Allianz Turkey wanted to enhance its mobile application experience in terms of usability, functionality, and technology to serve better and advance in the competition.
Digitalization is a notion which grew in importance globally for each and every sector in the last decade, and insurance is not an exception. However, not all the sectors have a term created for its digitalization, such as "insurtech." There are some factors that set insurance apart and render digitalization one of the most important aspects for insurance sector in the near future.
While highly regulatory nature and conventional agent/broker channels make E2E digitalization harder for the big players in insurance, this creates an opportunity for new players with a disruptive approach to reap the benefits. New players keep emerging with fully digitalized insurance products and with a special focus on customizable and fast solutions to ensure customer satisfaction.
Objective:
Allianz Turkey started its five-month-long strategy definition and re-design journey for Allianz'ım mobile application with the aim to create a seamless mobile channel experience that is enhanced with innovative technologies and functions; but without compromising the core values and services, including:
To this end, Allianz Turkey defined its strategy with user seamless customer experience as the main pillar; the brand started building on this experience design with relevant business targets and processes to create a future-ready application by using all cutting-edge technologies in mobile application landscape.
Allianz Turkey put the customer at the center. The company conducted 20 thorough user interviews and usability tests and 400 surveys to understand how it can answer the growing needs of its customers. Allianz Turkey supported this data with detailed usability heuristics and industry best practices to offer the best experience there is.
Further, the company made sure the business interests are always at its sights. To make sure its changes serve to business targets as much as to the customers, Allianz Turkey conducted business interviews. Company-wide goals were also validated with the whole team in a series of workshops.
Allianz Turkey analyzed all trends and opportunities in insurtech, as seamless customer experience was a must for mobile channels.
Target Audience:
From a demographic standpoint, the application targets all existing and potential Allianz customers. Therefore, the target audience was the general public from diverse socioeconomical backgrounds without any limitations of age or gender.
However, to be able to successfully tackle with this large demographic, Allianz Turkey used two guiding target audience classifications:
Product Ownership: Allianz Turkey conducted extensive research on how an individual behaves to complete their transactions for a certain product group. The company also included potential users without an active Allianz product ownership.
Digital Tendencies: Allianz Turkey paid the utmost attention to separate levels of digital literacy and shaped the customer personas accordingly.
With these guiding classifications, the company focused on behavioral segmentation to provide the best possible experience for all customers.
Creative Strategy:
Recently, there were several consumer surveys which implied a clear decrease in trust levels in the insurance sector. In 2020, a survey conducted by PWC in U.S. market showed that although there is an increasing need for both financial and health insurance, due to conventional communication methods followed by insurance providers, 41 percent of 6,000 consumers surveyed considers switching insurance provider due to a lack of digital capabilities. Further, 15 percent of them identifies lack of digital capabilities as the topmost challenge while interacting with insurers. This shows how big of a paradigm shift COVID-19 caused in insurance sector. To tackle this, Allianz Turkey positioned its creative strategy on top of four crucial building blocks:
One-customer and one-Allianz approach:
Allianz Turkey created the new in-app communication strategy with visible Allianz branding that revolves around explicit and interactive messages to the client, regardless of the insurance type they own. Whether customers have a traffic insurance or a health insurance, they are a part of a large global family with local conveniences.
Personalization and convenience:
Since there are several lines of businesses within Allianz where Allianz'ım application serves customers from each business as cohorts, communications were generalized. The company constructed seamless and convenient ways of reaching the desired content with a clear human connection to all existing processes, such as personal dashboards, with data-driven customized messages and enhanced experience design.
Digitalization of services:
By putting the data to the center, Allianz Turkey aimed to enable real time improvements in experience and to expand customer support to fuel user acquisition and retention by increasing cross-sell and up-sell potential via the application.
Context:
Allianz'ım is a living mobile application with post-sales support at its core. The aim was to expand this into pre-sales journeys and enhanced loyalty campaigns. 2022 was the first year of its transition. Since Allianz Turkey transitioned into a new strategic direction with novel ways of workings; Allianz Turkey have seen positive changes in all its pre-agreed performance indicators as can be seen in upcoming sections.
Overall Campaign Execution:
Allianz'ım mobile application is a part of a larger customer support ecosystem for Allianz Turkey, with long-standing outlets such as customer support hotline, web customer portal, and insurance agents. Allianz Turkey's intention was to promote Allianz'ım as the centerpiece of this ecosystem by increasing the capabilities to cover all topics which would be handled by other channels otherwise.
Main goals of the project were to increase user acquisition and retention to create a frictionless and seamless alternative for other customer support channels. To this end, Allianz channeled a large sum of its resources into its mobile application strategy project.
Mobile Execution:
Since the playground was a living and breathing mobile application, Allianz Turkey utilized agile methodologies heavily. In the early phases of the re-design project, the company relied heavily on how to make transactions easier for the users by conducting customer interviews and usability tests for many users. However, the large scope of the application meets with an audience from all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds meant that no design is final and continuous improvement is a must.
Once the initial re-design phase was over, real-time data gathered from Allianz'ım application itself, web customer portal, and CRM tool used by the customer support team were poured into the data lake to power continuous design and development. This data flow enabled Allianz Turkey to improve and to tweak already existing functions, while creating new journeys in line with users' needs. This continuous data-driven approach is the source that sets Allianz'ım application apart from the other substitute channels in the same ecosystem.
Since Allianz'ım is one of the few insurance applications where you can use a single application for all insurance policy types, there is not a way to position Allianz'ım against direct competitors. However, the public figures were showing that Allianz'ım was already one of the top applications in the sector when it comes to active user base.
Allianz Turkey's target was to reenforce this position by focusing on user growth, retention and time spent in-app, and lifetime value.
As soon as Allianz Turkey started the implementation of the new strategy, the company has seen tangible results in key performance indicators for mobile application.
Compared to the full year of 2021, in 2022 so far, digital penetration has almost doubled by an increase of 92 percent. Before the end of the year, it is expected to exceed 100 percent increase compared to last year. Compared to 2021, active users of the application grew by 35 percent. Average engagement per session increased by 15 percent to 1 minute and 14 seconds. Compared to December 2021, Google Store rating of Allianz'ım app has increased by 0.8 point and has reached to 4.2/5.
