Iterating important user journeys: RSA Insurance
Auto-renewal content design for multiple brands
When the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) imposed new rules around the automatic renewal of insurance policies, all relevant companies had around a year to make all the necessary changes to their user journeys.
The key rules for home and car insurance products going forward
- the concept of an insurance policy automatically renewing must be clearly communicated
- consumers must be able to opt out of auto-renewal at any time
- there must be no unreasonable barriers to stopping a policy from automatically renewing
- there must be no unreasonable barriers to cancelling an insurance policy
- when auto-renewing, consumers must be prompted to shop around
The brief
To iterate the relevant user journeys and ensure the new content meets the new regulations.
The challenge
There were three main challenges.
Firstly, there was the importance of the task. Auto-renewals are extremely valuable commercially. But this had he new FCA regulations had to be executed well or companies would be fined. In addition,
Secondly, the task was to create new content for multiple brands, not just one. In terms of insurance, RSA was responsible for the Nationwide, Yorkshire Building Society and More Than. That mean dealing with multiple style guides, brand guidelines, UX considerations and stakeholders.
The third challenge was the immovable deadline.
The execution
The automatic renewal feature was moved into the purchase journey for all the companies, meaning consumers are now informed about the setting before they make any payment. The execution was slightly different for each brand, but here's what the auto-renewal section within the Nationwide home insurance journey looks like:
The UX is clean and simple. The descriptive language is positive and framed around it making life easier. Extra information is also contained within the dropdown - this allows us to generously cover the new regulations without too much risk of users abandoning the journey because of too many details. This is the section with the dropdown expanded:
The extra information covers the compliance and regulatory obligations.
User testing
All the journeys went into user testing. We were able to see how people were interacting with the new content and gathered some valuable feedback. For instance, we realised quickly that users wanted to know that, even if the auto-renewal setting was switched on, we would still get in touch with them before their policy was renewed. For peace of mind, many users liked that their policy was set to auto-renew but nevertheless wanted some sort of contact in advance of any payments being taken.
Lastly, the auto-renewal toggle is very simple. It's set to on but the design makes it easy for consumers to turn it off if they don't want it. Again, the content was designed with the idea of prioritising the financial boost of auto-renewals whilst still meeting the incoming FCA regulations.
The result
All stakeholders across all the different brands were delighted with the results. The content was designed to effectively meet the new FCA regulations at no cost to the business. And through a combination of great content design, efficient user testing and an agile deployment, all deadlines were met.
