Last week on our sister site; we looked at the reasons that User Experience (or UX) is important to insurers looking to improve their online offerings or to move into the mobile application space. This week we’d like to review some of the findings from a recent report from Instinct Studios and show how a poor, current user experience is driving customers into the arms of insurance aggregators and away from buying their car insurance direct from insurers.

Why Does This Matter?

It matters because as we’ve seen recently; companies like Google and Amazon are preparing to shake up the insurance market. These companies are absolute masters of the user experience and they bring multi-billion dollar resources to the table to attack the traditional insurance companies. If the insurance sector wants to survive – user experience is going to become a critical factor in that survival.

So What Did the Report Say?

Instinct Studios looked at 12 car insurance companies, leading aggregators and a range of businesses from other sectors and compared the user experience of each type of site.

To assess the user experience they examined the layout of websites, their visual branding, process playback and notification, ease of navigation, calls to action and overall usability.

The key findings were stark; the insurance industry offered an average score for the user experience of 67% against a non-insurance average of 80%. Worse the insurance aggregators scored an average 79% compared to the industry’s 67%.

Aviva was highlighted as the best performer in the industry with a 73% rating and Admiral the worst with 43%. Google was the highest performing aggregator though and scored a whopping 86% followed by Money Supermarket and uSwitch at 82%.

Outside of the sector Easyjet came top with 87% and Tesco and Apple were close behind.

What Does That Mean?

It means that insurance is a long way behind the aggregators and other industries at providing an experience online that customers like. In some cases, the user experience provided is extremely poor and that means customers are nearly guaranteed to start shopping elsewhere.

Shockingly, in an age where the majority of internet use is conducted by smartphone – Instinct Studios discovered that most insurers do not provide a smartphone suitable website. Responsive themes are no longer an option; they are an essential part of doing business and the industry isn’t responding as it should to consumer behavior changes.

In an industry which is demonstrably one of the largest contributors to the British economy; there is simply no excuse for failing to make changes like supporting the mobile web. They’re relatively cheap and simple projects to develop and implement and without them – the industry is likely to fall farther and farther behind new entrants to the market. There are billions of pounds at stake here – neither Google nor Amazon, for example, has a particularly good reputation for keeping money made in the UK, in the UK.

A failure to deliver a good insurance user experience is more than a major risk to the insurance industry in the UK; it’s a major risk to the UK economy as a whole.

The good news is that user experience is not an impenetrable science – it’s a philosophy that puts users at the heart of design and development decisions and insurers can take this on board easily and perhaps model their offerings on those provided by successful retailers who are getting this process right now.

Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/morville/3228155685/

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