How an established insurance company became digital-first

Over the last 10 years, the global insurance market has been shifting to include more digital offerings. Consumers have become highly selective and price sensitive.

Once a consumer has taken out a policy online, they often find their insurance provider offers a limited and outdated experience – for example, making consumers call them to make claims, renew or cancel their policies, sitting on hold in the call center queue. It’s a far cry from the customer-friendly, intuitive digital experience that attracted them.

Hastings Direct is a UK insurer that, recognizing this potential drop-off in customer service for their business, developed the strategic ambition to become the best and biggest digital UK insurance provider. That doesn’t just mean numbers of customers or total revenues, it means enabling customers to perform more transactions digitally with the best experience possible.

Hastings Direct had a longstanding relationship with the EY organization as their trusted advisor, having already implemented and enhanced the core Guidewire InsuranceSuite, including the migration of their products to their new insurance platform.

Together, they worked on a path to achieve Hastings Direct’s ambition.

It takes the whole organization to embed a customer-first, mobile-first transformation like this – so it was essential to equip all employees with the modern workplace tools necessary for Hastings Direct to become a truly digital insurance provider from the inside out. EY teams advised and collaborated on this process and helped establish internal governance to improve overall efficiency and delivery quality.

Strategically, Hastings Direct wanted to use its innovative new technology to get a holistic picture of customers and offer them the best price possible – this included embedding automation in testing to iterate improvements in the journeys.

On a tactical level, Hastings Direct and EY teams addressed the user experience through simplified question sets (which still maintained information gathering integrity to assess the insured risk), a clearer tone of voice, a consistent look and feel to the familiar price comparison sites, and easy toggling between standard and enhanced cover options.

“Hastings Direct and EY teams have developed an effective collaboration based on trust and doing the right thing. By working so closely, we have been able to react quickly to evolving needs for technology skill sets, and we are able to bring capabilities from all over the globe despite working remotely through the pandemic," says, Joel Pegram, Partner, Financial Services Technology Consulting, Ernst & Young LLP.

Throughout, the EY organization mobilized a diverse and global team, spanning more than 10 countries and encompassing strong technical capabilities to bring Hastings Direct the very best of EY teams.

Delivery of these improvements comes from the inside out, and the changes also helped Hastings Direct internal development teams deliver an efficiency gain of more than 40%. Now, and for the future, EY teams are working hand-in-hand with Hastings Direct’s IT organization. The team is digitizing the next level of servicing journeys – for example, providing comprehensive FAQs and help text, and offering the ability to message via chat queries. This will give consumers even greater confidence to execute their transactions digitally – all underpinned by new contact center technology.

Looking to the future, Hastings Direct is embedding forward-looking, rich use of data to develop more tailored, relevant and adaptable products for customers.

“Together, Hastings Direct and the EY organization continue to deliver beyond Hastings Direct’s stated expectations enabled by technology. It’s a relationship that helps us go from strength to strength with digital at the heart of our customer proposition,” says Mark Parker, Chief Operating Officer, Hastings Direct.

EY teams provided deep technical experience to Hastings Direct, architecting high-performing recommendations to complex business problems, and remained agile to their changing needs so they can continually better serve their customers.

As a result, Hastings Direct has chosen to extend the relationship and keep the EY organization as their trusted advisor. Together EY teams and Hastings Direct will work to build a better working world, for every customer.