Imagine a world where “it just works”. A phrase that was made famous by the world’s most valuable company and most identifiable organizations – you would argue the two are not a coincidence!

“It just works” is a phrase that needs no introduction for most and it is usually delivered with such precision and poise that by default comes with a lifelong guarantee that even just reading it out loud brings most of us a warm smile. We know what it is and we trust it by default.

Of course this refers to an object that most happen to spend a lot of time on, but it won’t necessarily save your life or be there for you in a crisis. It may of course play a material part in that journey – more on that later, should you ever need it.

No one wanted a music player, a phone, and an Internet device all in one (no one was ever asked!), or ever imagined these three unique things coming together until you gave it to them.  Now you would find it hard to buy a device that wasn’t this smart by default.

Devices that now can cost nearly £800, described with words that ooze empathy and feeling. It’s never about what they do per se, more what they enable the owner to do with them. Equally, you open the box, there’s no terms and conditions and no manual. It’s intuitive so that almost anyone can work their way through it in no time at all. This for me can be summarized as simplicity.

Moving away from this to what I consider to be one of the world’s best organizations at delivering on its promise – they are simply great at delivering. We have come to know that when we order something it’s usually a great price and with us next day or in the hour, depending on what level of service we have signed up for. You know it’s something you can lean on when you need it. This for me can be summarized as execution. In the UK, we have widely adopted contactless payments. It wasn’t so long after Chip and Pin saved you the hassle of having to sign for your transaction and have the staff challenge you with two signatures that would never match. The next stage was the move to contactless cards that soon were enabled on most mobile devices and some watches. Now the sheer effort of having to take out my wallet, put in my card, and punch in my four digit pin is just another friction point I no longer expect. This for me can be summarized as pace.

Now, of course, I choose these organizations as almost everyone can relate and there’s a high chance that we have experienced one, if not all, of them personally. Equally there are thousands of other firms that deliver great experiences day in day out. And that’s what we do day in day out when we buy other things, be it a financial product or physical asset. We make comparisons, so by default every interaction we have sets the bar for what we expect regardless of what or who we are buying from. Now nine times out of ten these experiences follow a happy path and just work.

However, taking these three examples, simply put – table stakes just get higher and higher and the pace at which we expect and integrate change into our everyday life never ceases to amaze me. Today’s innovation is tomorrow’s baseline expectation.

So How Does all this Relate to Insurance Organizations?

Whether we are paying for goods, using a mobile device, or ordering something online – there is a lot for us to learn in all of these instances and how we specifically bring them together to match or exceed these ever-increasing table stakes relationships that are being defined and enhanced every single day.

For years, innovation was about breaking these parts down and making them more efficient, digital, and seamless (think marginal gains from Sir David Brailsford of British Cycling) of which there is still lots of mileage to go, specifically for legacy insurers. However, in many cases, good enough will no longer be just that. However, if you comb all of these three themes together (simplicity, execution, and pace), all of a sudden, you move from incremental (and still hugely important) change and benefit to exponential change for the end customer, be it personal lines, commercial lines, or enabling a broker in the middle of the two.

There are many reasons why we can and absolutely need do this now – importantly our attitude to doing and trying new things is now much more open. However, the downside is that our attention span has decreased at the same rate. It’s an opportunity that insurers cannot miss out on, the alternative being that someone else will take advantage of this moment in time and own the client engagement going forward, an existential threat that has been identified again and again for insurers. So if we compare our phone, music player, and Internet device to financial services, addressing the unmet needs of consumers simply becomes tomorrow’s default goal – let’s not ask what customers want, but instead create something so desirable they can’t live without it.

For random run-of-the-mill products, this is just fine. However, what happens when your product is a regulated contract that one day you or your family’s life, someone else’s life, your home, or your livelihood may need to depend on, and in a way that you never really wanted to find out just how good it is.

This, however, goes back to my original point: how and what we enable customers to achieve must be shared in the most appropriate way. An organization’s most valuable asset these days is fast becoming its ability to tell a story, bringing customers on a journey – even if they may never use it or hope never to cash in on its promise. For mandatory products such as motor insurance, there is a base enablement, but then there are all the features that enable you to do so much more – breakdown cover, legal support, backup car should you need it, and much more. These are often provided by multiple different parties, orchestrated by an insurance brand. Can we truly tie all of these together in a frictionless experience for the end consumer?

Comparing this to my first example of a phone or even the motor manufacturer itself is quite interesting. In my examples, the brand itself owns the end-to-end promise or expectation with the customer, whether it’s assumed or direct explicit responsibility for execution of the promise, even if others do the delivery. In the world of insurance, this is often not the case and may create additional friction points that the consumer is forced through.

There is a parody in the UK that goes along the lines of “computer says no” – or in my world, someone taking no accountability and blaming the process. We should apply the most simplistic approach and think like a customer. How as an organization do we empower front line staff to counter any friction points?

Legacy systems/processes and regulation are often used as reasons why things can’t be done for the customer, while at the same time they are reasons we seek investment – either to remove legacy systems or to simplify and modernize them. These perceived barriers create the right ambition to drive change – it’s all about how we look at them. Are we a large insurer with lots of legacy technical debt that means new regulation is painful and costly to adopt, or a small agile player than can turn quickly and use this to our competitive benefit in the race to win the customer?

When I Look at Simplicity, I Often Refer to this Quote: “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”

Finally, simplicity is as important to our internal customers as it is to external end-users. The alternative is that we end up creating environments in which it is near impossible to do what people want most, i.e. deliver great experiences. Only the superhuman survive through a series of heroic swivel chair integrations while at the same time multitasking with a customer at the end of the phone. Efforts should be firmly focused here, as making life straightforward here will pay material dividends. If we take the end-to-end process and look at all the engagement and interaction points, be it broker, third-party supplier, or otherwise – then what would our world look like if we were to design from scratch a beautiful frictionless experience? That means interventions now to mitigate against issues later. I believe that this is what we have to do to make our environment a great place to work too!

Moving beyond simplicity, we need to focus next on how we execute, regardless of where or when we are in the perceived value chain – customers really don’t care in their time of need. Ultimately, when a customer calls, we need to have all the processes, people, and capability laser focused to execute flawlessly and make them feel like they are the one and only thing on our mind.

We know why they call us and often when they will call us, e.g. the first frost of the year and so many other predictable events, so let’s get one step ahead and when we call it’s “Mr Walsh, we have been expecting your call” – or, better still, two steps ahead. In today’s connected world, don’t wait for the call: “Mr Walsh, we are expecting frost this week, these are the steps you can take now to avoid an event.” Delivering experiences that mean the customer will never need to call changes the relationship and materially increases trust and value.

Pace is practically the only thing not slowing down! It feels as though for every day that passes, two actually go by. How traditional carriers keep up with this is an ever-increasing challenge. Startups and newer insurance organizations are not constrained by these rules and often play on this as an advantage. Their ability to offer product speed to market, or service new clients or new products in an entirely different way, quite simply changes the traditional relationship that we have come to loathe and expect.

Each of these on their own adds incremental benefit to an insurer. However, bringing together simplicity, execution, and pace creates the opportunity for truly disruptive and exponential benefit. As consumers we can emotionally engage; we become fans, advocates, and champions of the brand that has delivered for us and not let us down.

Meeting the unmet needs of clients should be our sole purpose, delivered effortlessly through a frictionless, usage- (utility) based experience. It still has to be beautiful by design. It’s something that should be so intuitive that my mum or my kids could use it with ease!

Although less the case in recent years, one final tag line that always instilled a level of surprise and delight was “one more thing” – made famous by the late Steve Jobs. Whatever he said after these three words was sure to leave the audience in a positive state of mind, full of excitement and positive anticipation. How do we deliver this experience for insurance customers at their time of need?

I’m not saying we will immediately get to a place where there are zero friction points – in some cases we may design these in on purpose. If a customer is looking to leave, let’s at least have the conversation with them! So any friction points that are left need to be there by design.

I’ve never imagined an insurer that doesn’t just work, or is not there (intentionally) when we need them. However, sometimes the cogs need a little more pushing and oiling. To create frictionless experiences we need to go beyond the product offered, creating immersive brands that customers and employees can relate to and exude passion and pride when describing them. Once we have you hooked, we need to keep things (as) simple as possible and execute the hell out of it. Looking east, we need only see some of the providers such as WeChat that are doing this flawlessly and at scale – a messenger and communication platform that allows you to do everything you need from the comfort of your own walled garden. We can easily see that most of the InsurTech investment has focused on this area, taking out friction points (and cost) from distribution – it’s the closest part to the customer and the best opportunity to build engagement.

Insurance is your platform for building services beyond insurance as we know it today. Perhaps frictionless is more than just evolutionary fixes to broken processes, but instead, revolutionary leaps that deliver delight. Ultimately, to get to frictionless we need to be brave, bold, and get used to being comfortable with being uncomfortable.