Driving to True Partnership in UBI: The Floow and CSAA in Conversation at the Dig-In Conference in Austin, Texas

Driving to True Partnership in UBI: The Floow and CSAA in Conversation at the Dig-In Conference in Austin, Texas

Article written by Aldo Monteforte

In the recent Dig-In industry event in Austin,Texas, I was delighted to be joined on stage by Danny Maco, Head of Telematics Mobile &Connected Products for CSAA Insurance Group.The Floow team has been working with CSAA for more than two years, and over this time, our relationship has transformed. In our conversation at Dig-In we explored the journey that we’ve been on together. This article presents part of the conversation and some of the principles that we talked about in Austin.

The Importance of Telematics Partnership to CSAA

Danny Maco: CSAA Insurance Group has been providing AAA-branded insurance to members for more than 100 years. Today we’re surrounded by disruption and all the opportunity that brings. As a team and enterprise, we understand that customers have expectations in engagement and user experience that we need to take to a new level.

Through telematics products and technologies, we have all the ingredients to fundamentally change the relationship between the carrier and the customer. These programmes provide us with access to data that provides real time insights, converts that data into individual risk profiles, and - allows us to offer features and incremental improvements with greater frequency. Telematics genuinely has the potential to offer our policyholders the right product at the right time and for the right price.

At CSAA we’re all-in on lean start-up, agile methodologies and design thinking, but that type of transformation is very difficult; even if you’re in control of all the levers it’s still a lot of work. When you add projects dependent on external partners into the equation, it introduces a whole new level of complexity and if partners aren’t aligned with new operational models, the benefits that can come from agile methodologies can be negated, resulting in confusion and inefficiencies. Working to successfully extend these lean concepts into a partnership has been our objective. While The Floow and CSAA have deployed successful UBI propositions, in truth it hasn’t been “all rainbows and unicorns” getting to this point!

Transforming the Vendor/Client Relationship

Aldo Monteforte: Telematics is a potential game changer for the industry because it can touch every aspect of an insurance operation. But the successful implementation of a telematics programme can be very hard. On many occasions, Danny and I have discussed what makes a partnership bad, good or great and in these conversations we have identified 4 kinds of partnerships. At one end of the spectrum, the place no one wants to be is in an adversarial relationship. From the vendor perspective we might say “The client doesn’t really get it, they don’t understand the complexity of what we’re doing.” Folks within the client organisation would say that “The vendor doesn’t appreciate our goals or objectives.” This sort of relationship won’t flourish or last long!

A transactional relationship sees both sides looking to extract the most and give away the least. The insurer may be inclined to ‘switch horses’ to a different vendor at the first opportunity. This is not a good place to be in if you want to deliver great solutions that might appeal to end-users and achieve mass market adoption.

Then we have collaborative relationships where both organisations respect each other and are willing to work together for the long-term. There is deep mutual understanding at both the project and product level.

We’ve always believed that it’s possible to go beyond this to a true partnership. This is when both teams feel united as one in pursuit of the same goal. In our industry that is a bond cemented by the objective of making mobility safer and smarter. Using our technology and engaging with it can encourage drivers to adjust their behaviour and ultimately save lives.

The Floow CEO, Aldo Monteforte, and Head of Telematics Mobile & Connected Products at CSAA, Danny Maco, onstage at 2019's Dig-In Conference in Austin, Texas

So how do we engineer a true partnership? In our journey with CSAA this was a process that took several steps...

Step 1: The Shock – The Floow delivered an early product that had flaws. The feedback from CSAA was difficult to hear!

Step 2: Internal Reflection – this is where real leadership was required. It was about moving beyond negative feedback whilst using it as a source to direct where the real work needs to get done to eliminate issues and move forward.

Step 3: The Pivot – The team starts working together to make fundamental improvements. One pivot The Floow went through was the transition from a waterfall to an agile methodology. Another pivot was the introduction of in-residence support – a full time Floow representative within the insurer organisation to guide the process and support the relationship at all times.

Step 4: Getting Better – just like an athlete, hard training provides aching muscles but before long people start to enjoy the new mode of working, celebrating successes and also sharing the focus on solving problems when things go wrong.

Key Dependencies for Delivering ‘the Ultimate’ Customer Experience with UBI

Danny Maco: As we applied lean concepts to meet the goal of delivering the ultimate customer experience there were a number of key dependencies:

1) The Data: We need data that’s actionable, insightful and drawn from every part of the consumer journey. It must be collected at the project level as well as at the user engagement level. Our customers rely on us to identify and protect them from risks so not only do we need driving behavioural data but we also need to have the ability to evolve our own scoring algorithm, to draw our own insights and leverage the expertise that The Floow brings to the table. Our systems have to be able to get this data quickly and reliably.

Aldo Monteforte: There are 2 levels of data…of course there’s data showing each journey from A to B. But the CSAA team is also intensely focused on data relating to how users interact with the experience that we craft for them. One way we do this is introducing analytics tools as a core part of the proposition. I believe every client will benefit from analytics based on the understanding of user behaviour to support the definition of new features.

Danny Maco: 2) Speed: Having data available is necessary but alone it’s not sufficient. It’s only helpful if you can turn the data into customer value in the form of capabilities or a personalised experience. We need to be able to act on new insights as they reveal themselves and convert them into improvements. We need to be able to test our assumptions and hypotheses on real users and iterate quickly. It’s impossible to overemphasis the role of the agile process in this. The transition from waterfall to agile was critical in achieving the speed we’re looking for.

Aldo Monteforte: We developed a number of elements here. The most important was to deploy an in-residence, Floow ambassador dedicated full-time to CSAA. If you want to move at speed you need to have a very deep understanding of the partner’s needs and this helped us to achieve it. CSAA have a well-developed agile methodology so it was necessary for us to adapt our model to their rhythm and cadence. Now we have a dedicated agile team synchronised with CSAA’s three-week sprint cycles and have introduced shared design tools that enable realtime collaboration on prototyping UX/UI features before any time is spent coding.

Danny Maco: 3) Trust: CSAA has been successful for more than 100 years because we never forget how important it is to earn the trust of our customers each and every day. When members grant us this level and volume of data, there’s a heightened expectation and explicit promise that we should be trusted as the protector and steward of this data when using it to:

a) Accurately rate risk.

b) Encourage safer driving behaviours.

c) Fairly reward those who make the effort to modify their behaviour for their safety and that of others on the road.

Our systems and the data they process must be reliable and accurate, ensuring the highest levels of integrity to deliver on that promise. If something goes wrong, we must be able to discover and rectify that before there’s any impact to our customers. It’s important that our telematics partner understands the gravity of these responsibilities.

Aldo Monteforte: This is the most important dependency of all. We go to extreme measures to ensure that our monitoring systems, alerts and operational controls inform both organisations with complete transparency in real time. This allows us to intervene proactively and give consumers full confidence that their valuable mobility data is being treated in full compliance with applicable regulatory frameworks. Scores have financial consequences for drivers and insurers so we monitor our scoring methodologies to constantly check that they’re performing as expected.

Key Take-aways

Danny Maco: As a result of our collaboration, we’ve been able to launch a number of products with a small team in a short timeframe. We gather customer insights with each iteration and get better at satisfying the needs of our customers. With each release cycle we get faster and faster. Agile is powerful but just because you can pivot doesn’t mean you should. Those decisions have real consequences in terms of delivery and capacity for your partners. Finally, insurers and their telematics partners should enter into the relationship with humility; expect to learn from each other and nurture an environment where it’s OK to challenge each other. Get your expectations on the table early and be totally honest. It’s through these challenges that you achieve the most traction and reward.

Aldo Monteforte: The intention is always to produce wonderful products. There are no shortcuts. Challenges that come from ambition can put a relationship through pressure but achieving true partnership is how you’ll achieve exceptional results.