How do we stop customers dropping off due to lapsed policies?
The problem 🆘
Every year TAL customer policies have a premium increase at renewal time. This results in
15-18% of TAL insurance customer policies going into an overdue payment status, then lapsing and getting cancelled.
The business goal and opportunity 🏆
TAL brought me on board to help them understand why customers were lapsing and to minimise the percentage of lapses each year. TAL also had budget to create a new self service portal for customers, Financial Advisors, and TAL support staff and they wanted this portal to be part of the solution for reducing lapse rates.
Stakeholder interviews
I began by having conversations with people in the business to better understand their experience with customers, and some of the typical customer behaviours and challenges they had already noticed. Some of the people I spoke to were the...
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Customer Service Team
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Sales Manager
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Marketing and Transformation Leader
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Head of Product
What I found out from...
The customer service team
The customer service team received an excessive amount of calls every year from customers wanting to update their personal details like payments details or address. After getting an understanding from some support staff around what conversations they were having with customers over the phone, I came to the following conclusion:
Customers didn’t know how to access and update their personal details. This meant not only that many customer details weren't up to date, but also that staff and customer time was wasted on phone wait times and lengthy phone calls.
Marketing and Transformation Leader and Head of Product
1. Customers often create new policies with a ‘set and forget’ mindset, meaning once they create their policy, most of the time they don't return to it to update important details like addresses and payment details.
2. Customers only received their correspondence through the mail, not digitally, however many customer addresses weren’t up to date. Correspondence through the mail was the main way they would be notified if they had a policy due for renewal or an overdue payment.
3. The existing platform that advisors use to stay up to date with TAL customer policies focused on new business, like creating quotes, rather than existing business, like overdue payments and policies due for renewal. This meant that:
Many customers weren’t receiving important notices about their policy, such as overdue payments or premium increases
Heuristic evaluation
I started with a heuristic evaluation of the advisor platform as I wanted to see where it was falling short in terms of existing business. Below is a screenshot of a customer policy summary is the only location that the overdue status for a policy is displayed. It takes the user searching for a specific client and then making multiple clicks to locate this page, meaning the portal lacked in efficiency when it came to surfacing important customer information. The hidden policy status left advisors at risk of not assisting their customers before their policies lapsed.
I then conducted a heuristic evaluation of the existing customer portal for TAL customers. I noticed that policies that were due for renewal had no sign posting or notifications at all letting customers know that their premium was about to increase, meaning if they logged on after the policy had been renewed, the premium would suddenly be higher. This, combined with the fact that many customers weren't receiving their renewal statements as correspondence in the mail, meant that they would have no time to prepare for this premium increase.
I also noticed that when a policy has an overdue payment, users are notified of this fact but they aren't notified of the repercussions of not making this payment and how long they have to make it before it lapses. This left customers at risk of not being covered if they didn't pay their premium in the required length of time.
Policy card (policy due for renewal)
Policy card (overdue)
Defining the problem statement
❌ TAL customer policies are lapsing as customers and Financial Advisors don’t have a reliable and clear way to stay up to date with policies, or update policy details.
Solution statement
✅ TAL customers and Financial Advisors need a cohesive digital solution that allows easy access to important policy details, as well as managing customer details.
Prototyping
My next step after defining the problem and solution statement was going into protoyping the customer and advisor portals. These were both very expansive portals with many components that were integral to the reduction of lapse rates, however I'm going to focus on a few key features that I feel really helped to alleviate some of the pain points in the customer journey.
1. The policy summary card
Updated policy card
(policy due for renewal)
Updated policy card
(overdue)
My main goal when prototyping the policy summary card was to ensure that any changes to the policy were clearly highlighted through signposting, and call to actions based on those changes were front and centre. An example of this was my updated version of the policy card in a renewal status. Additionally to the existing premium amount and due date, I've included a set of details that appears at renewal time displaying what the new premium will be, the date this will renew, and a countdown for how many days they have until this takes effect. I've also included a page level alert that is fixed to the top of all the policy pages as the user navigates the policy which lets the user know their policy is due for renewal. This alert provides users with options to view their renewal statement, which gives them a break down of the premium increase, and options to adjust their cover online by applying for specifics discounts or reducing cover etc.
On the overdue card, I've also included a page level alert informing the user that their policy will be cancelled if they don't make a payment within the required amount of time. This remains fixed at the top of the policy across all the pages so they have a better chance at seeing the warning and taking actions. I've also included details about the outstanding balance and how many days they have until the policy is in a lapsed status.
2. Digital correspondence
Customer correspondence
Communication preferences
The second feature I want to highlight that I designed to reduce lapse rates was digital correspondence. Seeing as many customers were not receiving their correspondence in the mail, I created a digital mailing system in the portal. TAL expressed to me that they wanted to start making the move to digital correspondence only, so I also included a communication preferences modal on first log in for customers. This allowed them to toggle between receiving correspondence digitally or post, however if they selected digital, the communication preferences modal would not be available to them again via the portal and if they wanted to change back to post they would have to call to make the switch.
Advisor correspondence
I also created a digital correspondence feature in the advisor portal that allows advisors to search for a specific client, and then see the correspondence that has been sent to that customer. With this feature advisors are able to see the delivery channel that the correspondence was sent through, for example through the mail or digitally, as well as the date it was sent and the date it was digitally opened by the client. This allows advisors to better prepare to have conversations with their clients when it comes to matters like overdue payments or policy renewals.
3. Prototyping & Usability testing Advisor Dashboard
The third feature I want to highlight was the dashboard in the advisor portal. As I mentioned, advisors had no easy way to keep track of client policies in the existing portal, and the dashboard had signposting centred mainly around creating quotes for new clients.
In this early version of the new advisor dashboard, I created clickable panels that were dynamically populated with the amounts of lapsed policies, overdue policies, and policies due for renewal.
On click of one of the panels, such as overdue, advisors are able to see a list of all their client policies that have overdue payments, search for specific clients or policies, and see details about that particular policy that would be helpful when preparing to have conversations with their clients about making payment.
At this stage, no advisor testing had been done to understand exactly what details they needed to see, and the information I displayed here was based on conversations I had with teams who worked with advisors every day and understood a bit about their workflow.
For this reason, I took this prototype into testing with 4 advisor firms and testing with multiple support staff and advisors within those firms.
What I found out was that although each firm had a slightly different way of processing information and a different CRM, they were all creating reports manually for overdue policies. For this reason they felt this solution would save them a lot of time, however seeing as every firm had a slightly different process, not all of the details included in the data grid were relevant to every firm.
Based on what I learnt from this testing, I iterated on my design to include a customise button which would allow advisors to manually add or remove specific columns in the data grid, so they could tailor it to their firm's specific needs. I also included a 'download all' button with the intention of giving advisors a way to skip the manual reporting all together and download this data grid with the individually tailored columns as the report.
I took this into a second round of testing with the advisor firms and 100% of the participants said they this would significantly optimise their workflow and they would use this rather than creating their manual reports.
Final deliverables and project wrap up 🎁
To close of my engagement with this project, I collaborated with the UI Designer to turn the wireframes into a hi-fi prototype. We worked hand in hand to ensure the intended experience translated over effectively into the interface.
I also created a handover document for the developers so they would understand how the customer and advisor prototypes were intended to function. I worked hand in hand with developers to ensure that the proposed design was technically feasible and made minor amendments to the design where needed.