How the best insurance companies sell their products online.

User Experience design in the insurance industry — how to leverage design to increase sales and retain prospects.

Photo by Jack Finnigan on Unsplash

About a decade ago, something as simple as insuring your car could be quite an overwhelming experience. Filing claims or finding a policy that best suited you took time, and people did it only because they had to, like doing taxes.

There were people who knew the ins and outs of the industry. These were ‘experts’ to whom customers could delegate such tasks, but customers often felt cheated in the process. As a result, insurance companies ranked low in customer engagement and trust compared to other industries.

Then business moved online. Insurance companies responded by setting up web portals, mostly because they were afraid of losing clients to rival firms who were already online.

Insurance execs do the staring contest: what are others doing? Many are reluctant to make changes before the competition.

Jamie Yoder, Global Insurance Advisory Practice Leader, PWC

These websites still don’t deliver what users want. The online quote process mostly involves notoriously lengthy forms that take longer to complete. Poorly designed forms increase user friction and customers who start the process mostly never finish. They become stuck shoppers. Potential customers either end up walking away or venting to support agents, wasting both their time and company resources in the process.

What do users want?

When a user visits an insurance portal, there are several factors that influence their choice to leave or stay:

Ease: Most users don’t enjoy filling insurance forms, and they want to get it done quickly. If filing a claim or finding a policy feels like a task, you’ll lose them. It’s better if your site’s design is creative enough to make customers feel good while doing this. Users also hate uncertainty, so you’ll give them a better experience if you provide a way for them to know how long it’ll take.

Choice: Give users all the information required to make a decision and eliminate any doubt. They need assurance that they’re making a good decision. The goal is to eventually make them feel like they are paying an acceptable price for good coverage.

Advice: Though they want self-service, insurance can be confusing. They also want to find information without having to ask for help unless it’s necessary. You can help by subtly guide them through the process.

What can insurers do to create a good customer experience?

Companies spend a lot of money on ads to attract more users on their websites. Some of the most expensive keywords in Google Adwords advertising are related to the insurance industry. However, getting users to your site is just half of it.

The site’s design should be positive and user-centric. Think of it as an advisor, not a party who only cares about how much the user will have to pay. Leveraging design to offer a better user experience is can help re-imagine the company’s relationship with policyholders.

Here are some things to consider, for an ideal user-centric experience:

• Don’t mirror your organization structure online: Users want to be served. It doesn’t matter which branch of your organization handles that. Think of your website as more than a content portal, a virtual agent of sorts. An organization-centric website makes users spend more time searching for information, and these visitors are impatient. If they don’t find what they want, they’ll go look somewhere else.
• When defining customers, some beneficiaries are just as important as the policyholders. Beneficiaries, such as parents and kids, are the motivation for the policy enrollment in the first place. For instance, in life insurance, you’re not serving one user, but an entire family, with whom you have a chance to develop a relationship. Sometimes these beneficiaries provide opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling.
• Allow users to compare different alternatives. Side by side comparisons that are easy to interpret work best here. Avoid wordy comparisons, use icons, images and animations to make different alternatives clear. Text-heavy pages result in overwhelmed users. If you must have them, then improve text readability.
• Don’t ask personal questions first: Personal questions make users suspicious since it could lead to unwarranted sales calls or emails. It’s better to start with less sensitive details such as location. Ask for personal details after users feel they have invested enough time in the process. It’ll make them less inclined to leave.
• The ease of making a claim informs the customer’s opinion about your entire organization. If it’s difficult to make a claim, then you’ve lost your trust and might lose your customer soon.

How to simplify the customer journey

• Avoid lengthy forms. Find alternative sources of data so that you reduce the number of questions you ask the consumer directly. It’ll help diminish your question sets. E.g Use Google Maps to confirm the user’s location.
• Break forms down into different sections. Make it clear what’s involved in each step. Form wizards work best in this case. Users can complete them in bits and not feel overwhelmed. It also allows them to gauge how long it takes.
• Convey additional information using icons, they communicate better than text in some instances.
• Validate forms and handle errors as users enter the information. Don’t point out errors after they’ve completed the form. Imagine how it feels seeing those errors pop up when you thought you’d completed the form — It can be frustrating and the user could abandon the entire process.
• Questions should have clear (black and white) answers. Explain the reasons behind a particular question where necessary. Use tooltips and micro-copy for this.
• Provide an estimate of the time it takes to complete forms. This works in the same way as real-time departure boards at train stations. They don’t make your journey faster, but they matter a lot to passengers. We’d rather wait eight minutes for a train knowing it will arrive in eight minutes. Rather than spend four minutes in a state of anxious uncertainty when we don’t know when it will arrive. While it can be difficult to estimate the time of completion for different users, you could use progress bars for form wizards or mark every submission as a set of milestones.
• Avoid difficult terms and abbreviations: Users won’t know what they mean and people misjudge what they don’t understand.
• Users want to see the impact their choices have on the final price. Let them play around with the options present and get to see how the price changes. The quoted amount should be visible on the top or right side. Include up-sells here as well.
• Make the process of researching and comparing policies easier, so customers don’t get stuck and fail to complete the quoting process.
• Make your forms look better and more appealing. The font size should be larger. More white space. Less clutter. This way, users make fewer mistakes when completing the forms.
• Use micro-copy to explain why you’re asking for some information, and to anticipate any questions that customers may have for potentially confusing fields. You have to justify why you’re asking some questions, otherwise, they’ll be ambiguous, which reduces trust. Vague questions lower the user’s confidence and contribute to them abandoning the process.
• Offer help options, preferably live chat. These should be written with users in mind. A prominent phone number should be displayed on the site if you offer customer support. It should be toll-free. Remember user is either lost or confused, that’s why they’re asking for help. The tone should be friendly. The goal should be to help the user recover from their issue and continue filling the form.

Hint: Anyone involved in developing the digital customer support mechanism should first spend time in your call center. It’s how you can learn how to communicate with customers and translate it into excellent customer service. They’ll also learn what words to use for responding to users.

• Reduce the number of items in drop-down menus. Here’s a comprehensive guide on drop-downs.

Case Studies

Only a small group of participants in the insurance industry has achieved the perfect balance of good information architecture and user-centric design. They’ve leveraged good UX to increase their business.

Below is an overview of two companies that have created a positive and memorable user experience. They deliver what visitors want without confusing them.

Lemonade (400)

Lemonade offers renters/homeowner’s insurance. It uses A.I and chat-bots to handle claims and offer personalized policies. No bureaucracies or insurance brokers, just a desktop and mobile interface. All built with only one thing in mind: a simple, user-first experience. This has led to a loyal community of users, an annual 1000% growth and $180 million in funding.

Their appealing U.X is so natural to pick up on that they’ve arguably eliminated all pain points. They chose their words carefully. Their call-to-actions are strategically placed to help every site visitor come up with the perfect insurance policy for their needs.

In Lemonade’s portal, each screen answers a question that complements the previous. Simple, natural language is used, and there’s no legal jargon. They make sure you understand what they’re offering.

The assistant, Maya, makes you feel like you’re talking to an actual human being. The on-boarding process is as seamless as a continuous conversation, and you’re relied upon to hold the other end of the conversation inside your mind. It feels real. You get to interact.

In every instance, only the content you need at the moment is presented to you.

Users need certainty before they make a decision. Lemonade responds to this by giving them all the information they need for each choice.

It’s business model also borrows from behavioral economics — Users sign a digital honesty pledge at the beginning of their claim process. It also donates any surplus premiums to charity (a nonprofit of their choice). The thinking here is that your future self isn’t as transparent as your present self would like to be. So you have to make a decision, freely, that’ll bind you in the future

This, coupled with tweaks like a signed honesty pledge, helps attest to the truth of a claim.

K.C.B Insurance Agency

K.C.B (Kenya Commercial Bank) Insurance Agency is the insurance arm of the K.C.B Group, the largest financial services organization in East Africa, by asset size.

The first thing you notice when you visit their site is they only provide information that’s relevant to you.

First, there’s an option to select a policy type based on the kind of product you’d like to insure. If it’s not among the listed products, you can search for it.

Below that, there’s a list of their best selling products, which also represents the three most common insurance products in Kenya: auto-insurance, health, and education. Some products, such as ‘Simba Health’, are custom made for you.

You can opt for these plans and go straight to the quote process or you can choose to learn more about them.

Say we want motor insurance.

The next step answers the question, what kind of motor insurance is the user looking for? Just like the previous options, each category has a ‘learn more’ option, giving you the information needed to make a decision.

It works the same way in other insurance options, such as property insurance well. They’ve made it clear and second to nature. Moments after visiting the site, the prospect now knows where to find the information they need.

Next, say we opt for motor private insurance.

The next interface contains three things:

1. An intuitive form, divided into sections. They’ve made it easy to fill and process your policy. They’ve used tooltips to offer more clarification to the user. Especially on details such as towing charges, entertainment, and windscreen.
2. A live quote estimator, that lets you see how different variables affect the basic premium. It gives the user control in the decision making process.
3. A brief explanation about what this policy entails, in case you didn’t click ‘learn more’. You don’t need to go back.

Remember this is an agency. It sells insurance policies on behalf of insurance providers. The next interface uses cards to show the user what various providers offer, and their benefits for their premium.

After selecting their preferred buyer, it’s now time for the user to add their details. They’ve already invested enough time into this process.

Could the personal details form be simplified? They don’t explain why they need information like the seating capacity or something as sensitive as a K.R.A pin — A unique digit used to identify persons while engaging in transactions with the Kenya Revenue Authority. Tooltips could be used to explain what that information is used for.

It also feels like the location details are redundant. They should also explain what the sales agent does. They could have anticipated any questions that a prospect has in mind.

On your left, you can still add extra benefits, and see how the premium amount varies. Again, users have control over the decision process, and the insurance company gets to advertise the benefits it offers. A win-win situation here!

I think a separate section for upload supporting documents is needed. But they also allow you to skip this for now, in case you feel overwhelmed.

You also get a comprehensive summary of your policy before completing the transaction. This allows prospects to make any changes before committing if need be. (Ignore the dummy details.)

Finally, you make the payment through your preferred option. You can then complete the process by picking your forms at the closest K.C.B bank branch. You can also ask for assistance in these branches as well.

Conclusion

We can change people’s perceptions about insurance by simplifying the customer’s decision to engage with a provider. It should be made simpler and more positive.

Any insurance company that adopts a people-centered customer-engagement model will always have an edge over its competitors. It will also gain a holistic understanding of prospects, policyholders, and their beneficiaries. This way, the insurance provider gets to serve policyholders more effectively, building a trusted client-advisor relationship in the process. It’ll also provide more cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. That’s how you foster customer loyalty.