Brolly Case Study
Background
Brolly is a free personal insurance concierge, that promises to help understand, manage and buy the insurance product(s) I need.
In other words, Brolly attempts to disrupt an existing “customer → distributors → insurance supplier” value chain, by aggregating demand rather than suppliers first — “customer ← distributor ← insurance suppliers”.
To do this, Brolly must be able to provide user experience superior to the existing alternatives, around the following jobs:
- I want to be confident I have the right insurance product(s) for my circumstances (=peace of mind).
- I want to easily manage and switch my insurance products, when it is appropriate for my circumstances i.e. removing cognitive and interaction friction from the process (= convenience).
The first step is to obtain required details about the customer, so to be able to understand customer’s insurance needs, give better advice and by providing value for free build customer relationship.
Thus, the goal of the onboarding process is to enable this first positive customer experience — a ‘wow’ moment. In other words, the goal is to obtain customer’s insurance documents with least friction possible.
Review
- User journey
- Metrics
- Friction analysis
- Suggestions and prioritisation
User journey
Essentially, there are two ways to sign up to Brolly:
Metrics
Based on the above, the process has three crucial steps:
- Get visitor to download an app
- Capture an email
- Get insurance policy documents
The following metrics are useful for measuring success:
Albeit, an acquisition rate defines CPA and therefore directly impacts viability of the business model (condition: LTV > 3x CPA). Arguably, an activation rate is more important to watch, as it defines the proportion of the acquired customers, that actually used the service and therefore could be monetised at the later stage.
Friction analysis
By looking at the main friction points, we may be able to identify the biggest bottlenecks in the funnel.
Getting insurance policy documents
Brolly allows to automatically retrieve insurance policy documents by connecting to the Gmail inbox, which sounds like a great idea.
Get Maxim Kostenko’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
In my case Brolly was unable to find any policy documents in my email inbox, which prompted me to investigate myself. It turned out I did not have even a printed copy of the policy!
After spending 25 minutes on a phone with my insurance company, speaking with three different departments and going through two security checks I finally found out, that there is no way for me to access these documents online. The only option is to request these documents by post!
As the table below suggests this may be quite common practise. This means a significant effort is required from a customer to complete the signup process, which makes this a major blocker.
Suggestions & prioritisation
Summary
The changes proposed above are “quick wins” as they are relatively easy to implement yet have a high impact on the relevant metrics.
One the other hand, getting hold of insurance documents appears to be a major point of friction, which means providing instructions may not be sufficient in the long run.
This means some combination of scraping and document retrieval may be required to improve metrics further.
