Mobile and desktop experiences built for insurance agents to take the complexity out of assisting clients buying insurance
Role & Responsibilities
As the sole designer on the app team, I worked with developers and BAs to design the mobile and desktop experience that streamlines the process of quoting insurance from the agents
Context
Auto Insurance of America (AIA) is a US-based insurance carrier selling automobile insurance in Vermont through a network of independent agents. Ten years ago, AIA started losing business because the agents were complaining that it was easier to quote insurance using competitors’ software. Agents simply were not willing to spend the time to do the quote using AIA’s antiquated mainframe software.
Industry Research
Today’s consumers can be characterized as tech-savvy. They are not only proficient with the use of different technologies, they are shaped by the modern ecosystem that quickly provides information at their fingertips. This generation of consumers are highly sensitive to friction at any point of a transaction, therefore having a simple, transparent, and speedy process is crucial to compete in the market.
According to the 2023 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey which gathered data from over 2,000 CIO respondents with 91 firms from the insurance industry.
Research Insights
- The motivation behind the shift in priorities is driven from the bottom up
- When frontline insurance agents are asked directly about their priorities, the primary goal expressed is to present a proposal to customers as quickly as possible
- However, the same back-office limitations that hinder straight-through processing also hinder the agents ability to achieve their primary goal
Requirements
AIA recognizes the need to “rebrand” themselves in the eyes of their Agents. The first phase is to ensure this new application has a very clean and modern look and feel. In addition, they would also like an injection of creative and technical ideas to help develop a rich vision of what AIA’s portfolio of agent solutions could look like in the future.
Project Goals
The primary task was to create an easy-to-use, responsive, and scalable platform for insurance agents to provide accurate and reliable quotes to their clients. To achieve this, I set the following design goals:
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Create an easy-to-use and modern mobile user interface
Implement paging design in the quote creation process to focus the user on essential information at every turn
Enable the agents to update, edit, and seamlessly share quotes to the customers
Pain Points Identification
Lengthy quoting process
Agents find the current steps to complete the insurance quotes is taking really long time, especially customers who have a big family that needs manual updates to each member’s information.
Prone to mistakes
There is a large room for error when manually entering customer information, and certain data is not always readily available which could result in providing an inaccurate quote.
No ability to find or edit current quotes
Once a quote has created and shared, the agents were not able to easily search their system to retrieve the old quote. The agents were also extremely limited in the ways they could edit different components of the quote, which resulted in multiple quotes being created for a single customer.
Design Challenges
How might the agents provide the most accurate quote to the clients with the least amount of friction?
In order for the agent to get an accurate auto insurance quote, we need to collect about 80+ pieces of information. They also range in difficulty, like the client’s name (which is hopefully easy) to car details like their VIN (which the average person won’t know without having to look it up). In the first version of the app, the goal was to get a user a quote as quick as possible, with little to no friction. That meant defaulting questions and making assumptions on the users’ behalf to get a quote. As great as it was getting a price back after so little work, the quote wasn’t very accurate and time was spent later in the process with the agents.
Research and User Testing:
We’re fortunate enough to work with knowledgeable insurance agents who interact directly with customers. From doing sales interviews, we were able to determine common questions agents asks and move them into the app.
Through user testing, we were able to stress test the difficulty of questions, how many questions became too many (equating to a tedious user experience) and at what point was there any drop-off in the flow. Since we’ve design this version of the app with the ability to easily make edits, we were able to test questions and dynamic flows at a granular level.
Design Systems
We created a design system for all the different components and templates, so we can dynamically display questions for the best user experience. Create a design system for all the different components and templates, so we can dynamically display questions for the best user experience. Create a design system for all the different components and templates, so we can dynamically display questions for the best user experience.
Key Features
Question Flow: Design a quote creation process.
Filling out 10+ questions is really tiresome and it can make users want to abandon the process. Agents also have difficulty listening to the customers on the phone and have to confirm with the customers almost every answers to make sure they don’t make any mistakes. By breaking down the steps to separate screens, it will help agents to communicate the questions thoroughly to the customers.
Dashboard: Design a manager dashboard
For managers, they would like an “at-a-glance” view of agents’ progress towards sales goals embedded in the Agent Pro web app. This is a key opportunity to differentiate AIA from the competition.
The art of the possible
Beyond their rebranding and updated content strategy, AIA wants to keep an eye on the future direction of their industry and what they can do to innovate and stay ahead of the competition.
Agent’s Success Program
In order to motivate agents to achieve their KPIs, this success program utilizes the gamification aspect to help agents keep track of their mission and receive awards when they reach their sales goals.
