Singing in the rain: how our first year feels like
“Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.” Bob Marley
(Para ler esse artigo em português clique aqui.)
Digital transformation? We’re all constantly stumbling on buzzwords like blockchain, machine learning, artificial intelligence, chatbot or any other digital channel available that can help our business on the noble mission of delivering a brand new digital experience to our audience….
We believe technology is not everything we should be caring about. There’s less attention being paid to the real pain of our customers and less discussions on how to treat people better (yes, they’re all sick of being cheated) compared to the technological issues. At Pier, more than looking to fit in digital transformation, we’re building an “uncomplicated” and transparent product with a customer experience strong enough to be remembered. Our main focus was creating a protection model with so much value that people could feel free to really live urban spaces and allow themselves to experience and celebrate life having Pier as an emotional support they can count with.
Fortunately, our dream already has some very strong traits of reality and gradually we’ve been receiving more and more testimonials like this. Our ant work is getting bigger, we’re helping more people and transforming their relationships with protection services ❤
We started our pilot in January 2018 and now for the first time we can compare quarters. So let’s make use of our traditional transparency to tell you a bit of our history in three parts:
i. Results;
ii. Learnings;
iii. Challenges.
i. Results:
Pier is responsible for controlling our member’s payment flow in the most transparent way that’s possible. The good news is the word is being spread and our community is getting bigger:
Pier’s community has 3.405 members spread across 22 states:
Another information we consider to be very important is our loss ratio performance:
The loss ratio index measures the amount of pickpocketing and holdups suffered by our members. It tells us how much our community losses can compromise our refund reservation. It’s healthy to our community when those values run between 40% and 60% and so it did for our first year :)
ii. Learnings:
Before we even started testing our product we were looking for an Insurer that could support us as a partner. But we just couldn’t see in the companies we were talking to our values and ideals. And so we started our pilot alone and only in December 2018 Pier started working as a stipulator of Too Seguros (a company that clearly shares our market vision).
In our first year of operation (pilot+stipulator) we had some very important learnings about our product, members and company. Some hypothesis were validated and some others were not.
We would like to share some of them with you:
1. Caring makes difference
Since Pier’s beginning we search for a product that’s fair and transparent. The decision of including pickpocketing in our coverage was risky, but necessary to deliver an honest product for our customers. One year later we have conviction to say this decision was very successful. Until March of 2019, more than 55% of our refunds were pickpocketing cases (that would have being denied by any other company).
Despite our victory, it’s very sad to realize that 1 in 2 users of traditional insurance will not be refunded when robbed 😰
We also care about our community when we change something in our product or in our communication. We constantly ask ourselves:
Is it fair? Is it coherent?
Is this the easiest way to solve this problem?
Will our members understand why we did it?
Which question may come up? How can we solve them before they do? Did we explain this in the most didactic way?
Can this communication be ambiguous or offensive for minorities?
All these concerns generate a lot of attention to details. However, we are very happy to see our base growing bigger from our members’ referrals:
Virality measures the number of news members a user usually brings with them. 20% is equivalent to every 5 members bringing 1 new!
After all hard work, we believe we are on the right path :)
2. Automating costs but generates efficiency
This image became famous after a tweet by Tim Bray. It shows a lot of how we wok at Pier:
We just can’t accept repetitive tasks as default. If something can be automatized so it will be. Also, to guarantee that our mindset is focused on technology, we have at least one technology professional working in every single area of our company! From risk analysis to our marketing or financial, something has been done by a developer to increase efficiency in some of our internal processes.
Even though our main focus is automation, we’re very proud of our team growth. We were 5 in January 2018 and now we’re 15 talented professionals working together!
Talking about risks analysis, almost 80% of our invitations have being analyzed automatically and 10% of our refunds are approved even before our members send us their documents. We have dedicated a lot of effort to cleverly distinguish honest people from malicious people:
Almost 80% of our members were refunded in less than 3 days. Others had to send us some extra information and received their money in up to 10 days.
About 2% of all cases got into a more complex approvement flow and received their refunds in up to 45 days. We consider those cases pretty suspicious of fraud, but we sadly didn’t get enough proves to deny their refunds and create a police inquiry (as we did in other cases).
3. Data based anti fraud
Obs: because of our community’s safety, we can’t talk too much in this topic :)
We must guarantee that Pier is a reliable community. We use to say we trust everyone until they prove we’re wrong — and data help us a lot — .
Curiosity: in less than a month we are able to collect hundreds of thousands of data points from several sources about our users!
In a very simple way, we can differentiate users in our base and act preventively or correctively.
Preventively, we have already excluded 1% of users with behaviors considered incompatible to our community. Also, a lot of business rules have being incorporated to our invitations analysis process and we’ve elaborated some very accurate police inquiries that resulted in non-payment of refunds and in denunciations by Public Ministry.
After this first year we’re proud of our model evolution and glad to be able to use our technology to empower police. And believe us: this is just the beginning!
iii. Challenges
1. Internalizing payments
Developing all the payment logic internally was very important to give our members full control of their plans and improve their experience with us. At the same time it gave our users autonomy and it’s also the first step to a future on-demand protection. 😉
However, all these flexibility generates some big challenges to our back-end and during the process of implementing it we had some billing problems including wrong invoices and doubled charges.
We put a lot of effort to regularize all the cases and we’re very thankful to all our members who gave us feedbacks :)
2. Geolocation
We believe in geolocation as a very important tool to increase our pricing justice level. Geolocation will help us understand the risks our members are exposed to and in the future will help us to offer progressive discounts to our users. 😬
One big challenge is defining an ideal baseline between the granularity increase and battery consumption. The geolocation system has received 13 updates focused on balancing this equation. By the way, we test everything at home first and we use our team’s own devices to analyze the impact of all these changes.
Despite all the care we have with our community, some members have reported considerable battery consumption increase. We know the battery usage variates from one to another but we’re working hard to improve our models.
3. Involuntary cancellation communication
Another big challenge we have faced is dealing with people that had their plans canceled (ex: when the card expires).
We always try to validate if our e-mails were sent, if they were read or if the user opened our app. Everything we can do will be done so our members don’t find out they were not covered when they most need us.
This is the worst experience possible: to find out you’re not covered when you’re expecting to receive a refund.
Curiosity: we paid a refund to a user that was not covered because we verified he hadn’t received our e-mails telling him about the cancellation.
We’re strict in ensuring that our users get to know that their plans were canceled, but we apologize to those who were not properly informed previously.
See you!
Taking a long story short, the challenges we have faced and the involvement of our community with our proposal have allowed us to take Pier to another level in this very first year!
Pier is made of people and, differently of wines, people don’t maturate with the simple passing of time. “Any year” wouldn’t have being enough to bring so many learnings and evolution to our company as a “good year” was able to. How is a good year measured? By the intensity of the challenges and for the will to solve them. People don’t mature in their comfort zone and because of that we’re very proud and thankful for this first year of Pier!
Finally, we are happy to share our results with transparency. Thank you for all our members that came to us with questions, feedbacks and that have helped us on building something brand new.
We were not clear enough? Let us know, we answer all questions on chat, Facebook and Instagram:)
