<b>By: Ann-Karina Fly-Hansen, Head of Customer Digitalisation at Alka Charlotte Marie Hermann, Tia’s lead UX Designer </b>

<b>Tia’s lead UX Designer and the Head of Customer Digitalisation at Alka Insurance share their experience creating digital claims journeys, including how to create a connected, holistic customer experience. Find out what they believe is best practice and how the ability to tweak the customer journey in real time can make the difference.</b>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Insurers all over the world are working to create a digital claim solution that makes life easier for their customers – at a time when they really need to stand out from the crowd. The challenge for many insurers is twofold: firstly, traditional corporate silos make it difficult to provide a holistic digital claim experience; and secondly, business users often need to rely on IT to make any changes to the claims journey, making it impossible to react promptly to user needs. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Denmark’s award-winning digital insurer Alka knows why it’s important to break these silos and put the customer at the centre of everything they do. Today they work in agile cross-functional teams and place a UX designer on each one, to make sure the customer’s perspective is never forgotten as they develop new digital claims solutions. This approach helped earn them an award in 2018 for best digital solution for their made-to-fit self-service solutions for web, tablet and mobile.</span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">But how do UX designers work and how can they help insurers overcome the second challenge of having to rely on IT to serve the customer better? Charlotte Marie Hermann (a.k.a. CM), Tia’s lead UX Designer, sat down with Ann-Karina Fly-Hansen (a.k.a. AK), Head of Customer Digitalisation at Alka, to compare notes on how to achieve an excellent digital claims experience. They came up with these six best practices:</span>

<b>1.Go beyond customer journey – think ‘holistic customer experience’ </b>

<b>AK: <span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s been several years since we at Alka began putting the customer at the centre of our development. When we started, we focused on the customer journey and on our digital touchpoints. Today we have turned our focus to the entire 360° customer experience. That includes much more than our digital touchpoints – it includes the entire experience the customer has whenever they interact with or even think about us. </span></b>

<b><i>CM: </i></b><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">And that’s what UX design is all about – it covers the entire process of acquiring or integrating a product, including aspects of accessibility, usability and function. As a UX designer for software, I care not only about making the software easy to use, but first and foremost, I need to make sure the solution actually addresses the needs of the user in the first place. That’s the ‘Why’ part of UX design. If we miss this, we are just designing in a vacuum and no one will care how smooth or pleasant the experience is. That’s the first step to creating a successful digital claim experience.</span></i><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></i>

<img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-140831" src="https://www.cover.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/Screenshot-2019-11-28-at-16.12.56.png" alt="" width="416" height="153" />

<b>2. Work in agile teams with a UX designer on each one</b>

<b>AK: <span style="font-weight: 400;">One of the biggest changes we made in the past few years was to organise ourselves into agile teams with developers, business-function specialists and at least one UX designer on each team. In that way, the customer perspective is always represented, and we can make sure that we don’t do anything that doesn’t match the user needs. We can see that this approach results in better, more effective solutions than we achieved just a few years ago. </span></b>

<b><i>CM: </i></b><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">That is really commendable, Ann-Karina. (Of course, I would say that as a UX designer). Before my Tia career, I saw many solutions fall to the floor because the customer perspective was forgotten somewhere along the development process. This is a common pitfall, but easily avoided with a UX designer on every development team. </span></i>

<b>3. Understand your customer – always ask questions</b>

<b>AK: <span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s strange to even think about now, but the insurance industry does not have a long history of putting the customer first. It has had an inside-out approach and even its own language. The start of any design process should begin with making sure you understand the customer and how to communicate on their terms. </span></b>

<b><i>CM: </i></b><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Our UX designers do a lot of research on the end user, from dialogue with our customers, end users and focus groups, to remote testing of prototypes. We gather both quantitative and qualitative data that we can use to shape our digital solutions. We are constantly asking ourselves: </span></i>

<ul>

<li style="font-weight: 400;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">What do the customers need? </span></i></li><li style="font-weight: 400;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">What are their pain points? </span></i></li><li style="font-weight: 400;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">What are we trying to solve? </span></i></li>

</ul>

<i><span style="font-weight: 400;">For example, we test our solutions with different users, from randomly selected consumers to internal consultants who know our technology. In all cases, we observe how they interact with the solutions, where their eyes are drawn, how they interpret the questions, and hear their thoughts as they navigate the flow. This gives us instant feedback about what they expect and it’s a great way to get to know our users. </span></i>

<b>4. Create an emotional connection </b>

<b><i>CM: </i></b><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Insurers are relying more on automated processes to save time and money. Unfortunately, they too often forget to implement some kind of human connection into their automated flows. This can be done quite easily with chatbots. In the claims journey proto-types we tested, we found that users were happy to get a “human-like” experience with chatbots. They know they are not interacting with a human, but they don’t care, as long as the feeling it creates is that the insurer cares about what’s happening on the claimant’s side. </span></i>

<b>AK: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">That is certainly our experience as well. We recently launched a digital auto claims process where all the customer needs to do is register their first notice of loss online. Our customers love it. It has a modern mobile design and a chatbot helps the customer file the claim. The rest is handled automatically between the auto repair shop and Alka’s insurance systems. The customer gets great service and a smooth, efficient claim process, and Alka is seen as an empathetic company – largely because of the chatbot’s personal touch. </span>

<b>5. Capture customer feedback</b>

<b>AK: <span style="font-weight: 400;">At Alka, we are relying on data from our customers to help us shape solutions. By continuously analysing this data with a critical eye, we can get a better understanding of what the user needs. And, every time we put something into production, we immediately start collecting data on how the solution is used. We are also having more frequent dialogues with our customers – just calling them up and asking them about their experience. And we’re currently building a strategy for how to do this more systematically. </span></b>

<b><i>CM: </i></b><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">You can also use analytics tools to collect customer feedback. We are doing this with Tia Claims Journey Designer, our solution that lets business designers create their own customer claims journey. As soon as users register their first notice of loss, the business can trace their actions. Are they getting stuck on a certain part of the flow? Is there a question that is frequently misinterpreted? If so, they can immediately make changes to the journey. And, with this solution, they don’t need to wait for IT to make changes to the code – they can make the changes themselves directly in the solution. </span></i>

<b>6. Create new solutions continuously – and keep on reiterating</b>

<b>AK: <span style="font-weight: 400;">If you want frequent feedback, you need to be able to deliver solutions frequently. And for that, you need the right technology as well as an agile organisation. You need a core technology that lets you deploy new solutions on demand and release A/B solutions into the market – each week or every second week, for example. This way you can collect the usability data that leads to solutions your customers will love. </span></b>

<b><i>CM: </i></b><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Agreed. The beauty of working with digital solutions is precisely that you can reiterate again and again as soon as you have user data that indicates a change is needed. When we designed the Tia Claims Journey Designer, we made it possible to reiterate the journey as often as necessary. The same should apply to any customer-facing digital solution. Adapt them frequently based on user feedback and customer demands. Then you can use everything you’ve learned to keep creating new digital solutions that serve customers better online. </span></i>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">Creating an excellent digital claims journey is central to a holistic customer experience, and central to any insurer’s ability to compete in today’s self-service driven market. With an agile approach to development that’s centred around UX, Alka has proven it’s possible to continuously create unique solutions that draw new customers in. By focusing on solutions that remove dependency on IT and empower business designers to improve the customer journey, your insurance business can create a closer connection to its customers and build a foundation for building more engaging digital solutions over time. </span>

<span style="font-weight: 400;">To discuss your digital claims journey and how to improve your customer experience, please reach out to Product Owner Mette Grubert at </span><a href="mailto:mgb@tiatechnology.com"><span style="font-weight: 400;">\mgb@tiatechnology.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span>