Scoring high in a low-touch industry – a user-centric mobile app for Vanbreda
Vanbreda Risk & Benefits is Belgium’s largest independent insurance broker, providing solutions to the risk-related concerns of companies, institutions and individuals since the 1930s. Among their broad portfolio is a range of health care products and services to safeguard the health of employees across hundreds of companies in Belgium.
Insurance is often considered to be a ‘low-touch’ industry, i.e. where customer contact tends to be relatively rare. However, when those touchpoints do actually occur, it’s usually because of a problem.
In these moments – especially when the problem is health-related – a smooth, frictionless experience is more important than ever, and is a key driver of overall customer satisfaction.
Already convinced of the value of digital tools and solutions in delivering a top-class service, Vanbreda Risk & Benefits asked us to help them ignite the next phase of their digital growth and take health insurance admin firmly into the digital age.
Working closely with the Vanbreda project team, we carried out an ‘as-is’ analysis to understand the existing processes and build a comprehensive view of the needs of both Vanbreda and its end customers, i.e. the policyholders themselves.
Once we identified the features that would bring the most value, we developed a strong product concept that not only kept user goals in mind at all times, but that would also improve operational efficiency. Security and privacy were also a crucial element of the product design, given the fact that sensitive personal and financial data would be stored in the app.
The end result was a powerful but intuitive mobile app that lets users manage all aspects of their policies and claims from the comfort of their own mobile device – from submitting medical expenses and tracking reimbursements, to declaring hospitalisations and consulting policy details.
of users confirm admin is much easier with the new app
active users within the first 8 weeks
“The added value of November Five lays in its customer-centric thinking, the importance of UX/UI and being a true partner who challenges us to deliver high value and an efficient product for our end-users.”
Manager Innovation & Customer Communication at Vanbreda Risk & Benefits
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Over the course of our long-lasting partnership with Vanbreda Risk & Benefits, we’ve supported the company in delivering seamless digital experiences that make their clients’ lives easier.
With this project, Vanbreda’s deep understanding of its end clients’ needs, wishes and expectations helped us build a solid understanding of how we could leverage digital to make health insurance admin as straightforward as possible.
As well as guaranteeing an intuitive user experience in the dedicated mobile app, we also explored how we could ensure the very highest operational efficiency. For example, we integrated quality improvement measures to automatically enhance the readability of uploaded medical expenses even documents that are less sharp can be swiftly processed.
Dealing with admin is never fun, and when it comes to health insurance admin, the last thing people need is to have to search for policy details, and fill in endless paperwork.
Thanks to the new app, policy details and insurance cards of all family members are safely stored in the app for easy access, medical expenses can be submitted simply by uploading a photo of the expense, and notifications keep users up-to-date on the progress of their reimbursement claims.
Hospital declarations can also be made directly within the app. To streamline this process, only new and relevant information needs to be added – since the user’s standard information is already securely stored in the app – meaning that a new hospitalisation can now be declared in just two minutes.
We carefully considered the UX/UI design of all the mobile screens at every stage of the process to ensure a seamless, intuitive user experience.
Within eight weeks of the app’s launch, over 37,000 users were actively using the mobile app (on Android and iOS), with a customer satisfaction score of more than 80% (with 12% giving a neutral score). This went up to over 135,000 users within the first weeks.
In terms of the app’s functionalities, over 90% of users confirmed that that app offers a great improvement for the submission of medical expenses and hospital declarations.
As well as proving a winner with customers, Vanbreda employees are now also enjoying more streamlined operational processes thanks to the project.
