MySelective: Revolutionizing Customer Experience & Digital Risk Management

In a world that demands instant results and seamless digital interactions, the insurance industry faces the imperative of meeting and exceeding customer expectations. The MySelective portal and mobile app exemplify how Selective Insurance has embraced this challenge, transforming a convenient customer tool into an indispensable asset for digital engagement and risk mitigation. 

This session will delve into the MySelective journey, revealing how customer feedback has driven continuous enhancements, resulting in a surge of user adoption and satisfaction ratings. We will explore the strategic integration of Selective's industry-leading safety and loss control resources within the MySelective experience, offering customers personalized proactive risk management solutions. 

Presented by Selective's Customer Experience (CX) leads Keith Bregman and Sarah Dignardi, this interactive case study will demonstrate the synergy between innovative digital solutions and actionable user insights. Attendees will gain valuable knowledge on fostering an outcome-oriented digital ecosystem that captivates customers and contributes to the bottom line, mitigating risk for insureds and elevating the overall customer experience. 

Join us to uncover the transformative impact of MySelective and learn how to harness the power of digital platforms to create a competitive edge in the insurance landscape.


Transcription:

Keith Bregman (00:08):
Noon. How's everyone doing? So my name is Keith Bregman. I'm here with my colleague Sarah Dignardi. We work in the customer experience department here at Selective Insurance. Being in the customer experience group, we recognize we're the last session of the day and we are the only thing that stands between you and a cocktail. So we promise that we're going to finish on time

(00:31):
And customer experience. We understand and fond when I speak, I fondly say that Amazon has ruined it for all of us, meaning that essentially we're not just competing with other insurers, with other agencies, we're competing against all other service providers because the level of a customer expectation is so heightened today that they expect from their service providers, that heightened experience. They're paying a bill when they call, they expect you to know their name. I call American Airlines, they know my flight number. They tell me when I'm taking off before I even talk to anybody, right? So those kind of things from a customer experience perspective, that's what we focus on all day. We're worried about reaching customer expectations, especially in our changing demographics today. We understand there's a younger group of folks that are going to be purchasing insurance. I fondly remember a colleague who no longer works with us who was younger than me obviously, but said, if I need to talk to someone on the phone, I'm done. I'm moving on to the next person. So we need to be ready for that. We need to be ready for that as well as our existing customer base. So with that, I'm going to hand it off to Sarah so she can speak a little bit about our award-winning mobile app. My selective.

Sarah Dignardi (01:40):
Hi everybody. Thank you for being troopers and joining us for this last session of the day. We're going to make this as engaging and interesting as possible and we will have time for Q&A at the end. I'm Sarah Dignardi. I'm the person that manages my selective portal for selective insurance, which is an honor and a challenge. At the same time, we're going to dive in with the most exciting slide next. I'm kidding. This is required by our lawyers and we'll get in a lot of trouble if we don't pause here for a couple seconds for you to take in this very interesting verbiage by a quick show of hands, has anybody in this room heard of Selective Insurance before? Okay, that's more than I thought we would get. That's great. For those of you who haven't, we are a super regional property casualty insurer based in Northwest New Jersey. We focus on both commercial lines and personal lines. We're about 80% commercial and 20% personal. We're also one of the top five. Write your own flood carriers in the country.

(02:51):
For a quick agenda today, we're going to first walk you through a history and evolution of my selective as a platform. I'm going to go through some of the feedback that we've captured, the key metrics that we pay attention to in order to track how we're doing, and then we're going to do a deep dive into one of our recent enhancements that Keith is going to walk you through afterwards. We hope that you're going to understand the importance of why you need to really analyze feedback from all channels, how you can get to the root cause of what issues you're having when you do that, we're going to help you identify when you can gain value by undertaking strategic partnerships, you'll know that it's just as important to focus on the how of what you're building as it is to focus on what of what you're building and hopefully you'll be more comfortable when change is imminent and you'll be able to dive right in. You can kind of see in these grayed out screenshots behind the circles, examples of what our portal used to look like when it was introduced back in 2009, which sounds like ancient history versus what it looks like today.

(04:06):
We used to focus on this being a very function over form portal. We had a lot of features in here. You could see your policy, you could execute transactions, you could do billing management, but the problem was that people did not find it easy. I'm sure you have some examples from your own personal lives where you wanted to just log on quickly, get some transaction done and then you started to struggle. That is not what we wanted, but that's what we noticed was happening with our users. In fact, one example from my own life, I was at a conference in Vegas a couple years ago.

Keith Bregman (04:44):
Hold on, Sarah, whatever you did in Vegas should stay in Vegas, so maybe a different example.

Sarah Dignardi (04:50):
Keith never lets me tell this story. Another recent example I have for those of you from the northeast that have an E-ZPass account, I had to log in last week and this is because my teenage son just got his driver's license, which is terrifying, but that's a different story and I had to add his license plate to my account. That should be pretty straightforward, but it took me more minutes than it should have to do this simple task. I don't look forward to logging into E-ZPass for any reason because of things like that. The same was happening here. So we have undertaken a series of upgrades over the years to try to change that. We've established various listening posts, so these are the areas where we're capturing feedback. First is our voice of the customer. This includes our transactional and relationship surveys that we conduct periodically along with our usability study platform. The usability studies are especially important because they're giving us qualitative feedback that gives us nuanced and detailed contextual reasons as to why users are behaving a certain way or expecting something a certain way. We also track our app store reviews in both Google and Apple and site reviews on Google,

(06:11):
And we conduct in-depth competitive comparisons periodically so that we can understand what some of our competitors both inside and outside the insurance industry are up to.

Keith Bregman (06:22):
We also take a look at usage trends. Why are folks abandoning? Where's the friction at? That's tremendous in when we're enhancing the mobile app and understanding when what's going on and trying to eliminate frictions. We also take a look at industry trends. One of the largest industry trends within the insurance arena is going paperless. We understand what competitors are doing. We then do we also enhance that way? And then again, technology changes and improvements. We move from a touch enablement to face enable. How annoying is it when you have an app and there's no face ID and you got to actually now type something in? What a pain, right? So we are looking at all those listening posts and it's super important for us when we make enhancements.

Sarah Dignardi (07:06):
And just to add one piece to this, it's important to stitch together all the feedback that you're getting from these various areas and look at it holistically, not just taking one as gospel and moving forward full steam ahead. So strategic partnerships, one of my first projects at Selective Insurance years and years ago,

Keith Bregman (07:29):
Hundred years ago, I mean 20 years ago,

Sarah Dignardi (07:31):
Close to a hundred years ago, was working on the very first implementation of my selective mobile app. This was something that no one inside selective insurance had ever worked on before. Our development teams hadn't built mobile anything. Our business analyst teams hadn't built mobile anything, and our business stakeholders weren't really, not even everybody had a smartphone yet. That's how long ago this was. So there were some obvious situations of you don't know what you don't know. We partnered with an external firm to help us with this project and because of that, we were able to release our mobile app in only six months. If we tried to do this ourselves and learn everything we needed to learn before doing our implementation, it would've taken us probably six years and that is not what we wanted to do. So strategic partners can help you enhance your own in-house skillset. They had experience in the mobile space, the development space, we had experience in the insurance space. So we had a lot of thought provoking conversations about why something would work that they suggested or why it wouldn't work in certain cases due to regulations or otherwise.

(08:42):
I talked about the faster ramp up and speed to market. We continued that partnership afterwards because we knew it was super valuable to do so. And then this platform handled not just a downloadable mobile app, but you could visit selective.com on a browser log into the portal and it would be friendly on your mobile device, which amazingly, there are still some websites that don't do that and I don't know how that's possible in 2024. On the next slide, we're going to have a short video that provides a feedback clip of our usability studies. It's going to show you some interesting angles on why this is so important to include in your process for improvement.

Audience Member 1 (09:28):
How easy was it to find the billing information? Well, you click up here to get bills to me mean your electric bill or your water bill. Apparently this is meaning the billing account I guess by what I'm seeing.

Sarah Dignardi (09:49):
So have any of you ever undertaken any sort of project or conversation and you thought you knew what the other party was going to provide as feedback or you thought that what you had put together, maybe it was a slide deck you had put together and your audience was lost or you thought for sure, no, this process is easy, it's navigable, I can do this, and then you put it in front of a user or a stakeholder and they're like, I don't even know what I'm looking at. That same thing happened to us here. We did never expect this study wasn't even talking about that particular piece of our portal, but we heard this feedback and other users echoed that same feedback. So we didn't even know that was a friction point, but this listening to this user go through the steps helped us uncover that.

Keith Bregman (10:36):
And when we were looking at maybe exploring, getting into user testing and using an external partner to help us, we did a pilot and we were like, I can't figure out why people are not signing up for autopay, right? Seems pretty good. Everybody likes autopay. You just kind of do it. And we put that pilot through the user testing and one of the first things we saw unanimously, the folks that were looking at it, the users were confused. They're like, autopay, I'm paying for my auto insurance. What is auto pay? And so we're so far deep in the weeds we didn't know. Holy cow. So we changed it to automatic payment. Unfortunately that was done after the build and we had to go back and spend, I don't know how much money fixing that, too much money, but doing it ahead of time and doing it before the build is huge. But understanding what people are seeing, how they're engaging is a huge piece of feedback that we recommend. User testing whenever you're building or looking to enhance anything.

Sarah Dignardi (11:37):
And to further what Keith said, that's probably the single biggest benefit of this type of feedback and testing is we were able to conduct this without writing a single line of code. So it's very preemptive, it's not reactive. You're reducing rework and delivering a better product from day one, which is great. So because of studies like that and aggregating all of our other feedback from various sources, these are some examples of a major redesign that we had started planning about five years ago and then released about four years ago. Shortly after our release, within about six months, we had earned three awards which we had never had before. So that made us very proud and it's proof that this process does work. Some animations to walk you through additional screens and here's some examples of reviews from our app store and from Google directly from our customers. After that release, we went from consistently constructive and sometimes outright negative feedback. Say, wow, your app is the worst. Or Oh, I can't find anything on this site, which is not what we were striving for to positive reviews. Wow, this is easy. Thank you so much. It's very good to use. I can find what I need. And that was further proof that we were on the right track.

Keith Bregman (13:06):
And if you're going to take anything away from this slide too, you see the underlying themes of this, right? And there's three major ones that I see, right? Easy to use. That's a big one. They can actually perform tasks that they're looking to do, file a claim, pay a bill, and the third one, saving me time. So if you take anything away from any sort of enhancement, if you hit three of those, you're amazing. If you hit two of them, you're great, right? But those are the kind of underlining themes and trends that we were striving to do and we obviously did it. And we now have an award-winning app and self-service portal

Sarah Dignardi (13:40):
And easy to use probably being the most important one there, because no matter how rich your feature is, if it's not easy to use, you won't get the business value from it because people just won't use it. They'll find another avenue and might not ever try again. Here's the summary of some key metrics that we've been tracking since we released that major redesign. Our mobile app rating, I don't even want to say it out loud, but was only 2.6 stars. Poultry not where we wanted to be.

Keith Bregman (14:14):
That was back when Sarah started in grade school at Selective.

Sarah Dignardi (14:18):
We got that all the way up to 4.7 stars, which is if you're in the app store and you're looking at downloading an app and you see 2.6, you're going to ask yourself, is this even worth putting on my phone? Why is it so terrible? What's going on? But 4.7, you don't think twice about downloading it. So that enables us to gather more momentum from users that we haven't gotten to download yet.

(14:44):
And just a reminder, this app has been out for over 10 years. Our user adoption in that three year period went up by 20%, which is huge. So for a system that we've had, our policy holders know about it, we always have consistent marketing, we still were able to grow by 20%. We have a transaction for certificate of insurance, which is a huge value add from both the carrier perspective and from our independent agents because it saves both of us a ton of time. When customers can self-serve, that transaction utilization went up by 52%. And overall transactions including billing policy information, payments claims, and claim information up by 127%. We also noticed that there's a correlation between our customer retention and utilization of my selective either web or mobile. And as I mentioned before, you might've noticed the timeframe where we were doing this redesign. It went live right around the time covid happened. Covid helped shape some of our additional future enhancements because we didn't know what was going to happen in the future. There was a huge need all of a sudden for more digital tools because physical wasn't even an option. And that led us to our next project, which Keith is going to take you to our risk management center

Keith Bregman (16:13):
In looking at having a really great app and self-service portal and you have customer engagement. Well then from an insurance perspective, what's the next logical step? So we took a look, a hard look, and we're thinking about it, and we came up with the risk management center and it was developed through market research and customer feedback and agency feedback. And this was something people were really looking for, especially for our commercial line side. It's basically all for our commercial line side, but we have three factions. We have large business, we have medium, we have middle market, and then we have small business. And so really at the end of the day, the goal was to give an immersive experience for our customers so they can help manage some of their risks that they may be having and maybe seeing.

(17:03):
So going back, we took a look at the business problem. What was the business problem? Why would we want this risk management center? Well, essentially we have a great risk management department, but they only can see a small amount of folks within our book of business. It's usually the large accounts and the majority of our business is in middle market and small. So how do we open that up to everyone and let them enjoy all of the wealth and knowledge we have, all the resources we have, how can they become better? I like to call better insureds, really, how do they manage their risk so they don't have to shut their doors because there is an issue from something they could have really prevented. So the solution really at the end of the day, it was a scalability solution. It was a digital solution that we can actually enhance my selective and put this risk management center within the walls of our self-service portal.

Sarah Dignardi (17:56):
And this became even more important with inflation starting to run out of control not long after covid happened. So our losses went up, cost to fix went up, and that meant we needed to focus even more on that to help control that.

Keith Bregman (18:12):
But this wasn't done within a six month or a year period. This was a long undertaking. Took us, what was it, about two years?

Sarah Dignardi (18:19):
Yeah, two to three years.

Keith Bregman (18:21):
And it started in our innovation group under idea assessment. And then I know this is a little bit of an eye chart, but I just wanted to kind of give you the breadth of all that went into actually coming up with this idea. We had design thinking sessions and then a scheduling port. We actually even put the decision on hold after we were looking at some of the feedback that we were getting. And finally through vendor research and proof of concept, we came to the conclusion and we delivered this risk management center just what, a month ago within the My Selecto,

Sarah Dignardi (18:51):
Not even a month ago, only about two and a half weeks ago. And we're getting good feedback so far, which is great.

Keith Bregman (19:00):
But one of the aspects of it, again, and this is harping back on the idea of trying to understand what customers want because we don't want to have a risk management center and nobody using it. So we want to understand out of all the capabilities that we have or we wanted to offer, what really should we prioritize? What should we look at? What do customers, what would they use? And we are looking at agency feedback and we kind of did this cool thing, which I thought was pretty interesting. We said to our user group, Hey, if we gave you a hundred dollars, where would you spend that money? So here's a list of the features that we're looking at. If you had the a hundred bucks yourself, where would you spend it? And as you can see, you take a look, live chats with a risk mitigation specialist, these online assessments, risk mitigation assessments, training videos or resource center, those were the four top ones. That's what really actually resonated with the customer. So we want to deliver that. So before we have this little video that shows you what it looks like and where we have today, you can see what we have, the online assessments, expert support knowledge center, and then something near and dear to my heart, policy holder Perks. I really deal with value added services within the organization. It's kind of a new frontier for selective looking at value added services. But we figured that the risk management center really was the place to put our value added services, which we market now as policy holder perks.

Audience Member 2 (20:23):
Learn how to help lower your business risks with the risk management center. In my selective take online assessments to identify your risks and reduce them by following best practices. If you need additional guidance, you can get expert support, including answers to frequently asked questions. Visit the knowledge center to find on demand articles and engage videos you can use to train the team to get started today.

Keith Bregman (20:52):
And I want to add something else too, especially when it comes to the knowledge center, and I like to call it me being from North Jersey, it's kind of like a diner menu and you're taking a look at it and you're saying, I don't know what I want, but we kind of know what you want because we know who you are when you come in. So how cool would it be if the diner man, you could tell you, oh, I know you and you're going to look for a Taylor Ham, egg and cheese, so I'm only going to show you breakfast stuff versus, oh, I know you and I know you're going to look for a grilled chicken salad and I'm only going to give you now show you the salad. So we kind of do that. So what we do is curate all the material on a carousel and we deliver to our customer what's most relevant to them, essentially.

(21:31):
So if I know you're a workers' comp policy holder, and we know that as you enter into my selective in the portal, we're going to make sure that top of mind, top of things all in the knowledge center or they're going to be the articles about workers' comp, right? We're not going to show to a fleet auto policy holder stuff about manufacturing. It doesn't make sense. Now you have access to all the knowledge, but we want it to be consumable and understandable, especially by line of business. So we were able to also put that in there as well to make it a more personable experience and something that's contextual. So again, two important things when you're trying to drive engagement, especially if something that has a ton of information. I told you we were going to be brief, now you're holding, now you're holding us up from drinking. No, it's okay. And now we actually, we have a lot of time. This will be easy. Okay.

Audience Member 3 (22:23):
Just curious on that last point, did you buy the content for your knowledge center or did you create it from your own?

Sarah Dignardi (22:31):
It's another strategic partnership. That's what I figured. Yeah,

Keith Bregman (22:38):
It's coming.

Audience Member 4 (22:42):
What can you share about your build your own flood policy process or state specific regulations that allow that? I spoke to that at the beginning of the

Keith Bregman (22:54):
Presentation. Build your own flood policy. I thought you said that. No. So from a flood insurer. So Flood is a federal program and we service it. So we're one of the top five that service the actual program. So we have a whole flood division and we worry about how do we get, and we're all 50 states and we're doing a lot of, we insure a lot or service the insurance for a lot of these customers that we wouldn't normally have a regular CL policy for or APL policy for. We kind of stay away from the coast. We're pretty conservative, but we just kind of service that. And from a customer experience perspective, it's a lot of trying to get awareness out there, making sure that our agents, because we have independent agents, that they're actually wanting to write it with us. And what the person who runs flood with is very keen on also are value added services. So they also provide a discount to pods, let's say that they put on our website for flood if you have a problem or you can get a discount for pods if you have to store your contents while you get construction done. So I hope that answers the question. Yeah. Okay.

(24:08):
Any other questions?

Audience Member 5 (24:12):
Really enjoyed seeing all the great progress and implementations you've done. Can you share anything about what's next, where you're going to continue to evolve with maybe segmentation, personalization, other parts of CX? So you haven't

Keith Bregman (24:24):
Like paid, she buying you a drink after this. I mean, thank you. Yeah,

Sarah Dignardi (24:30):
I bought everybody a drink that's out there. Personalization is huge on our radar, so we want to incorporate that everywhere from our communication program and further into my selective to help make this even more tailored to our customers. We're also looking at what other resources we can build into my selective to make it easier for even your basic, how to find policy information, which as insurance professionals, that's back of the hand for us, but as the average Joe that's coming into buy insurance, they don't know a lot about it. So however we can increase that ease of use to get more engagement, that's also huge for us. And helping expand access to our portal.

Keith Bregman (25:13):
And I'm selfishly, again, I have the value added services side, but also customer engagement. We are on the precipice of adding a secure message center, which is fantastic for me because I think it opens up another avenue of communication rather than just email. We can actually deep link within the mobile app if we have the secure message center, like, hey, don't forget, do you want to go paperless? And it'll put you right to where it is. Or Hey, your bill is due, don't forget, and it'll put you right to the billing page. So that's a huge one. And another one from a commercial lines perspective we're looking to do is add. You can actually designate certain folks. So if you just want your controller to see the billing slot, you put 'em as a user person from the safety management perspective is great. We see our safety managers saying, yeah, we go out to a job site and we talk to a customer, but that's like a superintendent, that's not somebody in the office. If that person could have safety management access and just see the safety management, actually the risk management center, that would be great. So we're looking to, that's really, I think on the next phase of it, I know it's a burden to do that. It's a big lift and we're working through that

Sarah Dignardi (26:25):
And also looking into how we can incorporate video as a channel to help increase engagement. And I'd be remiss if we didn't mention AI. That's the hot topic on everybody's top of mind. So we're trying to brainstorm ways that we could incorporate various AI tools to help our customers journey both inside the portal and in other areas such as value added services. Any other questions?

Keith Bregman (26:50):
Okay,

Audience Member 6 (26:55):
Thank you. Great presentation. Fantastic. Do you guys deal directly with the insured or do you go through agents?

Keith Bregman (27:03):
Agents, independent agents. So

Audience Member 6 (27:04):
What do they think about you directly interacting with your customer?

Keith Bregman (27:08):
So that's a great question. So in 2017, that was really a struggle, right? Because at first we had 20% of our shared customer email addresses and understandably so, agents were like, I'm not sharing, that's my book of business. No way. We spent a lot of time talking to agents saying, Hey, look, we're looking to help folks do transactional work. We don't think you should be transactional, A button pusher somebody to help somebody pay a bill. I'm glad you're there, but you really should be focusing your efforts on being the trusted insurance advisor. There's no app in the world yet that's going to say, Hey, customers like you really should be getting this sort of umbrella. That's the trusted insurance advisor. That's where you're making money just to help somebody pay a bill. I'm not going to say that it's worthless because it's a good touch point, but it's again, let them use transactional leverage, what we've put in millions and millions of dollars into a mobile app to push your customers into that. So I think that message resonated and then covid hit and that message really resonated. And that's where we are today.

Sarah Dignardi (28:17):
And the talent drain that agents are also feeling in addition to carriers, I think that has helped convert some of the late adopters to help them realize when they can't hire somebody to answer these phone calls or return customer questions or get that payment in the door in time, they know that they can say, you know what, customer, go ahead and download this app. Log onto this website. You can do all those things yourself. Call me with a question. But that helps reduce their call volume a ton. Okay,

Audience Member 6 (28:45):
Awesome. Thank you. You're

Sarah Dignardi (28:46):
Welcome.

Keith Bregman (28:46):
Yeah, and just one other item on that. So we had a big proactive communication push, and we had over and back then it was in our billing contact center, over 300,000 calls. A third, over a third of those calls to us, the insurer was three questions. How much do I owe once my bill due? Did you get my check? So what we did, and that was a big push, let us get the customer emails and we can send out a proactive communication, a two and 10 day billing notice. It dropped calls to our agents to us, and that really proved it. But it was a really good call out because that was a struggle and my boss and I spent many days on the road to agencies kind of pulling teeth, but it definitely resonated. We don't see that much. Agents aren't really asking that question anymore. They don't. Oh, and our proactive communications are always co-branded. So that helps the situation as well.

Sarah Dignardi (29:44):
Any last questions? All right.

Keith Bregman (29:48):
Bar is open.

Sarah Dignardi (29:49):
Seven seconds to go until happy hour.

Keith Bregman (29:51):
The bar is open. Thank you very much.