 26% previously
• Only 5% of invalid claims transferred to claims team compared to 15% previously

Learnings

• Creative problem-solving with existing tools can create impactful outcomes, even with limited tech resources
• Rapid prototyping and testing accelerate iteration and improve design quality.
• Inclusive design considers all users, ensuring solutions work for everyone.