A new hub for customers to track and manage their claims

The task was to design and build a customer facing, brand new hub for all Direct Line Group owned brands, which would allow customers to find out information about their car claims.

Why?

To reduce phone calls post claim.

To allow customers who want to go online the ability to do so to find out what is happening with their claim.

My Role

Research and Discovery

Stakeholder management

Wireframing & Prototyping

Workshop facilitation

User-flow Mapping

Research and Discovery

I wanted to learn what customers call about..

Understanding the Claims Process

HOW DID I GO ABOUT IT?

Q&A sessions with subject matter experts.

Reviewed data on the most frequent claim types.

Call listening to claims reported over the telephone to understand what types of questions we would need to ask in our online claims journey.

Observations with call-handlers to see how they entered this information into the system.

Visits to garages and technology centres to learn about vehicle damage and repairs.

Competitive Benchmarking

HOW DID WE COMPARE?

Working with global research consultancy Lumivo, we were able to identify that Direct Line Group were above average, but behind two of our leading competitors; Admiral and Aviva.

WHAT WERE THE CUSTOMER PAIN-POINTS?

Customer frustrations included:

Asking for information the customer didn’t know.

Asking the customer for information twice.

An unclear navigation

The form was too long.

Getting close to our customers

WHAT WERE THE CUSTOMERS’ NEEDS?

To learn more abut our customers I reviewed the following information:

Customer demographics

Customer vulnerabilities

Existing customer survey feedback

Customer pain-points from the call listening I conducted.

Using this information, I created customer personas to help bring stakeholders closer to our customers.

Customer pain-points in the online claim form and recommendations

Through interviews and moderated usability sessions. it was possible to see that there were some issues with the existing form.

  • Customers were frustrated that they had to enter information that they felt their insurance company should already have, such as their policy number.

    Recommendation:

  • The process lacked reassuring and empathetic language.

  • It was not clear to the customer where they could find certain information, such as their policy number.

  • The form lacked information around how long the claim process would take or how far through the form the customer was.

Recommendations

User-Flow Mapping

To visualise the end-to-end claims experience, it was necessary to identify the key pieces of information we needed to gather.

I was supported by the business analyst and subject matter expert to map out the end-end journey at a basic level. It needed to be a flow that would work for the majority of claim types.

I was able to start gathering the information we needed to capture from the customer for each section of the journey, as well as the information for specific claim types.

Our first release would be claims for single vehicle accident, which is where only the customers vehicle had been involved in an accident.

Therefore initially, we focused on this particular type of claim and through workshops with stakeholders were able to flesh out the information that we needed to ask the customer in order for them to have sufficient information to process the claim.

Example of User flow-mapping from the claim type Single Vehicle Accident.

Wireframing and Prototyping

I used low-fidelity wireframes for quick comprehension testing, but also to incorporate some feedback from stakeholders.

Throughout the design of the claims journey, I utilised the platform userzoom for surveys, usability testing and click testing.

In the damage section of the claims journey, I launched multiple surveys to understand how the customer would categorise images of damage to cars and whether there was common language used by customers.

This helped identify common language used to describe damage to vehicles.

High-fidelity designs

Research fed into the designs…

Comparing the identified pain points in the existing claims form vs new one.

I would split up the sections on the right and give them each their own page?

  • When customers signed in to make a claim, we were able to pre-populate their policy information.

  • Understanding that the average reading age in the UK is 9-11 years old, we used clear and understandable language, offering reassurance to the customer.

    • Informed customers upfront how long the claim would take and what they would need.

    • Made customers aware what information they would need before starting their claim.

    • Progress displayed throughout claim.

    • Kept customers informed about what would happen after they submitted their claim.

    • Summary screens at the end of each section to give the customer the option to review information before submitting.

    • Confirmation screens to let the customer know the information has been saved.

    • Although I kept the journey simple with a one question one page approach, insights from the customer insight team told us that customers wanted to feel heard. As a result, it was important to give the customer additional free text boxes to explain what happened in their own words.

What’s the latest with the new online claims journey?

After the initial launch of single vehicle accident only, we went live with the majority of other claim types… Since its launch, the new claims product has achieved:

  • 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.

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 large contract with a key partner Motability, who have now adopted this claims form.

What customers are saying…

“The online forms were simple and intuitive and there were a lot of meaningful onscreen prompts and info.”

—Churchill customer

“Easy to follow instructions and it really walked me through the whole process from start to finish.”

— Churchill customer

Future Improvements

List of optimisations from usability testing including progress tracker (at bottom).

.From both usability sessions and post-claim survey feedback, many customers have photographs and video evidence which they want to upload as part of their claim. At the moment, the journey does not have the functionality to do this. Photo and evidence submissions are currently on the enhancement list for the project.

At present, the application has a progress tracker, but it is limited in the information it provides to the customer. It currently only shows progress dots and does not inform the customer of the current section they are on. There is still work to do to optimise this progress tracker and provide more useful information to the customer.

Project challenges

A big challenge was the business constraints we were working within. 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.

We made efforts to transparently 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.

Had to ask certain questions - fraud legal etc.

Could mention high turnover of staff - PO’s, developers etc.