Commercial Claims Research

Project Overview:

Conduct generative research to create a strategic path forward for the commercial insurance claims user experience projects roadmap.

Project Aspects:

Full strength multi-month research project including UX researchers, interaction designers, and content specialists

Research methods included, but were not limited to:

User surveys

User interviews

Card sorting

Interactive prototype building

“Jobs to be done” analysis framework

Semantic network analysis

The Ask:

Commercial insurance claims had been completely neglected in previous user experience research efforts

There was the assumption that commercial clients would want the same service or types of service as individual clients

The project was to get a better understanding of user needs

The Users:

Commercial insurance customers (B2C)

Commercial independent insurance agents (B2B)

Key Questions:​​​

How do customers perceive commercial insurance and claims differently than they do individual insurance policies and claims

Do commercial clients want to use self-service tools to file and follow claims like individual clients seem to?

Who owns what part of the claims process?

Where can the company make improvements?

Are there “low-hanging fruit”projects?

Methodology:​​​​

Interviews

10 - 12 Commercial Agents

10 - 12 Commercial Clients who had made a claim in the past year

Create a cluster of statements from the interviews

Conduct a “Jobs to be done” analysis of the clusters

Back up “Jobs to be done” qualitative research with Network analysis of semantic interview network 

Network Analysis:​​​​​​

Use an online engine, “Ifranodus,” to parse the semantic connections between all the words used the transcripts of the interviews

Then looked at the network analyses of the semantic network

Determined keyword “nodes” and looked for relationships

Network Analysis Findings:​​​​​​​​

Correlated about 60% of the big qualitative insights from the interviews

Correlated about 50% of the secondary qualitative insights from the interviews

Has some issues, but would definitely use it again

Network Analysis Issues:​​​​​​​

Huge correlation between the words used in the actual questions

No simple way to deal with disambiguation

No simple way to enforce similar lexicon for all interviews (Client could be “client,” “insured,” “Bob,” “owner,” etc…

Correlation is not causation

Tons of extraneous nodes (words like “swan”)

Potential Network Analysis Solutions:​​​​​​​​

Couldn’t solve for all the issues

For one interview, enforced limited vocabulary

Removed all nodes with low importance score (nodes with very few connections)

Removed nodes with too many connections (words like Insurance or process since the whole interview is about them)

Research Findings:​​​​​

Commercial Agents don’t want to get involved in the process

Commercial clients want to be informed of what is going on for their claim at all times because it may be their livelihood on the line

Some commercial clients want to do everything themselves

Some commercial clients don’t want to have to think about it and want their agents to take care of everything

Customer trust boils down to radical transparency

Commercial Claims Next Steps:​​​​​​​

Implementing a “Radical Transparency” strategy

Letting customers know where they are in the intuitively

Giving customers the ability to easily ask, “What’s next?” if it is not readily apparent

Deeper dives into active agent vs active policy holder