Insurance Claims Process
A full redesign of the claims process, updating it to a purely online experience.
Challenge
New business clients expect to be able to handle all of their insurance related needs over the web. The current system is heavily reliant on over the phone communications.
Solution
Create a digital claims process that a new client would be able to easily navigate and use without the need of direct communications with a customer service rep.
Duration: 3 months
Methods: User Testing, Low and high fidelity product testing, Journey Mapping, Prototyping
Tools: Adobe XD, Several journey mapping tools
Journey Mapping
Before perusing a revamp of our claims process, we first needed to understand what project would have greatest impact on our clients overall experience with the company. As I was new to the world of insurance, I decided to approach this challenge through collaboration with other departments.
I decided it would be beneficial to meet with team members from each of the major areas, gathering information on what ways clients interacted with that department. In these meetings, I took note of what the typical client journey looked like, what pain points clients had, outlier interactions, and estimates on how many clients traveled through each journey.
This process had the added benefit of building trust and understanding of what our team was working towards with other employees. As the UX team was the newest team within the company, I thought getting buy-in with other teams would be beneficial for long term success.
Presenting Findings
Using the data obtained from meeting with the other depts, several journey maps were creating illustrating the major and outlier interaction paths that clients had with us. I presented these journey maps to our leadership team. It was then decided that a digital revamp to our claims process would have the greatest benefit to our clients needs.
Research
There were two major areas of focus for research on this project, competitors already in this space and client sentiment from our customer service reps.
Through a combination of researching reviews and doing our own testing, we determined that Geico, Progressive, and State Farm were leaders in the digital insurance space.
Our customer service reps were the main point of contact, outside of their agent, for communications with us. As such, they had the best overall understanding of our clients complaints and praises.
This in combination with Customer Journey maps we already created, lead us into our first round of low fidelity user testing.
Low Fidelity User Testing
Low fidelity user testing was conducted in person. This would begin by calling clients that fit a specific user persona that we wanted to test. If a client agreed to meeting with us, a public place, most commonly a coffee shop, would be determined for the meeting.
User testing meetings would take anywhere from 30mins to an hour depending on the clients comfortably in giving feedback. Topics discussed would include:
Commonly used online experiences,
If they preferred talking to a person or using an online resource,
Other online insurance experiences they have had.
We would end these meeting with the low fidelity test which consisted of physical representations of an online experience (pictured here). We would give them abundance of options to create their ideal online experience and allow them to choose what they preferred and where on the “page” these elements would appear.
Digital Prototype
After looking over the in-person user testing, common trends became apparent throughout many of our clients designs. We took these ideas and, along with feedback from customer service reps, created a digital prototype.
We then conducted more user testing sessions in person with clients to get a feel for how they used the site, if there were any pain points in the system, and if we left out any experiences that the clients expected.
Design to Dev
In the end, a 60+ screen prototype was passed to the development team outlining the entirety of this new claims experience.
Challenges
As a smaller company, much of the claims process was done over the phone. There was a worry from the customer service team that this new journey path would result in fewer needed customer service team members.
To help reassure the customer service team, we brought them into the process and showed where they would still be needed and how this new system would affect their role.As the newest team at our company, many people were skeptical of the practical use of having a UX team.
By meeting with team members from each of the areas, we were able to foster a culture of working together for the benefit of the client. This quickly built buy-in from other depts. and allowed us to test new processes that would be beneficial for the client experience.
Accomplishments
Conducted 75+ user testing sessions both over the phone and in-person.
Created journey maps for several user personas.
Prototyped a fully digital claims experience.
Lessons
Learned how to conduct unbiased user testing.
Developed journey mapping and UX design skills.