Why I left one of the hottest companies to join a small start-up in one of the industries ranked most boring

After spending the last 5 years at Airbnb running business operations and working with some of the best people in the world, I decided to join a small insurtech start-up trying to disrupt one of the most traditional industries in the world and became their VP operations.

Why did I leave Airbnb for Luko ?

After a few chats with the founders and investors, I realised that insurtech was simply the best place to build an efficient operations machine from the ground up.

The thrill to create a user experience looking up to the travel industry

Insurance industry still has a long way to go before reaching travel standards in terms of client satisfaction. And despite one might think, it is far from being a lost battle. Here is why:

• Home insurance is a 10b euros-industry in France alone. Adding the rest of western Europe, the industry represents roughly 100b euros.
• Customer satisfaction in insurance is very low and most people mistrust their insurers because insurances offer illegible 60-pages contracts when people are really just looking for care, education and prevention.
• Tech in insurance is still in its infancy — a lot of tasks are still performed manually, data is not well leveraged and tools are ancient.
• Existing companies have cost-inefficient operations with multi-channels (chat, phone, emails, physical letters) and really large support teams in charge of collecting claims over the phone

There are so many paths for improvement it makes it even more exciting.

The right team for the right ambitions

Truth be told, many other companies aim to disrupt such an industry but I found at Luko a vision that made a lot of sense to me: protect homes, prevent damages from happening in the first place and help people feel good at home. I felt drawn to this vision, supported by a fully committed team that shares the same goals and the same energy.

And I have not been disappointed about any of this: in my first four months at Luko, I have already learnt a ton from my incredible colleagues, peers and founders. I am now more convinced than ever that insurance needs to be completely disrupted and that operational excellence is the most critical way to accomplish just that!

What can we do better as an industry?

I quickly identified five key points of future improvement.

• Be customer-obsessed: we are building a compassionate and skilled customer service team able to provide an accurate and unbiased advice to any customer in under 1m20 via chat. Focusing on a single channel allows us to deliver the best and fastest customer service while maintaining efficiency.
• Provide care & prevention, not just contracts: We do not want to merely offer an insurance product, we want to solve customer problems and we want customers to experience the same experience from the moment they file a claim to the moment their repairman leaves their home.
• Design efficient, fair and speedy claim machine: provide fast and high quality scalable claim experiences by leveraging technology. All claims are created via our app and flows are unique to each damage type. We also ask users to show us their damage with in-app videos so we can quickly identify coverage, estimate damages and schedule a repair.
• Super-powered operations with tech & data : Data availability, no-legacy infrastructure and a very agile team enable us to create tools for our ops team to focus on the highest-value work and leave the rest to automation! We are building fraud algorithm and damage pricing technology to automate massive time and ops-intensive moments in the claim handling-process.
• Treat every customer as a learning opportunity: Any complaint, bad rating or insatisfaction generates learnings. We listen to our customers’ frustration and leverage them to create better customer-facing tech, better processes and better tools for our team.

Customer experience in the insurance industry is awful. If you bring your vision of customer experience from an industry where the whole business is based on it, then you can fully transform the way of doing things.

With this in mind, I am delighted to be part of the Luko journey and thrilled to see how we’ll disrupt this industry!

Originally published at https://www.luko.eu on November 3, 2020.