by
Nico Meyer
|
April 2025
In a world of automation, where systems and programs have been trained to think for themself and change is happening more rapidly than ever before, the need, or rather demand, for a great user experience has become top priority. The success of a company is often determined not by what they sell, but how they sell it.
The South African insurance industry is at the forefront of driving change and making a global industry better. It is the first to introduce products like critical illness, universal life policies and most recently, needs-matched life insurance. However, as much as quality products are important, the number one cited reason consumers place business with a company, is ease of doing business.
In our industry alone, companies like Pineapple and Naked Insurance have seen massive success. Why? Because they have made the ability to get a quality product easier than ever. The ability to do business anytime from anywhere is their biggest asset.
Looking at the life insurance space
Sure, the requirements to underwrite a life are far more complex than insuring your car. The life insurance space is a highly intermediated market – meaning, most likely you have received financial advice from an expert, and you trust that they will recommend the best options for you. The interesting thing here is that industry research has shown that IFAs’ most cited reason for placing business with a company is not great products, but rather the ease of doing business.
User experience is our theme for 2025
“Design (User Experience) is the silent ambassador of your brand” – Paul Rand. User Experience (UX) will be the Client Operations theme for 2025. We want to create a user experience that is seen as a product, a benefit and a selling point to our financial advisers. We’ll spend much of 2025 and 2026 reviewing our processes and understanding what we can do better, and what our clients feel we should be doing better.
Projects like WorkItem adoption are designed to enhance our ability to assist clients. To ensure efficient and effective processes and ultimately avoid any errors or mistakes. Automating the requirements gathering process will help ensure that clients get feedback as soon as possible. The extra cover buy-up automation is another example of making our unique features come to life for the client and ensuring that we live up to our promise to our policyholders.
We want our service to become a product, and our UX to be an asset.