Gamification in Insurance
Gamification as a means for deeper customer engagement is increasingly employed by many new-age FinTechs. And why not so? Gamification helps in improving customer acquisition, word-of-mouth customer referrals, customer retention, revenue increment and even activation of existing dormant accounts, among other benefits. Indian apps in payments have started picking up this trend, and it is slowly being taken up by banking apps through their loyalty programs.
In India, Google Pay effectively creates gamified user experience to engage customers during festival time through small games & tasks on the app. You must have seen your younger siblings and friends sending you referral requests, game tickets or fun rewards on Google Pay app during festival times.
Big Question for Insurers
It is easier for payments and banking apps to regularly engage customers as they cater to a daily need. Every user has to open some or the other payment or banking app to make digital payments or money transfers. But when it comes to insurance players, most users tend to forget about their life or general insurance policies once they purchase and remember them only when it is time to make a maturity claim or reimbursement claim. The insurers make a lot of effort to engage with the customer during the pre-purchase journey and claim settlements. But, between these two events, insurers have little idea about the customers’ evolving preferences and insurance needs.
Here, gamifying the user experience for onboarding the customer on the app, policy purchase and post-policy purchase can create higher sales conversions and revenue for insurers.
Gamification and making sense of it for behaviour change
As per Gartner, Gamification is the application of game mechanics and experience design to drive engagement in non-game business scenarios, motivate people and induce behaviour change to achieve business outcomes.
The concept of gamification can be better understood from ‘The Fogg Behavior Model’. The Model states that for any behaviour change to happen, three elements must converge at the same moment:
Motivation — people should be motivated enough to work towards the change;
Ability — they should have the ability to complete tasks for the intended behaviour change with minimal effort;
Prompt — there should be a constant prompt to trigger and nudge the person in working towards that behaviour change
The behaviour change is unsuccessful if any one of the three elements slack. Let’s consider an example –improving physical health and staying fit. Here, the motivation factors are the many benefits one gain from a healthy physique, a realisation of higher self-esteem, and aesthetics as friends and family appreciate the efforts. Once people start working towards this, they may find it challenging to continue towards steep goals like losing 10 kilos in one month. Hence, the goals need to be broken into smaller tasks and components to be easier to achieve as per one’s ability. As one completes a task and progresses, they work towards the larger goal of ‘improving physical health and staying fit. Lastly, one can have a daily prompt through alarms, follow a calendar, or have a fitness coach.
Hence, gamification can extensively be used by insurers in inculcating healthy lifestyle habits in life insurance & health insurance policyholders and safe driving habits in auto insurance customers, among others.
Therefore, gamification in insurance must serve a purpose and not merely an offering. Insurance apps can never substitute addictive games like candy crush or PUBG. Still, they can work towards instilling a healthy habit in policyholders.
What can be done by insurers?
1.Gamified educational content
Customers can be made to play small in-app games to explain the benefits of various insurance products.
Ex- In a 10–15-minute game, the user can be given an identity and some coins to purchase a house and other electronic items like TV, Refrigerator, Oven, Antique Clock, Wooden furniture and room heater, among others. The user is also asked to virtually buy small home insurance plans to ensure these home items. Later, instances like fire incidents, earthquakes, burglary and damages due to flood, among other scenarios, can be created. The user can be made aware of different general insurance products through such scenarios. It can be shown that some items in the home could have been insured under some policy that the user did not select. Similar gamified stories can be created for auto, health, and life insurance products.
2. Challenges & Streaks to meet goals
An effective way of inculcating positive habits in the policyholders would be to create small achievable challenges, generate a streak, and achieve an important goal. These goals could be related to saving for maintaining personal fitness, personal finance, saving for retirement funds and children’s education, among other purposes.
Ex- YuLife is a UK-based life insurance app that incentivises customers to live healthier lives. It sells group insurance plans to corporate companies. The corporate employees can earn YuCoin, their wellbeing currency, for completing wellness challenges like taking a 10-minute walk or completing a 5-minute meditation session.
3. Progress Bars
Progress Bars are an attractive feature that could be used while onboarding a customer and completing the customer’s digital profile. The feature can make users share more information about their health details, income details, car details, and others to make personalised recommendations to them.
Likewise, for an Auto-insurance product same feature can be used to assess safe car driving habits using telematics. The telematics data of the vehicle can be used to study the driving pattern, and a safe driving score can be assigned to the driver. The user can keep track of similar scores for their family members. These scores can be used to award premium discounts during car’s insurance policy renewals.
GEICO insurance effectively uses DriveEasy, a performance-based auto insurance program that cultivates safe driving habits. The app looks for phone use, speed, and hard braking patterns. The ‘Driving Score’ is based on how many times the app detects these things during a trip.
4.Redeemable in-app coins or points
In-app coins help the users in continuing towards the goal. Users feel a sense of satisfaction whenever they earn some redeemable in-app points after completing any task.
The YuLife app also provides mental wellness offerings. Employees earn wellness points through healthy habits, which they can redeem against Amazon coupons, travel tickets, movie tickets, Decathlon & Nike products, other fitness app subscriptions, among others.
5. Badges & Stickers
Badges & Stickers give a sense of accomplishment when any policyholder completes a goal after maintaining a continuous winning streak. This acts as a motivation tool for the users to work further and achieve higher goals.
GEICO DriveEasy gives different badges to drivers after they maintain a continuous streak of safe driving trips.
6. Leaderboards
A leaderboard is a high score list that creates competition among users. By adding game elements to the goals and helping users visualise their results, the feature helps in increasing motivation and user efforts.
7. Customisation features
Customisation features like creating virtual avatars of users and making them a central character of the game can help in increasing their engagement. Customisation features can also design various health and fitness programs as per the policyholder’s comfort level.
8. Rewards and collectibles
Reward programs help reduce premium payment lapses and ensure regular premium payments from the customers. It helps in actively engaging the policyholders and cross-selling partner services by linking rewards.
Another life insurance app like Rakuten Life insurance has a successful reward and loyalty program called ‘Rakuten Rebates’. The policyholders who pay premiums on time earn rewards discount deals from other Rakuten Group services in Travel, eCommerce and entertainment, among others.
9. App Mascot
Creating an app mascot that regularly interacts and nudges the insurance customers to work towards fitness or savings goals, suggests the best suitable policies and offers during festival time.
10. Engaging through social media
It allows users to share their achievements on social media, follow hashtag campaigns on various themes like #selfiwithDaughter on special days like Women’s Day, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Diwali, and Christmas. The app can engage customers to share fun reels, selfies and achievements on social media. These efforts can create a good buzz on social media, attract new customers and create more awareness.
Concluding Thoughts
In the Indian Insurance space, only SBI Life Insurance has started using gamification features to create awareness about its insurance products. However, it is still at a very nascent stage. The rest of the insurance players don’t have any gamification features.
Also, gamification provides an easier way to deliver a customer-centric experience and clearly explain complex insurance products. Insurers need to capitalise on this trend if they want to seek more engagement out of their customers.
Not only just the customers but Gamification features can also be further extended to motivate insurance agents through small programs and goals. Training modules for insurance employees can be designed around gamification.
As more and more FinTechs in India start using gamification strategies to engage customers, this trend is here to stay. Soon, the Indian insurance apps have to catch up with the same.
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References —
- DriveEasy (geico.com)
- https://www.fintechmarketinghub.com/post/how-fintech-yulife-uses-gamification-to-transform-the-insurance-sector
- https://creativepool.com/yasheng/projects/yulife-app
- https://adamfard.com/blog/fintech-gamification
- https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2020/11/18/how-life-insurers-can-promote-successful-gamification-strategies/
