InsureTech content experience framework
Employer: Expedia Group
Role: UX Content Strategy leader, InsureTech
Situation
Travel insurance is a significant line of business for Expedia. However, Expedia is — legally speaking — a distributor of insurance products, while the risk is underwritten by a third-party insurance partner. The partnership between Expedia and the insurance vendor is one of the largest of its kind.
Constrained creativity: Since the insurance risk for Expedia travel products is underwritten by a partner, every word of content created by the Insurance BU is reviewed and approved by their legal experts. Moving Expedia insurance experience — in-path and post-purchase — to a customer-centric plane involves educating panels of lawyers to the idea of a conversational tone & voice framework, and a seamless claims experience. This process involves nuanced negotiation. In addition to our “regular” content design activities, my team at Expedia is privileged to be the point of contact for our esteemed insurance partner, and the evangelist of this customer-centric change.
Content experience challenges
User research in the insurance industry has uncovered the following key content-related challenges:
- Formal and legal-ey tone
- Customer find it hard to understand what they’ve bought
- Customers struggle to realize value out of their insurance purchases (claims experience)
These customer experience inhibitors have traditionally affected both customer centricity (NPS, journey progression, CLTV, etc) and business (attach, Gross Profit, etc) metrics for insurance providers.
Stakeholders
|
Drivers
|
Approvers
|
Contributors
|
Informed
|
|
|
|
|
Tasks
Throughout 2019, Purchase Confidence UX Content Strategy — the team I lead — focused on these challenges:
- Upleveling interactions between Expedia and the insurance partner from transactional negotiation to a strategic plane based on a shared common framework:
- Evolving the Expedia experience content tone & voice to a customer centric plane
- Stopping reinventing the wheel! Moving to a faster approval process that makes it easier to archive and reuse “precedents”.
- Acting as strategic consultants to the insurance partner and helping them simplify the claims process
Actions (content strategy)
- Put in place a modern communication system between the insurance partner and Expedia that supports archival, quick retrieval, and built-in SLA indicators
- Put in place an agreed-upon framework that leads to maximum content reuse, especially for Tests and Learn experiments (TnLs):
- Break down the problem of simplifying insurance lingo to doable building blocks. Make steady progress by dividing and conquering.
- Experiment with new content types
Results
- Expedia and the insurance partner now collaborate through a newly instituted Kanban JIRA board. Since we didn’t have a Technical Product Manager/Program Manager on the UX team, I doubled up as one to help implement this board. This Kanban board has led to approval SLA adherence for a majority of stories.
- My content design team willingly stretched to cause solid progress on a strategy framework designed to simplify insurance tone & voice, maximize content reuse, and strengthen collaboration between Expedia and the insurance partner:
- The team developed several other critical content strategy building blocks, such as insurance user journey maps for Expedia’s numerous lines of business (flights, lodging, car rentals, etc)
- Between August 2019 and January 2020, content reuse for TnLs went up 3X
- New content types were introduced. Experiments were encouraged. Learnings in the post-purchase path (low risk) are now being brought in-path (higher risk) to reduce experience friction for customers:
Inline contextual glossary
Inline contextual examples
All of these initiatives promise to positively impact customer centricity metrics going forward. Greater collaboration between Expedia and the insurance partner is a bonus of this process evolution!