Marshmallow Miles
Building a market disrupting app based insurance product that rewards customers for driving well
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:
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Increase market share for 21-30 year olds
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Increase click though rate from aggregators by 10+%
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Remove a higher percentage of high risk customers from our books
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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
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Market and competitor analysis into telematic product
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Researching engagement approaches to build safer driving behaviours
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Ran 12 initial user interviews with existing and potential customers
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Concept testing Marshmallow landing page
Stage 2
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Feature journey testing
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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.
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General comprehension of the product and how it works
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Any concerns around privacy or sharing data with their insurer
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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:
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What happens when a customer turns off their location permissions for 24 hours+?
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What is our criteria for warning customers if their break the speed limit?
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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