How a tech-led, customer-centric approach delivered 200% growth in attach rates for AXS: INTIX 2021

We partnered with AXS to deliver a personalized experience for customers when purchasing tickets to their favorite event, leveraging the technology behind our XCover platform and BrightWrite analytics framework. As more consumers prioritize peace of mind, especially for large value purchases like event tickets, our tech-led approach helped deliver a 200% growth in attach rates.

Watch the video below where Pat Young, VP of Partnerships for Travel and Ticketing, discusses how we were able to drive results these results for AXS by ensuring that their customers can now buy tickets and book events with confidence.

Transcript

Hello everyone, thanks for attending the Cover Genius portion of the Intix Virtual Conference. My name is Pat Young. I’m the Head of Partnerships for the travel and ticketing verticals for Cover Genius. And today I’m going to talk about how we leverage technology to deliver personalized experiences, and to talk about the customer journey and the reasons for providing peace of mind for your customers when they start to buy tickets again. Just a little bit about the company. I’ll talk a little bit about that it towards the end. But just to give you an idea of who we are, what we do, we’re not a legacy insurance company that provides the products to our partners. We’re an insurtech company that delivers a digital platform to our partners so they can provide products that protect their global customers in the sales path or as they sign up for it to purchase travel or tickets. In this case, we really focus on that portion of it. And we work with insurers on the other side to provide a global experience for your customers. Just wanted to talk for a minute before we get into the into the into the meat of it as to what has happened recently, not only with the pandemic, but in other in other times when there’s been some sort of global issue that might cause customers, whether they’re travelers in this case or purchasers of events, sporting events, concerts, things like that, and why they might be inclined to buy insurance.

Obviously, there’s their own reasons. But in a time like this, you can see a case of what we saw in our experience with customer purchases for us in Canada and then also the rest of the world. We saw 380 percent increase in attach rates for our travel business over the last couple of months and weeks. That led up to really the closure in in the middle of March. So you can see that our experience has been that when there’s been other events like natural, some sort of natural disaster or even a terrorist event where customers in that time period following that feel much more comfortable purchasing a some sort of product to protect their travel or ticketing investments. Somewhat along the same lines that we have another example here from a study that was done on square miles where after the coronavirus really came into full swing, 36 percent of travelers said that they were they would actively seek out a cancellation protection product again to protect their investment as they move forward. We would really expect to see this happen for the foreseeable future, as in our slow recovery as travel and ticketing return.

And we see that move throughout the next couple of years. We expect there to be really high demand for these types of products. I want to move now into a specific case study that we’ve done with our partner Access, but also to talk a little bit about the customer journey as we go, as we know what the customer moves through when they see our product in that in that ticket purchase path. So basically, the event cancellation product can be can be separated into several different bundles and unbundling of the product and then bundling it back together for a personalized experience for your customers. As you can see from this graph, our API, we arrange with our partners to accept many different elements from the customer, whether that is the dates that they’re leaving, the number of tickets, the event type, any all of that information. And what we do is we’re able to put together with our panel of different insurance companies. They all have different policies. We’re able to unbundle and then rebundle those coverages to provide the right customer of the right product for your customer at the right time. So through the XCover API, we’re able to return the tailored, tailored product for your customers.

Another part of our platform is our great data analytics and experimentation platform. So through this, we’re able to provide dynamic pricing and product recommendations for our partners. And this is all part of the XCover API. So what we do with our partners is we’re able to look at the event type, the amount of time until the event, the price of the event. And we’re able to tailor the price of that to optimize the price of that to the product that they’re buying. If you look on the right side of the screen here, there’s some statistics on what we’ve done. Just in 2013 alone, we had over nine billion dollars in sales. And what we were able to do through this optimization platform is provide a lift of twenty three percent in the gross written premium through that optimization. So looking at what the price of the of the events that the customer is purchasing, and then and then we’re able to tailor the price to that event so that it makes sense for the customer. We did over one point seven million experiments in 19 and we’re doing this with over 30 of our of our current partners. Just now going to walk through very quickly what are what the customer journey looks like on our current connection here.

Our customer, the customer journey is probably similar to what many have. The customer goes in and chooses the event that they’re looking for. When they find that they start to look through for the tickets that they’d like, similar to what you may find in a lot of different experiences once they’ve found those tickets and they’ve they’ll go in and if they have an account, they create their account again, they’ll see our insurance offer. What we found to be the best, best spot for our offer is on that confirmation page towards the end. And we’ll get to that in just a minute. As they’ve logged in here, they’ll look at their form of payments. We have various options for being able to handle payments with our partners, whether that’s a single payment or split payments where we can be flexible on that. Once the customers put their information in. We will get to the insurance off just coming up next. So you’ll see that they’ll have that opportunity to choose. Yes, if they’d like to put that in there, you’ll see that the pricing it per ticket is there. They’ll also see they purchased one ticket, so it’s two pounds and then they’re able to go to see the details of the policy right here. We’ll provide that in the in the offer experience. They’re able to see further information in the form of a PDF if they’d like to see the details on that and then they can go ahead and confirm their purchase.

So I just wanted to give a little bit before we get into the specific event that we’re going to look at, just give an idea of what that what this looks like. Here again is the specifically what the offer would look like. We are flexible on how we provide this to our partners. We generally would provide the text as we want it to look. We would provide the text through our API and then our partners, we work together with them on some of the wording. Some of it is there’s a regulatory partner of some of the disclosures on the bottom, but we work with our partners on how that looks. We can provide this to you and then it can fit into the appropriate location in the confirmation page. And then the customer has the option to see it, to get more information, as we saw before, and then also to confirm the purchase on the right side, you’ll see the confirmation email that the customer will get. They’ll receive this right after they make their purchase. It’ll give them the specifics on what they’re covered for a reference number and then links to where they can go to look at the policy wording or to log into their account, make a change to the to to the policy if needed, and then also to make a claim.

So it’s a fully digital experience for the customers to handle this process. Just a quick I wanted to talk a little bit very quickly about some of the things, some of our capabilities with what the policies look like, we’re able to, as I mentioned, able to bundle together different types of policies, bundle or unbundle those types of things to provide the rights, personalized products for your customers. We work with our partners to be able to come up with what those products in those coverages are. We in our policy wording, as we saw very quickly there on that quick video, you see that it’s very straightforward language, straightforward, easy to read language. We provide navigation tools that the customers can find what they need in their policy and service themselves functional and intuitive design. And then also a fully digital experience, as I mentioned before, on the last one, so that the customer can handle their needs in the timing that they need to. When the customer if the customer does have a claim, as I mentioned, with an integrated platform, that customer is able to log in to handle to put in their claim, they’re able to start the claim. There’s information on what’s needed to complete that. If there’s any kind of other documentation that that might be required, like a doctor’s receipt or something like that or a doctor’s note, they’ll submit all those details and then we’ll be able to assess that very quickly.

Generally, within a few days, we’re able to assess that will communicate digitally with the customer and make sure that they know what the status is as long as it’s going through the process. And then we have a the an immediate payment process, which I have a short video on as well. So they’ll be able to choose their payment method, whether that is return to a credit card or some sort of in-store credit. We have a lot of different options there and then instant payments in 90 currencies. So as soon as the claim has been adjudicated and it will be paid to them immediately in this video is going to give you a quick look at how that process works for the customer. They’re going to get an email that will confirm that they’ve been approved. They will then go into this hit this link, this will be the email that lets them know their payments been approved. They’ll go into the. They’ll go in and choose their payment form. And there’s a couple of different options here, and it’s going to go through a few different here. You’re going to see that they can choose the. Currency that they wish and it will give them more how much they’re going to be paid. In this case, they’re going to take Australian dollars, they’re going to confirm that, go in and make sure that their information is correct.

They’ll put their back information in in this case where the instant payment will be delivered to them. Hit next, they will check that information and confirm it and then they’ll get a notification. Once that’s been paid compared to the.

They can also go back to their account so you can see here and see. That they in this case, all these are all of the different policies they may have had, they can go and see that they what they paid and what’s been paid out.

Demise the program and how that created a higher yield and also higher take rates, as you see what we were doing currently with the with our customer was that they had a flat insurance rate for their premiums. So it was the same amount whether your ticket was four hundred and fifty pounds or fifty pounds. So that part was it was either one or two euros. You can see there two euros, sorry, two pounds. And then what we did is optimize that.

And we put in different we tested in different prices for those, for those ticket ranges, those buckets of ticket prices. And we were able to provide a huge lift in the amount of premium that was collected. So a huge lift in the amount of revenue that was generated for the partnership. The dynamic, dynamic pricing experience gave us that opportunity to increase those margins by testing in different prices in those areas. And we as you can see in the third bullet point here are the higher prices, tripled yields. In addition to the yield growing, we also were able to increase the tax rates for a couple of reasons.

One is that we saw at the lower ticket price buckets, we saw a much higher take rate when we lowered the price of the insurance. And on the higher price buckets, we didn’t see much of a drop off. We saw a much higher yield on those, obviously. And then we also saw in some cases on increased take rate in those because the customer found more value in it. So they were willing to pay that. So we actually saw an overall increase in take rate and yield over the course of this of this test. In addition to that, I think it’s important to point out that we have a seamless checkout process, the digital process that I just showed. And then in addition to that, we take we do an empty scoring of our customers who have gone through the claims process. And again, these are ones that have gone through the claims process. So not just the customers that have gone through the experience and we have a rating of +65 five with those customers. So it’s a very strong NPS score, particularly for someone who is rating an insurance claims process. So we’re very proud of that. So we’re able to provide a better experience for the through the four for this in this particular case for those customers, because they’re going through this digital process. They’re not going through the old process where you have to send in forms and then wait for a check to be returned.

And then on the claims part of it, we’re able to provide clear and quick information on the status of their claim. Just to summarize, the case study here, the traditional approach or what was happening in this case, the excesses that they were using, a flat fixed rate insurance price that was kind of set. It was left there. There was not an API or dynamic pricing or segmentation. So the customer there’s not a personalized offer in place after working with our bright rates program to be able to optimize the pricing in this case, they were able to provide a significant increase in the overall revenue that was generated by the program. Wanted to just give in addition to that one. That is talk for a minute or two more about the company and who we are at covered. We’ve been around for about six years. We’ve got offices around the globe with over one hundred and fifty employees currently all over in every region. We’ve provided insurance to millions of customers over the last few years, two point five million in to that in twenty nineteen alone and have over two hundred forty million dollars and not in gross written premium in that year in two thousand nineteen. We also processed over sixty thousand claims in the year.

So we have experience using that process that I was talking about a little bit more within there. We started off the company started off as a mobility platform and we worked with a partner early on with booking holdings and starting in twenty fifteen, there’s still a partner today. We then developed that into a platform into the XCover platform in twenty eighteen to develop a full range of personal lines across the different verticals that we work in. So today we work in travel, ticketing, retail economy, share economy and also shipping. So those are really our core platforms. But we are through our platform. Those are our core verticals, through our platform. We’re able to provide products anywhere in the world to customers so we can provide a truly global solution for our partners. Finally, a couple of the partners that we do have mentioned booking holdings and of course, access, but we work with Despegar, eBay. Wayfair is another one. National Express is a shipping customer. So these first two rows are the sum of the distribution partners that we work with. And you can see on the bottom, those are some of the on the bottom row. Those are some of the underwriters that we work with. As I mentioned, we work with underwriters all over the world to be able to provide products in every country that our partners need solutions in.

So thanks very much for attending Intix and listening to the Cover Genius Case Study.

Really appreciate your time. My name is Pat Young. My email address is at the bottom there. If you and I should be on the website as well for attending the virtual contest, the virtual conference. If anyone has wants to get in touch and talk any further, please let me know. I appreciate your time. Have a great day.