Commercial Auto Quote Flow MVP
The Project:
The goal of the project was to take our commercial auto quote and bring it into the self service portal. Before this project, all quotes were taken over the phone and added to the system by our internal agents.
The internal system built in Google Sheets versus the external facing quote application
My Role:
For this project I had the responsibilities of Product Manager, Project Manager, and Product Designer.
The Process:
Pie was in the process of building out the commercial auto product. As we were building things, we wanted to make them as lightweight as possible. The first consideration of the quote flow was built in Google sheets. This meant that all the quotes had to be manually given over the phone. I was brought on to bring in the quote flow to our partner portal so that our agents can input their information directly.
Discovery and iterations:
I first met with the commercial auto team to review their current process. I wanted to see what information they needed to get a quote, what steps they typically take, and what we could bring into our quote flow in the portal. For the first round, we wanted to keep it to just the bare minimum that we would need to get a price.
UX testing and prototyping
As we met with the team, we were able to continue to narrow down exactly what was needed. This team was didn't have a dedicated product manager at the time that would lay out all of the items that we needed. So I met with the team periodically to review what I had and to confirm that we truly needed all of the steps. We were able to make some things optional if we weren't sure if the user was going to have that content, and we made some assumptions again to be able to capture the information.
Instead of getting a granular business type, we grouped them into three buckets. The internal associate would later correct this
We wanted the ability to add the drivers license number and state, but don’t actually need that info until the bind flow. We did need the name and age of all of the drivers however, hence why those are not optional
Final Mocks
The final layout followed typical industry practices of combining business info with the the vehicle information, then driver and then we had a catch all for things like coverage selection, and any kind of modifications to the vehicles .
Results
We did have some folks on the commercial auto team that were skeptical that if we released the form without a price that our external agents were not going to use the flow and continue to email our internal agents. What we found was they were willing to type in the information into our form and it ended up being more accurate than our internal agents adding it separately.
An unexpected result that we found was that our portal system was faster than our internal Google sheets, so our internal agents also asked to be given access to our quote flow so that they could start the process in partner portal and then fill out the other fields later in their slower system.
MVP Round 2
The other thing we talked about was presenting coverages. Typically an insurance you want to be able to customize the coverage, but our system was not going to be ready to have the partner portal talk backwards to the Google sheets document. We did decide to go ahead and provide three prices at the end so that the user could see generally what the price would be depending on what coverages they selected.
The initial results page after inputting the customer info
The pricing screen with an estimate based on the coverage levels
Final Results
We were able to build out the flow and we had agents using the experience without us, even marketing it to them. In the states that this was live over half of the submissions were coming through the portal without us, pushing the agents into that flow. We had several repeat users, which was encouraging as we still had the email flow available to the agents.