Delivering advanced real-time UX innovation

The timing is perfect, as the award-winning InsurTech has just completed a major user experience upgrade to its real-time parametric product suite, which is being rolled out globally this month. Designing a high-quality, real-time user experience (UX) can be highly complex but is essential when serving a global partner network that pursues competitive advantage through the effective delivery of customer-centric assistance solutions. Here, Richard shares key insights on the process.

Focusing on the needs of partners and end users

The needs of our partners and their end users were at the heart of our white label responsive web app redesign. A high-quality user experience is a Blink Parametric imperative. We all appreciate the value of a simple, seamless service experience delivered at speed, particularly when facing frustrating or stressful travel delays and inconvenience in unfamiliar surroundings.

Building on our experience from running the service and insights from our partners and end users we worked to deliver major advancements:

1. To the real-time end user experience and functionality of our Flight Disruption and Lost/ delayed Luggage assistance services.
2. To the customisation options available to our insurance partners and brands.

The service configuration, languages, naming, hosting, branding, colour palette, visual assets and all content can be tailored to ensure the end-user experience aligns seamlessly with partners’ brand, tone of voice and proposition requirements whilst being powered and fully managed by Blink Parametric. By offering a responsive web app we are able to offer a rich, tailored experience across mobile, tablet, laptop and desktop devices from a single technology solution without the overheads or constraints associated with native apps.

Steps to success

Building on a solid foundation, our new white label web app is built on the same proven Blink Parametric platform and API that sits behind its predecessor, taking advantage of these underlying capabilities. We went back to basics and mapped out all the tasks and activities that end users need to complete at the different stages of engagement with our solutions, from first interaction through to fulfilment of a resolution.

This mapping included details of all of the configuration options that lead to different experiences or user journeys and the interplay with back-office support processes available via our support portal. This was overlaid with insights from partner and end user feedback that identified user pain points and opportunities for improvement, all as part of a highly consultative process.

We also carefully mapped out scenarios where end user circumstances or the third party data available to our systems limit our ability to fulfil the entire end-to-end journey automatically. Whilst rare, these cases can be frustrating for users and can lead to ad-hoc manual intervention which adds delays and cost. Through understanding and working through these scenarios we were able to create or redesign user journeys and workflows that optimise the experience for all parties. These were converted into wireframes and ultimately high-fidelity responsive designs for our development team.

As well as the time spent working through the end-user experience, we have also spent significant time working through the underlying tools and processes to simplify and streamline the management of content and themes both at time of initial implementation and in-life. We then developed the new web app from the ground up in order to benefit fully from current UI technologies and best practices.

Global roll out

The new web app is available right now for our Flight Disruption and Lost Luggage solutions and all new customers will benefit from the new experience and capabilities. We are simultaneously working on existing partner migration to ensure their customers and end users benefit from the enhanced functionality. Going forward we have an ongoing programme of work on the web app which will see enhancements and extensions introduced on a regular basis. Any evolutions that affect the user experience will be deployed as configurable options so that our partners can take advantage of them as and when they align with their business objectives.

How the Blink Parametric Flight Disruption solution works:

An insured traveller simply registers their flight details prior to travel. Blink Parametric then monitors the flight(s) in real-time. Any delay that occurs to the registered flight automatically results in a traveller being notified and being offered choices that help alleviate the stress and consequences of the delay. These assistance options can include airport lounge access if a flight is delayed by a predetermined number of hours or a cash payout per traveller, which is directly issued. We even integrate with a global service that can provide hotel accommodation reservations for extended delays or flight rebooking for customers. The traveller selects their preferences via their smartphone. The average resolution time is four minutes.

For the travel insurance sector, we specialise in high-frequency, low-value claims with market-leading real-time propositions for flight delay, flight cancellation, checked luggage delay and loss.