OneDegree, 2021

Virtual Pet Insurance: Insights from User Research

At-A-Glance

Since virtual insurance was still new to the market, we wanted to understand why pet owners chose OneDegree and how they experienced the virtual insurance journey—from purchasing policies to filing claims—to see what we should improve for the next step.

Following this research, I created the following items to help the team better understand our customers:

A journey map of pet owners
3 pet owner personas

Timeline

Jan 2021: Planning,

Feb 2021: Data collection,

Mar 2021: Data analysis

Deliverables

User research. Planned and conducted remote user interviews, performed qualitative data analysis, provided design suggestions, and created and shared reports with teams.

Contributors

Research Mentor: Ivy Huang

Researcher: Tuan Wu

Interviewer: Yolanda Wan, Tuan Wu, Robert Chang, Ivy Huang

Participant recruiting: Ivy Huang, Tuan Wu, Anthony Lin

Pilot test interviewee: Becky Tam, Tracy Tou

Jump to section

01 Background

02 Why did we do this research

02 Why did we do this
research

03 What we want to know

03 What we want to
know

04 How was the process

05 Key Findings

06 Suggestion & Impact

01 Background

By April 2021, our first insurance product, Pawfect Care, had been on the market for about a year.

Since virtual insurance was still new to the market, we wanted to understand why pet owners chose and trusted us and learn about their actual experience throughout the entire insurance process to identify what we should improve for the next step.

Pawfect Care (OneDegree pet insurance)

02 Why did we do this research

Understand how do customers do themselves a favor in Virtual Insurance to improve the experience

Unlike the experience of traditional insurance, customers have to pick up all processes by themselves in the virtual insurance world. No more brokers and agents can help customers manage policies and claims.

As a product team, we collected data from GA and followed up on the issues collected from the customer service team for the past year. We could picture users' behaviors about purchases, but we don't know what users consider when making choices.

We also know some users aren't unsatisfied with the claim experience, but we don't know the reasons. We lacked information about how users manage their policies after purchasing a policy.

We believe that understanding the entire user journey of our customers can help us bring the virtual insurance experience to the next level.

Understand how do customers do themselves a favor in Virtual Insurance to improve the experience

Unlike the experience of traditional insurance, customers have to pick up all processes by themselves in the virtual insurance world.

No more brokers and agents can help customers manage policies and claims.

We also know some users aren't unsatisfied with the claim experience, but we don't know the reasons. We lacked information about how users manage their policies after purchasing a policy.

We believe that understanding the entire user journey of our customers can help us bring the virtual insurance experience to the next level.

03 What we want to know

What things would pet owners consider when selecting pet insurance?
How do pet owners understand the policy?
How’s their journey after purchasing pet insurance? What will they do? What information will they need?
What’s the purpose of pet owners to log in to the OD portal?
What’s the problem they may encounter when filing a claim?

04 How was the process

Remote Interview (about 50min)

Participants would be asked to share their experience and the problems they had encountered, focusing on the below topic:

Past insurance experience and insurance understanding.

The entire journey of pet insurance, including the reason to purchase, the things to consider when selecting pet insurance, the experience of seeing a vet after purchasing pet insurance, and the process for the claim and policy management.

Participants

17 OneDegree pet insurance policyholders
Age range from 20 to 49 years old.
10 male, 7 female.
All of them have at least 1 OneDegree pet policy.
All of them have logged in to OneDegree portal at least once in the last 3 months.
16 of them have completed the claim at least 3 times.

05 Key Finding

Experience needs to be improved: Claim Experience of Online And Offline

After analyzing the qualitative data of users’ feedback from interviews, we found that the most destructive issues are not in our online purchase flow.

(Pet Owner Insurance Journey)

I created a user journey map of Pet Owner to help our teams understand what our customers encounter when they claim their policies in real life. And apparently, users’ experience worsened when they started collecting the documents for the claim from the vet clinic.

I created a user journey map of Pet Owner to help our teams understand what our customers encounter when they claim their policies in real life.

And apparently, users’ experience worsened when they started collecting the documents for the claim from the vet clinic.

3 Main Issues

I collected users’ quotes from the interviews and found three main issues with our offline claim process cooperating with vet clinics.

3 types of Pet Owners

I also built the personas of different owner types based on how they understand pet insurance products and terms, what strategies they follow when considering an insurance plan, and what was the experience of taking their pets to the vet.

By these personas, I suggested our Marketing team focus on our target users as those who belong to the type of Learn From Savvy since if someone recommends OneDegree Pet Insurance, they are the people most likely to buy.

Our marketing team pushes the referral campaign firmly after our research.

Learn About The Campagin

06 Suggestion & Impact

Suggestions for improving the Pet Insurance experience

I provided 7 suggestions and differentiate their priority, for our team to evaluate which enhancement should we go first to improve our online and offline experience for users to submit claims.

(Example 1 of improvement suggestion)

(Example 2 of improvement suggestion)

Priority charts for evaluating which to improve first

(Priority charts for evaluating which to improve first)

Improvement Case: Vet Clinic Receipt for Claim Filing

One of the suggestions and improvements we have launched is to provide Vet Clinic Receipt Example for users. Users have a standard and actual example to show to the vet clinics when collecting documents for claims.

One of the suggestions and improvements we have launched is to provide Vet Clinic Receipt Example for users.

Users have a standard and actual example to show to the vet clinics when collecting documents for claims.

View Receipt Example

Made with 💙 and Fluffy Unicorn Magic.

01 Background

02 Why did we do this research

03 What we want to know

04 How was the process

05 Key Findings

06 Suggestion & Impact

Section

01 Background

02 Why did we do this research

03 What we want to know

04 How was the process

05 Key Findings

06 Suggestion & Impact

Section

01 Background

02 Why did we do this research

03 What we want to know

04 How was the process

05 Key Findings

06 Suggestion & Impact

Section

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