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Marshmallow Miles

Building a market disrupting app based insurance product that rewards customers for driving well

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Overview

Marshmallow Miles is one of the first app based insurance products in the UK market, with its core aim to help offer inclusive car insurance with great customer benefits. The nature of this cover allows Marshmallow to reward customers that show safe driving behaviour with renewal discounts whilst removing dangerous risk from our books if deemed unsafe drivers.

Leading a small product team from an initial design sprint concepts to our beta market launch within 7 months. We successfully delivered an new type of insurance product that has help us increase our market share of 21-30 year customers whilst positively impacting our Loss Ratio (In insurance this is the number one factor of success).

Roles

- Lead product designer

- Product strategy

- User research

Duration 

10 months

The challenge

Marshmallow were moving into their fifth year as an insurer but were finding it difficult to branch out successfully into younger customer segments where traditionally their higher risk of claims results in negative business impact. 

The Risk Mitigation product team's brief was essentially to find ways to help reduce risk for this segment of customers whilst building a product that meet customer needs in a competitive market. We needed to prove out to the business that whatever approach we took could help meet the following goals:

  • Increase market share for 21-30 year olds

  • Increase click though rate from aggregators by 10+%

  • Remove a higher percentage of high risk customers from our books

  • Reduce overall claims frequency and Loss Ratio

Kick-off & Discovery

We begin with a week design sprint to map out possible strategies that could help mitigate risk for the business. We decided to focus on the app based cover concept as this was a differentiator to other insurers in the industry and had the potential to help meet our main objectives. Marshmallow are a young insurer and telematics based covered was a low knowledge area for the business so an in depth research phase was kicked off.

The early proposition 

At an early stage we had agreed to pursue validating our concept of app based cover that rewards you for driving well. The customer would receive an average driving score and we would use engagement features to increase their awareness of this score and influence safer driving behaviours.

Discovery approach

Stage 1

  • Market and competitor analysis into telematic product

  • Researching engagement approaches to build safer driving behaviours 

  • Ran 12 initial user interviews with existing and potential customers

  • Concept testing Marshmallow landing page

Stage 2

  • Feature journey testing

  • Diary study with new customer segment 17-25

Industry research: Building safer driving habits

Early findings

We concept tested a future Marshmallow Miles landing page to understand users expectations and potential challenges.

  • General comprehension of the product and how it works

  • Any concerns around privacy or sharing data with their insurer

  • If the rewards proposition was really a true influence on their decision to purchase

Programme overview

Building core functionality

As the product research continued we started to build out the core features of the product that would be needed for MVP. These features needed to be validate with users whilst we looked into who we could partner with from a data perspective to help create a scoring model for our customers. This model was crucial in accurately estimating the risk of drivers.

Main user journeys 

Customer   acquisition

(Sign-up)

Web landing page

Onboarding in the app

Driving score & factors

Engagement features & rewards

Customer sign-up

This is the journey a new customer will go through to purchase miles insurance 

Main objectives here to what successful metrics are here for the business

40% 

Click through rate

(From aggregators)

8%+ 

Net conversion rate 

4-7% 

Cancellation rate

App onboarding

One of the most complex journeys to design and optimise was for setting users up in our app to share their necessary permissions to ensure we can track their drives accurately. 

98.8% 

0.2%

Successful onboarding rate

Start a live chat to get assistance

14s

Avg time to complete

Driving score and factors

Show design options

final design

new components created in figma etc

Underwriting & Pricing considerations

We had to work closely with our pricing and underwriting teams in order to build a policy that worked for the business and had the correct criteria to protect us from increased risk.

For example we had to set rules around edge cases which included:

  • What happens when a customer turns off their location permissions for 24 hours+?

  • What is our criteria for warning customers if their break the speed limit?

  • What happens when a customer wants to change to a standard marshmallow policy?

How do can we rewards customers?

We worked closely with the operations, fraud and underwriting teams to build out set of criteria to review customers alerts

Operational services

Understanding what to offer customes, budget, scalable, long term etc

- add images of marshmallows, rewards screens, mention hypothesis on rewards encouraging safer driving with renewal discount

Product launch strategy

1.How we would validate if this product would work

2. alpha internal, beta with 1,500 customes, test operational requirements

- show what the product was looking like to begin with vs post beta launch feature parity

The product itself

Show core features and future features, example experiments

Communication approach

Show push and email comms mapping 

Beta results (3 months on..) 

We worked closely with the operations, fraud and underwriting teams to build out set of criteria to review customers alerts

Add looker graphs

1140 Policies sold

Weekly active users vs standard customers

Adapted ways of working

Customer sign up bi-weekly

cancelation reviews

trustpilot deep dive

App feedback feature implemented

Month 1,3, 9 user surveys

Month 1 user feedbback sessions

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