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Exploring the viability and desirability of Quickcover (Parametric Insurance) through transparent and concise information.
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Overview
Insurance-love it or hate it, most of us purchase some form of it. It is a $76 billion industry set to increase to $96 billion in terms of gross written premiums by 2025 . This dramatic increase is due to post COVID recovery and a rise in catastrophic trigger events caused by climate change.
IAG and Firemark want to test the viability and desirability of Quickcover (Parametric Insurance) and needs to ensure that the rate of customer churn due to unaffordability remains low.
Goals
The business goal is to test the desirability of Parametric Insurance and reduce customer churn due to unaffordability at renewal time.
From the user's perspective, we needed to understand their:
- behaviour and motivation to buy insurance.
- pain-points while using insurance products.
- thoughts on parametric insurance.
Conclusions
People will pay for peace of mind. By providing information for Quickcover in a transparent and concise way, we believe that there will be an increase in customer loyalty and retention and everyone, including the business, achieves peace of mind.
My Role
Project Manager, Design Strategy, User Researcher, UI/UX Designer, Prototyping and Usability Testing
Tools Used
Figma, Miro
" For me, insurance has always been about knowing I'm always going to have a roof over my head" HL
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Who are our clients?
IAG are the biggest underwriters of insurance in Australia with 29% of the market.
They focus on 4 strategic pillars:
1. Growing with customers
2. Building better businesses
3. Creating value through digital platforms
4. Managing risks
The goal is to be able to retain as many customers during renewal periods.
This allows for financial planning for investment in improving processes, customer service and provide new and innovative products.
Firemark is IAG's Innovation and Venturing Hub
Their focus is to disrupt the insurance industry by challenging the current norms.
They do this by INNOVATION - using new technology, systems, ideas and business models around customer - centric experiences.
Insurance-love it or hate it, most of us have some form of it
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Insurance has been around since the 1830’s and started out as a "community pot" of money that was used for funerals and other disasters.
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Industry is now worth over 76 billion dollars in Australia and is projected to grow to over 98 billion dollars by 2025 (in terms of gross written premiums). Growth is fuelled by post COVID recovery and the increasing effects of climate change.
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The three main types of insurance in Australia are General, Health and Life insurance.
Buying insurance is for peace of mind- it is something that we can control in a life that is full of change and uncertainty.
Introducing
Parametric Insurance
What is Parametric Insurance?
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Select
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Measure
Settle
The customer chooses the trigger event and payout value they want to insure against.
The insurer and customer agree on the measurements that will fire the trigger.
When the trigger is reached, the insurer pays out, usually within a few days.
How climate change has affected the insurance industry
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Catastrophic losses expected to double every decade
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409 natural disasters worldwide in 2019 equivalent to US$ 71 billion
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Has led to an increase in claims and increase in premiums
How Parametric Insurance differs from traditional insurance
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FLEXIBILITY - you can choose what you want to be covered for
NO INVESTIGATION NECESSARY - the event is verified by a 3rd party
FASTER PAYOUTS - as there no formal assessment, payout is made within a week.
Parametric Insurance solutions ARE NOT designed to replace but to COMPLEMENT traditional insurance programs.
So what do people REALLY think about insurance??
We had to ask people to find out!
Surveys
We needed some quantitative data around who bought insurance and what types of insurance people felt were important to them.
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We sent out a survey and received 40 responses
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The majority of people did not know anything about Parametric Insurance. We created a document with a simple, concise explanation about it and then asked our survey participants the final few questions.
What did our users say?
Quite a lot, actually....
User Interviews
From our secondary research and results from our survey, we created a discussion plan with questions around 3 areas of investigation:
We interviewed 20 people to better understand motivations and behaviours of people who use insurance.
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buying insurance
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pain points while using insurance.
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thoughts about parametric insurance.
Making sense of the data using affinity mapping
Data synthesis highlighted the main issues and benefits of Insurance from the perspective of the user.
Actual scenarios from our user interviews
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Helen had her car broken into, and her laptop had been stolen.
She called her insurance company, but they said that it is not included in her car insurance.
The problem is that it WASN'T CLEAR what her insurance did or did not cover.
Her TRUST is broken.
The insurance that she thought she had was NOT what she actually paid for.
Helen was in the vicinity of a bushfire that was raging nearby.
The smell of smoke was everywhere- her carpets, clothing and cupboards.
In the time of need, she wanted to see if her insurance company could help her out.
Thankfully she was covered for SMOKE but NOT for fire. If there was fire damage, she would not have been covered.
She THOUGHT she was covered.
This was a LOOPHOLE..
One day it rained- a lot.
Her house was flooded
so she called her insurance company.
She found out AFTER the event that the best the insurance company could do was to buy a can of paint because the TYPE of gutters on her roof was NOT covered.
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It is clear from these 3 scenarios,
that due to a perceived
lack of transparency and loopholes in insurance policies
has led to a distrust of insurance overall.
Thanks to Kyle Wilson for the brilliant graphics!
Key takeaways from our user interviews
People buy insurance for peace of mind, security of finance and security for their future
Over 60% of our users highlighted transparency of information was a pain point. Loopholes and lack of clarity in policy information leads to an overall lack of trust of the insurance industry.
When purchasing insurance, our users looked for easy quotation process, how much they can claim, looked for advice from others, and reputation of the company.
All users expressed that Parametric insurance was a valuable form of insurance and they would consider buying it IF they lived in a high-risk area.
Where to from here?
Based on the information we had from the business and our user data, we made a few decisions as to the next steps:
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we were not going to focus on pricing and payment as we were unable to obtain this information from the business
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focus was going to be on the WAY the information about Quickcover was going to be communicated
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investigate what best practise in this industry looks like and apply it to Quickcover
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a single Persona is all that is required
Meet Helen.....
We also needed to understand the Helen's emotional journey...
We found that there were a couple of pain points in the journey that we needed to solve for.
The renewal and the discovery phase needs simplified information
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The claims process needs to be streamlined.
We were not investigating claims and payments so we focussed on the first pain point which was renewal and the discovery.
Defining the key problem.
"Helen, who lives in a high-risk area, needs transparent insurance information because she wants to have peace of mind knowing her home and family are protected in the event of an emergency."
What does transparent mean?
Based on our insights, we could define what transparency means for Helen:
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To have all information in one place
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No fine print or scrolling to another page for further information.
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To have clear statements about what and what is NOT covered by the insurance plan.
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Clarity, not only for the insurance policy itself but the insurance industry as a whole.
“Insurance is a bitter pill, this is a chance to make it a bit sweeter” KW
How do we know this is true??
We found examples of best practise from Google and product reviews.
The metrics that were used in the rating system included transparency, value for money, customer service and claim approvals. Interestingly, these are the same reasons that were brought up in our user interviews-so there is a common theme here about what customers look for in insurance.
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Brands such as NRMA and SGIO received far less approval ratings than best practise such as local insurer Honey and Lemonade from the US. We can see that there is a distinct correlation between the ease of information and transparency and the star rating and user approval.
So How Might We help Helen?
HMW provide Helen with transparent and concise information so that she can purchase a plan that gives her peace of mind in an event of an emergency?
Knowing that best practise is all about providing transparent information, our ideation phase began and we found that our focus was more about how we could visually and descriptively do this using UI and UX copy.
Focusing the problem:
Hypothesis
"We believe that Helen will be able to purchase a parametric insurance policy with confidence if the information provided is transparent and concise.
We will know this to be true when Helen renews her insurance policy with the addition of Quickcover."
Which features do we need?
We knew that our solution was about the way the information was displayed on a responsive website.
Branding was given to us by Firemark fonts, colours, logo and name of policy which was Quickcover.
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UI and UX copy are the MVPs!
Language is the primary interface. It's the verbal UI.
UX copy needs to be:
It also has to be concise and to the point:
Transparent
Emotive
Relatable
Iconography and simple illustrations are used because they make information more accessible and transparent- this is what Helen wants!
The best in the business were no longer using stock images- tailored and unique illustrations were the trend.
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Ratings from Google reviews
Helen's journey for renewal and discovery of Quickcover
We have illustrations, new brand assets and an idea of how we were going to communicate this- before we start designing the flow, we had to outline the journey Helen would take from renewing her old policy to discovering the new Quickcover.
Based on this storyboarded task-flow:
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We created low fidelity wireframes
We tested the paper prototypes with 6 users
Made iterations to the high-fi wireframes
Conducted 2 more rounds of testing with a total of 14 people
Linking it all together-interactive prototype
How do we measure success?
Google Heart matrix!
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Helen is able to purchase Quickcover upon renewal of her home and contents insurance
Increased uptake of the Quickcover insurance and it's addition to current home insurance
Reduced churn and increased loyalty to business
The Roadmap
Key Learnings
Key Takeaways
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It's a big advantage to have a team that has strengths that reflect the different aspects of the UX process- eg. research, UI. It makes the process run efficiently if everyone is confident in what they are doing.
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Successful stakeholder management is dependant on a clear outline in the discovery phase - this includes expectations, communications and roles
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It's important to play to your strengths and it's ok that you may not be as proficient in something as someone else!​
Did we solve the problem?
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We believe that through our research, synthesis, ideation and prototype, we were able to reach the business goals of validating the desirability of Quickcover.
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We also provided proof of concept of selling insurance in an easy and transparent way will increase renewal rates and increase loyalty of customers like Helen.
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The insurance industry desperately needs an image overhaul. By providing transparent information, there will be an increase in customer loyalty and retention and everyone, including the business, achieves peace of mind.