Insuring the future
Connect website development
FMG is New Zealand’s leading rural insurer. They hold over 50% of the rural market and are valued for their face-to-face, advice-led approach to insurance. But with a changing market and shifting consumer expectations, they needed to embrace a digital future, while still delivering the same quality service their reputation was based on.
Fertile ground for growth
When FMG first came to us they had no digital self service offering and they felt they were at risk of being left behind. They were concerned about potential fintech disruption in the rural sector, conscious that customers were increasingly expecting an online self-service option, and aware that they needed to be able to scale efficiently for the future.
At the same time, with a diverse customer base - including residential, lifestyle and farming - and many different types of covers, there was far greater complexity involved here than for most general insurers. FMG needed a way to future proof their business and make it easy for customers to manage their claims online - while ensuring they were still always putting people first.
Planting the seeds
During the discovery phase, we worked with FMG to help define their strategic vision and determine how to bring it to life. This involved consultation with both customers and employees throughout the product lifecycle, and using a combination of focus groups, quantitative surveys, contextual enquiry, interviews to producing journey maps to define the customer experience.
From these insights we designed a flexible digital self-service platform - FMG Connect - that would enable them to meet all of their business goals, while complementing and improving their existing engagement model with their customers.
We then broke down this vision into an actionable roadmap that could be rolled out over the next 24 months.
Fresh pastures
FMG customers are down to earth and practical, so we created designs that would speak directly to them with a pared back, fresh and functionally intuitive approach. Hand illustrated iconography was used to distinguish different product lines and link important pieces of information.
Because their needs were diverse, and their policy options myriad, we produced an extremely flexible IA and modular UX framework, which would allow the solution to elegantly scale for a huge variety of user types, with coverables ranging from a single vehicle, to multiple properties including hundreds of covered items.
A new season
FMG Connect empowers FMG customers. It’s clever functionality means they now have:
More control over their policies: They can add or cancel insured items; amend the value of their insured items within a preapproved range; and lodge, view and complete the processing of simple claims.
More information at their fingertips: They can check the recommended insured value range for their vehicle and view comparable levels of contents cover for their homes.
Quicker reimbursement for their claims: Integration between FMG Connect and FMG’s authorised supplier network allows for easier settlement of claims.
A happy crew
And it’s not just FMG customers who are benefitting from this transformation. Thanks to early consultation across the organisation, FMG Connect has resulted in better ways of working for everyone.
“FMG Connect now saves our customers teams time on after-call activity and they love that because that was the more mundane part of their job,” says FMG’s Chief Client Officer, Glenn Croasdale.
“They love talking to clients and helping them solve their problems and they can now do that without the burden of so much administration.”
Handing over the reins
Key to the success of this project was a great working relationship between Alphero and FMG. “We had a number of conversations up front about the type of organisation we are - which always fit well with Alphero’s culture of transparency, fairness and partnership,” says Glenn.
After 4 years of working together, We have now supported FMG to take the work in-house and continue running the platform themselves.
“In a weird way it’s like watching your child grow up and mature. I’m proud of the product and the application but also the team. We’ve worked very closely with Alphero to build our own capability and they’re now standing on the shoulders of what Alphero did for us.”
Glenn Croasdale.
Chief Client Officer at FMG