How Long-Term Partnerships Can Deliver Significant Benefits to Insurers and Their Policyholders

How Long-Term Partnerships Can Deliver Significant Benefits to Insurers and Their Policyholders

Article written by Claire Sargeant

During our six year partnership with DirectLine Group, we’ve been lucky to have had the opportunity to work closely with them to develop telematics propositions which truly add value from encouraging better and safer behaviours on the road to saving young drivers more than £50million in premiums since the launch of their first proposition in June 2013.

Alongside this huge financial milestone, the UK’s largest personal motor insurer is also celebrating reaching two billion driver miles recorded withThe Floow. We work with Direct Line Group across a number of their brands, including DirectLine, Churchill and Privilege, to deliver telematics solutions which complement and enhance the general motor insurance products they offer across the UK.

Developing Scoring IP

Over the last five years, we have collected journey and driver behavioural data for DirectLine Group, scoring drivers across six key areas- comparative speed, smooth driving, road risk, fatigue, mobile distraction and time of day - to produce individual component, journey and driver scores using our world-class scoring algorithm providing them with a better understanding of their policyholders’ risk.

To add further value to their telematics insurance propositions, we have worked with Direct Line Group to add their claims data into our scoring algorithm to build their own unique scoring IP. This gives them greater predictability of claims propensity and the opportunity to price motor insurance policies with much greater accuracy, benefiting not only them but their customers who reap the reward of having access to fairer priced premiums modelled on their driving behaviour.

All of this results in drivers gaining an overview of their individual driving style by providing them with the insights which can help them to make positive improvements to their behaviour and become safer and smarter on the road.

Annette Fox, Head of Telematics at Direct Line Group, recently made the following comment about our partnership; “We know that through data we will have a much better understanding of risk which will not only enable us to offer better premiums to young drivers, but we can help educate, inform and improve road safety overall. It is Direct Line Group’s ambition to be a leading telematics insurance provider and we are confident that working with The Floow, we can help drive change that will see telematics fully integrated within the UK motor market”.

Driver Coaching

Motorists who receive consistently good scores over time can benefit from lower insurance premiums whereas those drivers who have the lowest scores are invited to take part in our driver coaching programme, FloowCoach, which has been designed to help motorists to improve their driving skills through a series of telephone-based coaching conversations.

FloowCoach was created by The Floow’s Chief Education Officer and Associate Professor of Driver Behaviour at Cranfield University, Dr Lisa Dorn, to help reduce the number of accidents and deaths on the roads.

Our trained behavioural coaches work with drivers in the bottom 10-20%, as they are proven to represent an increased risk of making a claim during the lifetime of the policy, to help them develop safer driving behaviours through the use of behavioural change techniques over the course of the 12-week programme.

During these coaching sessions, a series of goals are agreed upon and progress against each of them is measured and discussed alongside support and encouragement offered by our coaches. Follow up contact is also made with FloowCoach graduates after three months which serves to ‘nudge’ drivers towards maintaining behavioural changes and improved scores.

FloowCoach was first launched to Direct Line Group customers in October 2015 on their DrivePlus brand before being extended to their other brands in 2017. With FloowCoach, we worked with the Group to:

• Help their policyholders understand and engage with their driving behaviour

• Improve customer loyalty to the brand, through great customer experience

• Support Direct Line Group’s CSR agenda aligning to young driver safety and saving lives

Direct Line Group sees FloowCoach as an opportunity to actively engage low scoring drivers, who are likely to regularly exhibit behaviours such as speeding, braking harshly and distraction which have a negative impact on road safety but they are also the areas where drivers have the most influence over improving their driving to become safer drivers.

Our latest research shows that FloowCoach has encouraged an improvement in graduates in the lowest deciles scores by up to 30%, with an average close to 15%.

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

Customer Engagement and Retention

The inclusion of additional features into telematics insurance propositions not only encourages safer driving reducing the number of claims on an insurers book to save them money and allow them to offer cheaper premiums but it also helps encourage customer retention through engagement techniques and a focus on building a strong relationship between insurer and policyholder.

In a world full of choice for the consumer, it has never been more important for an organisation to be truly customer centric. It is also vital that legacy industries, such as insurance and finance, focus on the customer by creating products and services which meet customer requirements.

The Floow recognises this and helps insurers, including Direct Line Group, to build relationships with their policyholders by creating engaging insurance propositions through the use of telematics technology, driver feedback and rewards programmes which encourage engagement and long-term improvements to driver behaviour.

An Enduring Partnership

As consumers continue to demand choice and quality from every organisation they interact with, it is vital that insurance companies remain customer-focused in order to remain competitive in a fast-changing market, increasingly dominated by technological advancements.

Therefore having a service provider behind your organisation that you can trust to deliver a quality service for you and your customers is extremely important and its why The Floow is so committed to delivering an excellent service and quality products to their clients and across the whole insurance market.

We are extremely proud of everything we have achieved through our partnership with Direct Line Group over the last six years and we are looking forward to many more years working with them to deliver solutions which enhance the insurance experience, deliver customer engagement and improve road safety across the UK’s roads.

Our Chief Innovation Officer and Co-Founder, Dr Sam Chapman, summed it up best in a recent article celebrating the two billion miles milestone [https://www.thefloow.com/news/dlg-and-thefloow-2-billion-miles.html];

“I am incredibly proud of what we have achieved by working with Direct Line Group; their reach has enabled us to bring telematics benefits to a wide audience across the UK. The partnership means there are more people using telematics who want to be better drivers and who could benefit from lower premiums and a safer environment on the roads.”