Redesigning Nedbank Insurance's vehicle cover application journey to surface the premium early, reduce completion time and improve sales
Challenge
Vehicle cover is Nedbank's car insurance, which clients can take out digitally on the Money app. The existing journey started with a quick quote flow, where clients answered a few entry-level questions about their insurance history and their vehicle to get a calculated quote. If they were happy with the quote, they could continue to the full application. However, because of technical constraints, the full application resurfaced the questions clients had already answered, as pre-populated screens. The journey from the quick quote to the full application was not seamless. The application also still asked legacy questions that were no longer valid in today's vehicle insurance application landscape. The requirement was to improve the journey and its design end to end, reduce the 10-minute completion time and, ultimately, increase sales.
Approach
Getting clients to a quote quickly was worth keeping. Clients want a general idea of the cost as early as possible, and for the business, an early premium can keep them interested through the application. The approach was to find a flow that surfaces the premium early, by asking the standard questions the premium depends on first. I started by benchmarking what other insurers were doing and which questions they asked. The benchmarking fed into a workshop with the business, where we went through each existing question: why it was asked, whether it affected the premium or qualified the client, and whether it was legacy and could go. Questions were then dropped, improved or moved later, so the premium could be reached within a few screens. Usability testing then validated the redesigned flow as a whole.
Solution
The redesigned application is one seamless journey, no longer split in two, and it keeps the idea of the quick quote by asking the questions the premium needs first. Clients answer insurance history questions to pre-qualify, then enter a registration or VIN number, which brings back the vehicle details from TransUnion. Questions follow on the vehicle's insurance history, where it is parked, with the client's address as the default, and its security. The premium then appears on the excess screen as a sticky total and stays on screen from there on. The total updates as clients choose their excess, car hire for 30, 45 or 60 days across different car groups, and any optional extras, so they see how each choice affects it. Clients then choose how to pay and accept the final quote.
Outcome
Usability testing scored 4 out of 4, with no usability issues found. After go-live, completion time came down from around 10 minutes to about 5, and sales improved. Because the flow was shaped by benchmarking, the journey now matches the standard across vehicle insurance and digital applications. The next step is to go beyond that standard and explore what would make clients choose Nedbank over the household names in insurance, rather than only matching them. A few parts were designed and explored but never implemented because of technical constraints. One was to use data the bank already holds from clients paying disc fines on the Money app: the list of vehicles linked to their profile. Clients would pick a vehicle instead of entering details the bank may already have, which would cut completion time further.