Preface
When I joined Getsafe, the company pivoted its business model just recently. Moving from being a digital insurance broker to evolving into the world’s first insurance platform, I have faced some inspiring challenges. In this article, I’m going to guide you through the foundation and giving an outline of the problem space.
With it’s technical foundation Getsafe strives to cover the entire insurance value chain, in order to dramatically improve the experience for first time insurance customers. Within 2.5 years the customer base grew to over 100k customers and I found myself being heavily involved in finding and establishing processes to keep up with growth and advocating design throughout the company.
I led a team of 4 product designers, building out design team rituals, mentoring and allocating our teams resources. The main challenges I've been facing have been around hiring and identifying strenghts and weaknesses to enable anyone to reach their full potential.
Besides growing our design team, my main focus is all around building mobile and desktop digital interfaces that serve a growing product portfolio and most importantly match customer needs.
My day to day work is accompanied by the mission to democratize design at Getsafe and help to unify and simplify workflows for our multidisciplinary teams. In order to achieve that I’ve been holding keynotes and workshops on design related topics like design research and problem-solving strategies (e.g. design sprints) and teamed up with our frontend developers to build up a design system.
Lastly I've been heavily involved in a huge rebranding project, that required to align our C-Level, product design, brand and engineering.
Approach
For most people dealing with insurance isn’t something that they necessarily enjoy. Yet, it’s something everyone has to take care of at some point in life and even adds in the potential to enable people to worry less and make confident, self-determined decisions to live life to the fullest - when done right.
So we set out on the mission to reduce barriers, increase transparency, and engage first-time insurance takers in an educational experience that is equally social and accessible to create a feeling of empowerment.
Data shows that the individual insurance need grows with increasing age, so our premise is to convince young people in need of their first insurance product (which in Germany at least is liability insurance) with a mobile-first, digital experience and grow together with them as they get older. From a business point of view, this means increasing the per capita premium over time by providing personalized coverage that adapts to the customer's situation in life.
On a high level, customers move along three main journeys that are designed to help them reach their goal of feeling empowered.
1. Getting covered
2. Adjusting/Managing coverage based on their ever-evolving life
3. Things go south - Help is needed
The principle of keeping customers in-the-know is the foundation for several product initiatives. We are aware that we're dealing with a complex topic and an industry that isn't famous for its transparency.
This is why we are trying to guide customers by providing the right amount of information at the right time throughout their experience.
It starts with the distribution of information on product pages, enabling customers to dig deeper on demand, continues with additional interactive material that should decrease the level of abstraction, and make people understand whether it's necessary or not for their situation, and ends with a service experience that provides clarity around all problems and questions that might occur.
