HoldCover CS

HoldCover is an online insurance aggregator where customers can compare and purchase insurance from different providers in one place.

Its customer service system is a complete customer support and insurance policy administration system, designed and built from scratch by our team. I was responsible for the entire system’s user research, user interface, experience and system design.

Research And System Design

In the research stage, I interviewed our customer support representatives to understand the insurance workflow, their needs and expectations. I analysed and grouped factors into clusters from the interview materials and then mapped them into multiple diagrams to help me understand the system’s priorities, requirements and goals.

From there, I started designing the system on a high level with a system diagram and gradually mapped out the information architecture of each sub-system and its mechanisms to flesh out how it would work. Only then did I start designing the interface.

One of the system’s goals is to relieve the mental workload of support representatives by reflecting the life cycle of insurance policies and customer requests on the system’s design. Design sessions were held with support representatives to make sure the system was more suited to their needs, compared to a generic customer support system.

The system created was similar to a relational database of insurance policies and support tickets. The insurance policies purchased by our customers arrive in a queue and get processed. Any request tickets are linked to the policy, and both are linked to the customer’s profile. Hence, support representatives can quickly reference all linked objects. The insurance policy’s lifecycle is mirrored in the system by status and tags.

Structure

Tickets. All tickets assigned to the representatives are organised in one place for them to clear. They can also snooze open tickets that have no immediate action to perform.

Policy Records. All policies purchased arrive here for support representatives who mainly handle policy issuance. Strong context information and filters help them find policies that need to be processed.

Accounts. Representatives can get a bird’s eye view of a customer’s policies and tickets to help them more effectively.

Admin. All actions under this system are auditable and traceable, important for any insurtech system.

Therefore, representatives responsible for different areas can focus on their work while referencing information and tickets from the entire system. For example, a representative working on delivering insurance policies to our customers can concentrate on the Policies queue and reference information from this customer’s previous request tickets and profile.

User Interface

This customer service system uses GitHub’s Primer design system. Since the system was designed and built simultaneously with the client website’s development, it is more pragmatic to use Primer instead of building our own. Their customer product is similar in complexity, benefiting from GitHub’s design optimisations and refinements.

A sizeable amount of content displayed in this system came in a list format. The goal with these was to concisely and effectively communicate the state of each item in the list.

Afterword

An insurance policy, throughout its lifecycle, can undergo various changes, situations, and statuses that need to be accounted for in this system. While they can be abstracted away on the client’s side, on the customer service system, it is imperative not to oversimplify the process.

The balance is delicate between ease of use and reflection of the task’s inherent complexity. A balanced and predictable system empowers users to handle their tasks effectively.