Quickly fixing insurance’s issues to move people from browse to buy

Challenge: The dreaded information re-submit

Few things are more frustrating than typing in your details again and again. To ensure online customers can check out first time, every time, LV= looked for a way to resolve struggles rapidly.

Technologies like smart homes and driverless cars are maturing fast, and the insurance industry is bracing itself for a far-reaching transformation. As automatic safeguards become common in daily life, we won’t need many types of insurance products popular today. And to get ahead of an evolving market, leading providers are starting on a journey to become nimbler and more responsive to their customers’ needs.

This was a key aim for LV=, one of the UK’s leading providers of car, home and travel insurance, as well as protection and retirement products.

Matthew Harris, Digital Analytics Manager at LV=, takes up the story: “Within the next decade, we see that there will be major changes to the insurance industry in the UK and around the world. Whatever form these changes take, it’s clear that the organizations that best understand their customers will be in the strongest position to succeed.

“Consumer expectations and preferences have changed remarkably in recent years, both in terms of how people shop for insurance and how they want to be covered. For example, the exploding popularity of insurance aggregator sites and smartphones mean that customers demand the ability to search, compare and buy a policy any time and from any device. In fact, more than two thirds of our sales now originate on the digital channel. Similarly, many customers increasingly prefer personalized, short-term insurance products that mirror the speed, convenience and flexibility of services from online retailers.”

He continues: “To achieve our goal of becoming the UK’s most trusted insurer, we wanted to enhance customer experiences on the digital channel. This meant answering questions such as: ‘How can we use mobile more effectively?’ ‘How can we make it easier to purchase insurance?’ and most importantly, ‘How can we build life-long relationships with our customers?’”

Solution: Automate the discovery of issues

LV= uses customer experience analytics to uncover sticking points on its sites automatically and in real time, enabling it to find the root of issues and fix them in as little as one hour.

Like many leading insurance companies, LV= had relied for many years on call recording in the contact center to pinpoint ways to improve the customer journey. To realize its vision for the digital channel, the company has embraced an automated approach to customer experience analytics — enabling it to identify sticking points in online and mobile journeys in real time.

“Our customer experience team and contact center personnel both rely on insights from our customer experience analytics solution,” says Harris. “If a customer has difficulty with a certain area of one of our sites, our contact center can replay their exact journey on the screen at the touch of a button, just as if they were sitting next to the customer — making it far faster and easier to spot the problem and help the customer solve it.

“These insights are also invaluable from a site design and usability perspective. By combining customer experience data with other sources of information such as satisfaction surveys and clickstream data, we can build up a detailed picture of how customers are moving through our sites. This means that we can compare the way we intended customers to use a particular feature with actual, real-world behavior, and make adjustments to help them explore our products more easily.”

LV= is also using customer experience analytics in other areas of the business — enabling data-driven decision-making to deliver commercial benefits.

“We see that customer experience analytics is about more than making it easier for our customers to interact with our desktop and mobile sites,” explains Harris. “As well as enhancing site navigation and usability, we are gaining immediate alerts about technical issues that might be preventing customers from purchasing online.”

He continues: “Our customer-centric approach extends far beyond our digital teams. Our revenue protection personnel use the solution to trigger alerts that help them to investigate potentially illicit transactions, and our audit team sees great benefit in the comprehensive traceability it delivers right down to the level of individual customer transactions.

“Even our B2B2C partners — particularly our network of insurance brokers — are interested in using our analytics capabilities to better understand the root causes of friction points on their own sites.”

Results: Assuring positive insurance experiences

With deep, timely insight into customer experiences on the digital channel, LV= is well placed to meet the challenges of an evolving marketplace.

“With traditional user experience testing, you have to draw your conclusions from a very small sample, usually fewer than 10 people,” explains Harris. “We can now draw on the collective experiences of thousands of customers using our websites to shape customer journeys that are quick and easy to complete.”

He continues: “Our digital channel is a very significant contributor to our total revenues, and it’s important that we get every customer interaction on our websites right. We use automated alerts to highlight parts of our websites that may not be working correctly — for example, if we’ve seen no sales on a certain area of the site for a set amount of time. This is particularly important for our insurance aggregators, which are a valuable source of customer visits.

“Recently, we detected an error that impacted around 25 percent of our digital customers — and within just one hour, we were able to trace back the root cause of the fault to one of our servers and restore normal service.”

By building an automated approach to customer experience management, LV= can now reach out to help customers who have struggled online to complete their journeys.

“We pioneered a logic-driven solution we developed internally that helps us use human intervention to ensure that every customer has a positive experience of our service,” adds Harris.

“For example, if a customer attempts to complete a payment but their bank card is rejected due to a technical issue with the payment processing system, the event bus automatically forwards the details to our contact center. Our personnel can then call the customer directly to offer them a discount, and ask if they would like to complete the transaction over the phone instead. At peak periods, we send our customers a text message asking if they would like us to call them back as soon as one of our operatives is available. These personal touches are not just lifting our conversion rates — they nurture life-long customer loyalty.”

Harris concludes: “The insurance industry is beginning to change, and we believe that understanding the customer experience is the vital first step to preparing for the evolution of the marketplace. Thanks to our automated approach to customer behavior analytics, we are making it easier for customers to do business with us on any channel — driving our sales and keeping us at the front of customers’ minds.”

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