Improving the Life Application Process with Virtual Medical Questions
Offering simple solutions that meet customer, business, and insurance agent needs.
THE PROBLEM
The problem we encountered at our life insurance company centered around a specific part of the application process. Customers were required to respond to a series of several medical questions, but they were limited to two options for doing so:
1. Visiting a local agency and discussing personal and sensitive medical information face-to-face with an agent. 🏢
2. Completing the medical questions over the phone in a single session with a third-party customer service representative. ☎️
This approach posed discomfort for customers and agents, resulted in time-consuming interactions, and often led to awkward encounters.
Additionally, customer complaints regarding the quality of the phone service provided by the third-party vendor prompted the need for an alternative method to collect medical information from customers.
A glimpse at the customer journey map for customers and agents to connect through the life insurance application process.
EMPATHIZE
I started the project by leading two journey mapping sessions in which business leadership, agents, and developers walked through the entire customer journey and identified each step that would need to happen in each process.
We knew right away that one of the key features for customers and agents was flexibility. This meant that our team focused on allowing customers to start the medical questions independently via a link emailed to them.
Those who had issues with the online application process could easily contact their agent and continue with an agent in the office if they wanted the extra support.
This became a major highlight throughout the project, highly anticipated by business leadership, agents, and customers.
A workflow exploring all the different paths a customer can take during the life application process.
DEFINE
Next, our team looked at the medical question portion of the application, which has hundreds of drill-downs and different paths customers can take.
With a multidisciplinary team comprised of a business analyst, a life underwriter, and myself, we began documenting each section of the application process.
Due to a short timeline and small team, I also used these sessions to begin creating wireframes and documenting requirements with the BA.
IDEATE
Additionally, our front-end developer and I collaborated on the initial concepts that would later become the foundation of the entire application process.
After several whiteboard sessions, the developer and I came up with a structure that would allow underwriting to gather all the data they needed while remaining user-friendly for our customers.
A prototype example of the checklist menu opening and closing we used for testing.
PROTOTYPE
With a concept ready to test, I found eight employees I could have regular access to who were not familiar with the life insurance process. We began user-testing simple application sections and validated our checklist menu.
TEST & REPEAT
Based on user feedback, I took several feature ideas to the business for consideration and validated our direction with the checklist design.
We also validated our mobile-first direction by interviewing our testers and polling local groups about their preferences.
DEV COLLABORATION
On this project, I had the opportunity to introduce design thinking to our dev team and got to work with them closely, from the idea all the way to launch.
We were able to work hand-in-hand, and I was even able to bring some of our developers into user testing sessions. 👏
IMPACT
Being the first project of its kind for the company, the Life online medical questions, later named Life Portrait, have gone on to be loved by agents, leadership, and customers.
The success of this project has allowed the business to look at making it the primary channel to gather medical questions from customers, leading to a cost savings of $600,000 per year.