Customer Experience in the insurance world

There’s no doubt that you should offer your customers a good customer experience these days. Because the customer experience is an important instrument to strengthen customer loyalty. But how do you do that for such unpopular and interchangeable products as insurance, which nobody likes to deal with?

What is the customer experience?

The customer experience is the sum of the experiences a customer makes with a company. While it is difficult to gain customers through a good customer experience, it helps to retain customers over time. In this respect, the customer experience has become a "must" in marketing.

How exactly does that look like for Getsafe? When I ask others to give me some examples for a good customer experience, I never get examples from the insurance industry. The customer experience isn’t (sufficiently) focused here yet.

Why is it like that?

In my experience, the customer experience is always neglected when the customer has a poor negotiating position. In the energy industry, for example, there was a monopoly for many decades, so the customer couldn’t choose an electricity or gas supplier. With the opening of the electricity and gas market, an energy supplier suddenly had 700 competitors. A good customer journey became an important competitive advantage.

In the insurance sector, however, the problem was not the lack of liberalisation, but rather the lack of clarity and transparency of offers. This changed with digitalisation and the introduction of new comparison portals (e.g. Check24).

At the same time, only a few customers want to go deeper into insurance. It is an "annoying evil", not a sexy product. Often referred to as a "commodity", in other words an exchangeable, arbitrary product. For this reason, price is often the decisive purchasing argument.

In order to free themselves from the price spiral, more and more companies and especially Insurtechs are now focusing on an excellent customer experience. The latter is also relevant because customers from other sectors are used to a very good customer experience and (rightly!) transfer these expectations to insurance companies.

Customer experience at Getsafe

A good customer experience is therefore a clear competitive advantage. And that's why we're working hard to improve that customer experience. We see ourselves as a companion to our customers, helping them to protect what they care most about in life. But one thing at a time.*

#1 Getsafe target customers

Our target group are young adults between the ages of 18 and 35, the so-called "millennials". They grew up with smartphones and do almost everything mobile. So it goes without saying that we focus on offering our customers a simple and fully digital experience without paperwork. Our customers can take out an insurance online in three minutes, extend or downgrade their protection with just a few clicks, view and change their data anytime and anywhere, or report a claim via chatbot in the app. Customer journey is completely digital - for all customers and for all products. This is still unthinkable for many traditional insurers.

The basis for this is a digital insurance platform that allows us to collect a large amount of data about the entire customer journey. We have more than 100 data points for each customer. These include device data, app usage data, location data and sensor data. This data is complemented by further quantitative and qualitative data from surveys, user tests and focus groups and helps us to break down the heterogeneous target group of millennials into segments and to individually design customer journey.

#2 The customer comes first

Flexibility is extremely important to our target customers. For this reason, we make sure that our customers can reach their goals within the shortest possible time in just a few steps. If, for example, a customer has moved in with his partner and wants to insure his partner in his liability insurance, all he has to do is (1) open the app, (2) click on the protection tab, (3) select the "Family" module, (4) enter missing information and (5) check the box. Protection will then be activated the next day. The whole process takes less than two minutes.

Focusing on the customer also means enabling them to manage their affairs when they fit into their daily lives and not when they fall into our core working hours. Therefore, customers can use the app around the clock to do many things themselves, such as extend or reduce insurance coverage in real time, report claims, submit invoices, change personal data or cancel insurance.

Claims management is of particular importance here. This often determines how satisfied the customer is. For this reason, it is important to us not only to make the process fast, but also very transparent. This way, the customer always knows where he is in the process and understands even if we are unable to settle a claim. Our internal customer satisfaction analyses show that the recommendation rate ("NPS") is 50% higher if customers already had to file a claim.

Finally, at Getsafe, we work hard to ensure that the customer experience feels smooth and consistent. Although we are a start-up, the customer also has contact with many different departments at Getsafe - from the initial contact to the conclusion of the contract to the notification of damage or termination. That's why we work across teams to improve customer journey.

#3 Personal interaction is everything

No interaction is the same at Getsafe because we use existing data to individualize communication with our customers. For example, we have developed personas for the most important customer segments that help us to tailor our central customer journeys to customer needs. Data helps us to better understand our customers and improve our products at the same time.

For example, in the closing process we ask our customers which other products are of interest to them. On the basis of this information, we develop campaigns that automatically send the customer an email after a few days with information on the desired insurance policy if the customer has not yet purchased it in the meantime. Depending on the customer's reaction, another email with further coordinated information will follow. Finally, we send a survey to find out why this customer did not buy the product despite their interest. This feedback helps us to improve or reposition the product.

#4 Testing instead of guessing

At Getsafe it is not always beneficial that we all arel insurance customers ourselves. It's easy to forget that we deal with the subject of insurance every day because of our profession - but our customers don’t. On average, a customer has contact with his insurance company every two years. That's why we regularly conduct customer surveys, user tests and much more! In short cycles we analyse problems, develop ideas and prototypes and then test them with users until we are able to solve the customer problem to their complete satisfaction.

What’s next?

In the future, the intelligent use of data will become even more important for the customer experience. This will further individualize the customer experience across all touch points. Automating all processes and customer interactions is also becoming increasingly important. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the keyword here. With the help of AI, we can better identify and evaluate customers. We have a friendly AI in mind that automatically adjusts the insurance cover when the customer's circumstances change - of course always in consultation with the customer himself and always up to the desired coverage level of existing risks.

And that's not all: in the medium term, we will use our clients' behaviour and data to create better risk profiles. Customers who are trustworthy can then benefit, for example, from lower prices or faster claim processing. Nowadays, on the basis of their profession or a particular place of residence, customers quickly end up in a drawer that does not correspond to their actual risk profile. Artificial intelligence makes insurance much more individual and fair for the community.

*In the meantime, Claire has started new adventures beyond the insurance industry. If you would like to get in touch with her, keep your eyes open on LinkedIn.