How USAA is modernizing interactions with members

Digital Insurance spoke with Ryan Barth, vice president of enterprise digital at USAA, about the rollout of the insurer’s modernized mobile app and how its customer service strategy informs its technology efforts. He joined the company 26 years ago through an internship, and began his current role in August.

How do you describe your role and responsibilities at USAA?

I'm in charge of all the platforms and capabilities that our clients use; our bank, our P&C insurance company and our life insurance company. That includes the mobile app–making sure that the mobile app is healthy, fast, reliable and stable. We have interactive voice response (IVR) and an enterprise virtual assistant. USAA Insurance now has a digital team that are insurance experts and are making the experiences better for getting an insurance policy, filing a claim, doing service-type things in the app or the site.

What's your vision for digital technology at USAA?

Our approach is our integrated digital strategy. We want to go where our members are and not make members or potential members come to our app, digital assets or digital properties. We want to build a platform that has specific advanced APIs that we could put our application into, like Instagram, for example. If a member's on Instagram, maybe there's something military-affiliated there that gets our attention. We want to use AI to see if they potentially could be a member of USAA. Wherever our members are socializing, wherever they're engaging, we want to be where they are. We can engage with them on their own time, on things that interest them, and not expect them to always come to us.

What are your near-term priorities for digital and what determines success for those goals?

We're getting our new modernized app out in production. But even when we're done with the phased rollout, which is scheduled to be completed in June, we still have a lot of work to do in integrating the app and creating a great experience in each of the different components of the app.

We've redesigned the initial homepage and we've redesigned some additional pages as the member goes deeper into the app. We want to make sure that we're embedding that experience regardless of where they go in the app. We know there's additional pages within the banking section or within the insurance section that we need to build out. So it has the same design and look and feel as the member sees up front.

We also want to simplify what users do as they get deeper into the app. In the near-term, we aim to integrate across the entire ecosystem of our mobile application. We’re working on a patent for an index that measures what the experience is like, what's the navigation like, and what's the acquisition or servicing like. Many indices roll up into one specific index that we're using for our mobile application. It goes back to fulfilling our mission, which is to secure the financial security of our members and their families. If we're doing that, we know that we're going to be successful.

As part of the app upgrade, we added a search engine. We didn’t have that in the past. This search engine is predictive, using natural language and AI. The member gets a seamless, consistent experience regardless of how they engage with our natural language or chatbot.

Summary pages for umbrella policies, and auto or property policies, are being redesigned. They will have that same simple refreshed look and feel as the homepage. We've taken a human-centered design approach to make sure that we're putting what members do the most right up front in the header, so they won’t have to search. That’s our main focus for the insurance specific section of the app between now and the end of the year.

Seeing the scope of all the changes and all the technology development that you've seen, what do you make of it all?

A lot of companies, in my opinion, don't listen to their customer needs. I feel like we do an amazing job of knowing our members more than anybody else. We have that military connection. We have that military affiliation and culture. The recruiting that we do revolves around that. We bring in people that already know the military and know what our members' needs are. It makes the technology side so much easier because when you're building things for our members, we have a lot of folks who already know what those needs are.

This app upgrade was so important to us because our members are all over the world. So they need to be able to do what they need to do from a financial services perspective, like literally in the palm of their hand. So we have to make sure that our app is fast and simple and reliable because that is the number one way that they interact with us. And that was really one of the main impetus of us doing this app upgrade and this new modernized version of an experience for them.

How is customer feedback influencing your digital strategy?

If someone is engaging with our chatbot or our virtual system on the app, they don't want to have to come back later and start the conversation over. We’re working to thread those experiences, so we can take whatever's in context from that chatbot and give it right to that frontline rep so they can continue that conversation. Another thing that we're working through is how to put that conversation on hold. Think of it like a text message: You're not going to text somebody every day, but you want to be able to remember what you might have texted them about. We want to make it easier for our frontline reps.

We're also upgrading our artificial intelligence right now. We are implementing a new natural language engine that will thread conversations between phone calls and IVR digital voice channels. Now, it’s intent-based. They have to say the exact keywords to do what they want to do. We're going to use artificial intelligence to make that smarter and make it very conversational. We’re going to use that same natural language engine for our chatbot. That will make the member experience identical regardless of where they engage.

We are using machine learning to personalize experiences that are unique to the member. We have hundreds of data insights that we've gathered around our members. Now we have about 70 different experiences that we can provide when the member logs in.