Motor Claims Project

I worked as the UX Designer in a cross-functional agile team that pioneered the UK’s first end-to-end, fully integrated digital claims experience.

It was launched as part of Direct Line Group’s Churchill brand, one of the most well-known insurers in the UK. As a result of its success, it is now being developed for Direct Line Group’s Privilege and Direct Line brands. Additionally, it helped secure a multi-million pound contract with a key partner - Motability.

Timeline

Business Objectives and Requirements Gathering

To improve the claims process, it was crucial to gain a comprehensive understanding of the previous claims journey. This would help identify useful elements for customers and align business requirements with customer needs.

  • Workshops with stakeholders: Conducted sessions to understand business requirements.

  • Collaboration with call handlers and subject matter experts (SME’s): Worked with call centre handlers and SME’s to grasp the existing claims process and identify problems.

  • Testing the existing online claims journey: Analysed the current journey to pinpoint customer frustrations.

  • Customer interviews: Engaged with customers to understand their expectations from an online claims journey.

  • Customer insights: Partnered with the Customer Insights Team to gather feedback on the current process and identify improvement areas.

  • Data analysis: Studied the data around most frequent claim types.

  • Engineer consultations: Discussed technical constraints and limitations with engineers early in the process to help inform our approach.

This comprehensive discovery phase ensured that the team fully understood both customer and business needs, setting a strong foundation for improving the claims process.

Initial Requirements Gathering and Discovery Work

To improve the claims process, it was crucial to gain a comprehensive understanding of the previous claims journey. This would help identify useful elements for customers and align business requirements with customer needs.

  • Workshops with stakeholders: Conducted sessions to understand business requirements.

  • Collaboration with call handlers and subject matter experts (SME’s): Worked with call centre handlers and SME’s to grasp the existing claims process and identify problems.

  • Testing the existing online claims journey: Analysed the current journey to pinpoint customer frustrations.

  • Customer interviews: Engaged with customers to understand their expectations from an online claims journey.

  • Customer insights: Partnered with the Customer Insights Team to gather feedback on the current process and identify improvement areas.

  • Data analysis: Studied the data around most frequent claim types.

  • Engineer consultations: Discussed technical constraints and limitations with engineers early in the process to help inform our approach.

This comprehensive discovery phase ensured that the team fully understood both customer and business needs, setting a strong foundation for improving the claims process.

Analysing the findings

The previous online claims form, provided by a third-party, proved to be both an average customer experience and ineffective for the business. Here are some of the issues identified:

  • High costs: The third-party form was expensive to use.

  • Lack of personalisation: Customers were frustrated that they had to re-enter information that they thought their insurer should already have. Pre-populating this data would improve their experience.

  • Manual intervention: After submission, human intervention was required to input information into the claims management system. This was time-consuming.

  • No immediate decision on fault: Customers did not receive an immediate decision on who was to blame for the incident and they would need to be contacted.

  • Lack of additional services: The form did not offer any additional services, such as whether the customer wanted a hire car, as part of their online claim.

  • Lack of empathy: The process lacked an empathetic approach to customer needs.

  • Poor intuitiveness: The form was not user-friendly or intuitive.

This analysis highlighted the areas for improvement in creating a more efficient and customer-centric online claims process.

Aims of the new product

The redesigned claims journey aimed to achieve the following:

  • Pre-populated policy information: Pre-populate information we already had about the customer.

  • Mapping of online claim directly into claim centre: By taking the customers claim and mapping the information directly into our claims management system, this would remove the need for the information to be re-entered by a human.

  • Reassuring and easy-to-understand language: The average reading age in the UK is 9-11 years. The language would need to be clear and understandable, offering reassurance to the customer.

  • Transparent process expectations: Clearly explain the claims process upfront to manage customer expectations.

  • Immediate fault decision: Provide customers with a decision on who was at fault for the incident.

  • Customer acknowledgement: Ensure customers feel heard and understood throughout the process.

  • Enhanced services: Integrated additional services relevant to each claim scenario.

Mapping out the possible

Before diving into specific sections, it was crucial to visualise the entire end-to-end journey from the customer’s perspective. Since each claim has unique circumstances, a flow was needed that would accommodate various incident types.

Process overview:

  • Initial mapping: This consisted of looking at the main entry points into the journey and then the main sections including when, where and what happened. This initial mapping was done using InVision, and later Figjam. It was important to start with the highest frequency claim types, before looking at the less frequent claim types and exceptions.

  • Holistic Integration: Mapping each part of the journey and understanding their integration with each other was key to creating a seamless claims experience for the customer. This holistic view ensured consistency throughout the process.

Tools and techniques:

I created low-fidelity wireframes and prototypes using design tools such as Figma, Sketch and Axure. These wireframes supported:

  • Facilitating stakeholder workshops: Engagement with stakeholders to gather insights and feedback.

  • Explore multiple approaches: Considered various ways to design the customer flow.

  • Test with customers: Conducted user testing to validate and refine the journey.

Research

Having our own UX research suite in-house and access to tools such as UserZoom, meant that this new product could be informed by research at each stage. This included:

  • Usability testing of legacy forms: Identifying customer pain points to address in the new design.

  • Early concept testing: Evaluating initial end-to-end journey concepts with customers, focusing on the most frequent claim types.

  • Customer feedback: Collecting insights via YouGov and UserZoom to refine language clarity and user experience.

  • Click tests: Ensuring the journey was discoverable and user-friendly.

  • Usability testing: Conducting both moderated and unmoderated testing on specific sections of the journey, as well as end-to-end testing.

  • Testing Accessibility: Prioritising testing with participants with physical and neurological impairments.

Each testing phase involved planning, analysis of the results, and feedback to stakeholders.

Performance and future enhancements

Since its launch, the new claims product has achieved outstanding results:

  • 97% customer accuracy rate in customers correctly reporting their claims

  • 17-point increase in Customer Effort Score (CES)

  • 22-point increase in Net Promoter Score (NPS)

  • 94% of customers accepting who was at fault for the incident

  • 92% conversion rate for customers using recommended garage to repair their vehicle

Due to its success, the product is now being expanded across all Direct Line Group brands.

The next step for the online motor claims journey is to focus on enhancements based on customer feedback, including simplifying photo and evidence submissions.

What Churchill customers are saying…

“Very smooth process and easy to understand for someone who has never had to do it before.”

“Clear and concise instructions and options and pictures as examples.”

Challenges

There were many challenges to overcome throughout this project including:

  • Telephony versus digital: Handling claims over the phone was inherently conversational, with handlers skilled at extracting necessary information in a friendly manner. Transitioning to a digital claims journey introduced the risk of losing this personalised touch. The goal was to strike a balance between between our journey offering reassurance and empathy to the customer, without sounding insincere.

  • Business constraints: Certain claim types necessitated asking specific questions to determine liability in incidents. While these questions were crucial for business purposes, they often seemed unusual to customers. For instance, questions like "Did your car roll back?" were necessary to ascertain fault in rear-end collisions but could be confusing to the customer. Efforts were made to explain the need for such information but achieving this required extensive collaboration with design, fraud prevention, and legal teams to find a solution that maintained this balance.