Improve Your Insurance Website User Experience for Growth and Profit

Nothing speaks louder than statistics. For the insurance industry, one of these immediately stands out: Users’ judgments of a site’s credibility are based 75% on the website’s overall aesthetics. Trust and credibility are crucial for insurers, so this is a stat not to be taken lightly. In addition:

• Design-related factors are 94% of the first impression visitors receive. First impressions, as you know, are critical to engagement, and a poorly designed website will send them running.
• Investing in UX from the start saves money. A poor UX means developers have to spend 50% of their time reworking projects.
• A seamless experience across every device is very important to 83% of people.
  If the content or layout of a website is ramshackle, 40% of users will stop engaging.
• Sites with a superior user experience can have 400% higher visit-to-lead-to-conversion rates.

Investing in UX brings its rewards. Let’s take a look at the ROI.

The research is in, and the rewards of an enhanced UX can’t be denied:

• On average, every $1 invested in UX brings a return of $100–an ROI of 9,900%
• Your well-designed UX can raise website conversions by up to 200%, and further improvements can yield up to 400% more conversions.
• A UX design that pleases enough users to boost your customer retention by 5% brings a profit increase of at least 25%.
• Of customers who had a positive experience, they shared it with at least 10 others.
• Conversion lift KPIs increase up to 83% when UX improves the customer experience.

A superior UX provides a fairly simple way to boost user engagement and customer satisfaction while returning a significant ROI. For insurers, it’s a more cost-effective way to increase market share than a bigger ad budget or price cutting.

So just what makes a great UX? Let’s find out.

Online customer attention spans are short – eight seconds. This means you have to grab your audience right away with no margin of error. The essential elements that will keep them on your site include:

This might be the most important element of all because it’s about making your experience work the way your customers think. This falls under “ease of use,” and if your site is not intuitive, your customers will leave and move on to a competitor’s site.

This means having decluttered web pages with ease of flow, which can be difficult for insurance industry websites that need to contain lots of information. The key is to provide enough guidance for people to find your site useful, but not so much that the user feels lack control over their decisions.

Few things are more frustrating for customers than to feel that departments within a company are not communicating and operating together. Entering the same information over and over because your channels are siloed doesn’t provide the best experience.

The way forward is to join the disparate parts of the end-to-end customer experience together. Whether such disparate parts of the overall experience result from different channels not handing off information properly or having different back-end systems across channels, the goal is to blend these experiences seamlessly together to create a cohesive single-customer experience.

Interactivity embraces the concept of two-way communication with online customers at the appropriate points in their buying journey. It also gives insurers a chance to compensate for any areas that are not as intuitive as desired. Online interaction takes three basic forms:

“Help me.” This contact can be initiated by the customer via a “chat now” button or a pop-up offer to chat when the customer has stayed on the same page or field for a certain period of time. An important consideration of this UX improvement is setting up these interactions at the right moment without being obtrusive, which means knowing the usual points of customer difficulty.

“Help me choose.” Not all customers have a selection locked in. Many require more information to make a decision. Rather than facilitating this via chat, add a section to the web page that highlights informational blogs and adds additional products for consideration, or even for upsells.

“Make it Mine.” This is an opportunity to delight your customers with a more personalized experience when they return to your site by collecting information that builds on insights gathered through every channel.

Innovation for innovation’s sake often risks serving the needs of your brand instead of your customers, potentially risking the simplicity of an easy-to-use and effective experience. A meaningful role for innovation should be to address the unmet or partially met needs of your customers when “more of the same” won’t solve their problems.

A differentiated experience is the way forward. What most customers want is a personalized and frictionless experience.

They want:

• A fast and smooth application process that is hassle-free
• A seamless claims process (Intelligent Automation can help with that)
• 24/7 free support (which can be facilitated using chatbots)
• A cohesive experience, no matter what channel they use

These practical considerations provide data for a way forward to your ideal UX.

You already know that good UX is good for business with a lower cost of customer acquisition, reduced support costs, increased retention, and increased market share. A systematic approach is required to realize the benefits.

Yes, it is all about the customer (more about that later), but conducting stakeholder interviews is the first step of the design process. This research is essential to understand current user behavior, pinpoint constraints, identify common pain points, and help guide the flow of the project to include business goals.

One-on-one interviews should be conducted and compiled to release rich customer insights that will help your UX designers get the right focus.

The next step to improve your UX is to conduct a usability assessment of the website to uncover its most common problems. Usability testing explains these issues so you can solve them. Often, websites will underperform because they were designed for executives who made assumptions about website users rather than getting that information from the end-users themselves.

The key to proper UX design is to understand user needs and then create an experience that solves their problems and helps them complete tasks easily and quickly. This means getting inside users’ heads through interviews and observations while they interact with your site.

Models can then be constructed that show behavioral patterns, and those can be applied to prototype products and services that better serve the needs of users. By applying continuous testing and making adjustments, ease-of-use can be improved, mistakes reduced, and customer satisfaction increased.

Usability testing doesn’t take a room full of people; research shows that observing and interviewing just five users uncovers around 85% of all usability issues. These users should represent your actual user base.

This is where you pinpoint less-than-perfect areas of your website. This most essential UX design step helps reveal which parts of your website are causing headaches for users and blocking conversions. A UX audit uses empirical methods to enlarge an existing situation and offer heuristics-based strategies for improvements and user-centric enhancements.

Your UX audit should give you the information you need to boost conversions by making it easier for users to achieve their aims on your site. Though website audits include a vast list of elements to verify based on your specific needs, there are some critical common areas that must be included:

• Key user-specific activities should be easy to locate on your website, including objects, actions, options, and menu items. Make sure that the main navigation bar or menu is easily identifiable and labels are clear and concise.
• A way to keep users informed of back-end processes, including premiums and claims.
• Use non-technical terms and day-to-day vocabulary familiar to end-users.
• Express error messages in everyday terms, and they should offer a solution.
• Make help information easily accessible, well-organized, and relevant.
• Check page load times. It’s important to note that half of web users expect a site to load in two seconds or less, and they tend to abandon your site if it doesn’t load within three seconds.

Also, make sure your fonts and text formatting provide easy readability. Your home page should take just five seconds for a visitor to digest – any longer than that risks them leaving the page.

Requirements are based on the insights gathered from both stakeholder and user interviews. They will be used to create an accurate requirements definition document that outlines the requirements for all UX design process activities, so they should be meticulously described.

Getting things wrong from the beginning will, of course, affect how your UX improvements turn out. CTOs and CIOs know that it takes lots of research, an intensive understanding of project complexity, and experience with the software development lifecycle.

This is where you organize your content, create information relationships, and develop your navigation structure.

• Classify your content. Formally classify your content based on how users might access your site at various levels. Before performing this task, you need an understanding of that content. Techniques such as card sorting can help: All navigation labels are written on separate cards, users then place these cards in the way they want the information to be organized.
• Create informational relationships. This is all about making information usable. This means connecting various metadata elements so it’s easy to find under search terms that may not be precise.
• Develop your navigation now that your content is organized.

Then move on to create visual designs, prototypes, and perform usability testing until you’ve achieved the objective of offering users a streamlined, intuitive, integrated, and converting experience.

The real key here is choosing the right implementation partner — one that can integrate your siloed information, provide the data management and analytics you need to improve the customer UX, and embrace the principles of human-centered design.

The bottom line is that, in the highly competitive insurance industry, leaders with an eye toward growth and increased revenue should understand the importance of providing a great customer UX. The digital experience matters more than ever.

RD Global empowers insurance companies with high-impact technology solutions rooted in a 5-star customer experience. Our development team is well-versed in all of the latest digital solutions, so insurance companies can wow and delight their customer base.

Our unrivaled team of in-house technical experts can solve your most complex digital challenges with state-of-the-art custom insurtech software to power your digital transformation.

Only the digitally strong will survive and prosper. Schedule a discovery call to learn how RG Global can partner with you for success now and in the future.