behind the scenes. Fixing the small glitches can have a big impact on the level of trust.
Comparison and Purchasing Criteria
People say they make insurance purchasing decisions based on quality, but they find it hard to do this in reality. It is very difficult to compare what is inside different insurance policies and make a rational choice. People feel that insurance is not very transparent, especially with regards to quality, so it is easier to compare on price, because money is a fixed variable. This means designers cannot simply trust what customers say they want, but have to work smartly around price and quality issues.
Of course there is room for quality in the market, but with online price-comparison engines, the quality aspect of insurance has completely dropped out of the conversation with customers and all that is left is price. For customers, quality means, “Am I covered? Do I get a rental car when my car is being repaired? Am I actually covered for the things I think should be covered?”
With most other services and products, customers can easily see the differences between the premium version and something cheaper, but not with insurance. Customers are really asking what quality means—that is, the difference between the premium and budget products. This raises many other questions, such as what is actually covered and when, how much are the out-of-pocket expenses, and so on. It soon becomes complicated.
As with much service design, the challenge is to make the invisible visible, or to make the right things visible and get rid of the noise in the rest of the offering. In the Gjensidige project, then, one of the key challenges was to develop a service proposition that eliminated price as the key deciding factor.
Expectations
People expect an insurance payout when something happens, and they expect help. This is another issue related to quality. Customers who buy a cheap insurance product get money but will not get much help, whereas Gjensidige has a very good system for taking care of people when something happens. For example, when customers have damage to a car, they just take it in for evaluation and Gjensidige issues a rental car and takes care of everything else. This fact needed to be made visible as part of the service proposition.
Employment and Public Benefits
Gjensidige believe they provide all the insurance people might need, but in Norway many people are also covered by some kind of insurance from their employer or union. It is very difficult for people to tell whether they are covered because there is no way for them to see all of this information in one view, all in one place. The challenge is to achieve this in a transparent and trustworthy way for customers.
Social and Cultural Interactions
Many invisible social touchpoints affect the entire service experience. The police, for example, might give insurance advice by saying, “Oh, your cell phone was stolen? Don’t even bother contacting your insurance company.” Customers who contact Gjensidige do in fact receive a new phone, but people tend to trust that the police are knowledgeable about such issues.
The researchers discovered that many different people were giving advice about insurance who should not be. For example, friends and family were frequently believed to be the best source of insurance advice. People trust their father to give them good advice about an insurance policy more than they trust an insurance agent. (By “agent” here, we mean a representative of Gjensidige because there is very little in the way of an insurance brokerage market in Norway.)
The challenge, then, is how to work together with all of these invisible touchpoints. Insurance originally dates back to a time when people in a small community would pool their money to pay for an accident, such as someone’s barn burning down. This stimulated thinking about bringing back this social aspect, because insurance had evolved from a collective effort into these machines that customers don’t trust.
Choice
From an insurance specialist point of view, the more options you have the better you will be covered. Covering certain items, such as a new bike, but not others, such as an old PC, allows people to have insurance tailored to their needs.
At the same time, customers want simplicity. The paradox discovered in the insights research was that customers want very simple products, but they want to feel like they are making a choice from an array of complex products. The underlying need here is that they do not want to have to choose from lots of options, but they want the experience of having made their own choice.
Documents
When it comes to reading insurance papers, one of the typical quotes from interviewees was, “I just can’t do it.” This connects back to the issue of trust. On the one hand, customers do not read the details of their insurance policies, which means they blindly trust the insurance company to be right. On the other hand, customers do not trust the insurance company because they do not know the details of their policies.
Insurance companies produce enormously long documents, which is the main reason customers do not read them. Customers were saying, “Can’t we have just one document and could it be on one page?” but what people actually wanted and needed was a “What if?” structure they could study—one to explain that if this happens, the customer will get that from the insurance company.
Customers also had no idea where they kept their insurance papers. They know the papers are important and some people said they had them securely filed away, but when researchers asked to see them, the papers were in a complete mess. Interviewees would say, “Yes, they’re just over here,” but it would turn out to be a policy from two years ago and the latest one was still in a pile of papers somewhere. This means that customers have no clue about what they are insured for or what they are even paying.
Another reason people did not know what was in their documents is that most of the text is written by lawyers in “legalese.” Over the years, more and more text had been added to these documents without much serious thought about what was still needed. To counter this, Gjensidige reduced the size of their insurance policy documents by 50% to 60% just by taking out extraneous words and simplifying the language as much as legally possible. It took a team of four people a year and a half to do this, but they have done a brilliant job. Gjensidige also gained a small side benefit from reduced printing costs, but the big benefit has been in customer experience.
Company Insights
Filling In the Gaps in Public Benefits
In Norway, people assume that if something bad happens to them, they will be covered by the state, but they have no clue about what actually would be covered and what they should cover themselves. Customers need this information and they need people to talk to who can give them good advice, not just salespeople who are more interested in selling an insurance product than in what customers need.
As in many organizations, the underlying issue is hard targets for sales quotas and organizational structures that actually discourage customer service representatives from taking proper care of people. Gjensidige needed to change the way they measure performance internally so that the benefit could be experienced externally,
