InsureTech post-purchase content experience

Employer: Expedia Group
Role: Sr. Manager – UX Content Strategy, Purchase Confidence

Situation

Insurance customers generally face these three challenges in getting the most out of their purchases:
  • They don’t fully understand what they’ve bought. Often, they may have some idea of the broad benefits that their insurance product may offer, but not the exact events it covers and, importantly, does not cover.
  • Most insurance policies are hard to navigate and read
  • When an event covered in the insurance policy happens, claims information is hard to come by and understand. Often, customers are left wondering what proof/documents they’ll need to provide for their claim to be favorably considered.

A cross-functional team of content strategists, product managers, engineers, and product managers at Expedia imagined a unique post-purchase system that would help travel insurance users understand and derive value out of their benefits confidently and seamlessly. I led the content strategy and delivery for this post-purchase system.

Challenges

Content — simple, conversational, and yet legally accurate — is central to any insurance post-purchase system. The insurance UX content strategy team at Expedia, working out of two geographical locations, strived hard to develop a conversational tone & voice framework that would resonate with customers and be relevant at every stage of their trip — when they’ve just purchased a travel insurance policy, when/if they need to file a claim, and all the way to when the final claim status is communicated.
The content aspects of designing such a system posed the following additional challenges:
  • Every word that insurance content designers write goes through a legal review process with a panel of lawyers external to Expedia. Educating our legal partners about the tenets of a customer-centric tone & voice framework was a challenge and required expert negotiation skills.
  • The tone & voice of insurance content had to be consistent with the tone of the rest of the content on Expedia websites, including the content for the support chatbots that customers may use to get in touch with Expedia support.
  • The baseline content developed had to be tweaked for multiple residencies to which TripCare would be eventually rolled out. This residency-specific content required additional rounds of intense legal reviews with lawyers in those countries.

Solution

At its heart, the post-purchase system is a UX/design deliverable tightly integrated with the overall trip experience on Expedia’s websites — Expedia.com as well as other points of sale serving individual countries, such as Expedia.au.

Channels

The first phases of the post-purchase system involved content design on the following channels:
  • Expedia websites, including country-specific points of sale such as Expedia.au
  • The mobile web versions of those websites
  • Expedia apps
  • Email 
  • SMS

Content types

The following unique content types served customer needs across these channels:
  • Web content integral to the user experience 
  • Mobile notifications and SMSs sent out to customers at relevant intervals for the following purposes:
    • Assure customers that they’re covered
    • Help them understand their coverage
    • Advise them when they experience an event that may be covered or they could claim against. For example, tell customers if their flight was delayed for 6+ hours that they might have a claim under the Travel Delay benefit.
    • Guide them through the claims process to make it dead simple to understand
  • Interactive email deliverables
Unique content elements, such as examples and inline definitions, were interspersed throughout the content to aid benefit comprehension.

Web information architecture

Tightly integrated with the Expedia trips user experience, the content strategy team decided on a multi-tier web information architecture:
  • A Benefit Overview page listing the insurance benefits that the customer has purchased — right within the context of their overall trip
  • Benefit Details pages explaining a single benefit in detail. Some elements on this page were made dynamic and appeared only when the customer visited the Benefit Details page from a specific context. For example, a customer visiting the Travel Delay benefit detail page after their flight had been delayed for 6+ hours would see a dynamic banner advising them about the claims process (see screenshots).
  • Instead of using technical terms like Inclusions and Exclusions, we used simple customer-centric phrases like What’s covered, What’s not covered, and When to claim, aligning our legal partners along the way on the simple lingo.
  • Special pages emphasizing benefits that the customer may have but may not be aware of; for example, Emergency Assistance services
  • General exclusions and other pages to capture legally-important information in a conversational tone 
  • Detailed claims information in a conversational lingo that would make customers feel reassured and supported
  • Chatbot scripts and agent talking points in the same tone & voice as the web/app content 
All of this content had to scale across the channels and surfaces that TripCare would serve: web. mobile web, app, SMS, and email, to begin with. 

Snapshots

Expedia app: Contextual notification to advise customers
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Benefit Overview page
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Benefit Details page detailing a single benefit. Note the customer-centric headings like “What’s covered” and “What’s not covered”.
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Benefit Details page with a dynamic element (blue box) capturing the context
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Page detailing emergency assistance services that Expedia insurance customers have access to but may not be aware of
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Examples to boost customer comprehension
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Example of an example!
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Multi-channel email: simple and conversational
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