Improving Bestow’s Paperless Document Experience

Project Summary

Bestow is a life insurance company that allows customers to get term coverage online without a medical exam.

One of the biggest detractors in Bestow’s customer experience follow-up surveys is that customers don’t know where to find their policy documents. We also frequently receive support requests from customers looking for their policy documents.

We needed to improve our customers’ awareness of Bestow’s paperless documents approach and help them more easily find their policy documents in the Customer Portal.

The main goal of this effort was to reduce the number of CX calls and help customers more easily find their policy documents. 

Details

My Role: Lead Product Designer

Project Duration: 4 weeks

Team: Design Manager, Product Manager, Head of Customer Experience (CX), Customer Care Team Lead, Engineering Manager, Frontend Software Engineer II, Backend Staff Software Engineer, Chief Insurance Officer, Chief Compliance Officer, Senior Copywriter, Head of Product

Production painpoints

After customers purchase a policy, the current flow doesn’t clearly indicate that policy documents are electronic and available on the Dashboard in the customer portal. This causes Bestow’s CX team to continually receive negative feedback about customers not receiving their policy documents in the mail.

Here is the current flow and some pain points customers encounter along the way.

1. Checkout - After finishing their online Application, users sign and pay for their policy.

2. Accept Policy Docs - Upon purchase, their documents begin to generate. Users are required to click the “accept documents” button.

   • PAIN POINT: Because Bestow applications are sold online, customers are required to acknowledge they are accepting their documents electronically. This is not easily understood. If they leave the flow, the CX team is required to print and mail the policy documents to the customer manually.

3. Transition to Customer Portal - Customers are transitioned from the Application to the Customer Portal. These are separate systems.

4. Policy Overview - Users land on the overview page on the Customer Portal.

   • PAIN POINT: It’s not clear where a user’s policy documents are located or which documents are a part of their policy.

Research with the cx team

The documents associated with a single-term policy actually consist of several documents. This can also be confusing for users. The CX team is constantly receiving calls from customers asking, “Which of these is my policy document? The answer is all of them.

Policy documents could only be downloaded individually or in a zip file in alphabetical order by title. This required the team to open docs in a particular order for printing.

One CX member had the following ideas:

Improving the “download all” feature of policy documents by placing a number in front of each document so they’ll be in order and ready for streamlined printing….better yet, generating 1 PDF with all policy documents in order so they only have to click print once when printing and mailing files.

Additionally, Bestow had recently partnered with Lemonade to produce a Lemonade Life product. Lemonade requested we generate a single PDF that included all the policy documents for their customers. In response to Lemonade's request, we prioritized and scheduled that work for development around the same time this work was in motion. Our team would be able to utilize the single PDF generation feature for our own Bestow customers.

Design process

Kicking off the design process, there were 3 users with jobs to be done to keep in mind:

1. Brand new customers

   • Many policyholders see their physical policy documents as proof of their policy. New Bestow customers need to understand documents are electronic and feel confident they always have access.

2. Existing customers

   • Existing customers need a way to quickly locate their policy documents when they log in to check on their policy.

3. CX members

   • Our customer care team members need a way to quickly print and send physical policies to customers who don’t click “Accept policy documents”.

Early ideas included removing the documents list from the Policy Overview page and creating a new tab on the dashboard dedicated to documents. A “quick win” with low implementation effort could be a toast alert on the overview page that notified all users (new and existing) about the new documents tab and included a link to take them there.

Ultimately, this didn’t attract enough attention or add enough value, and the concept of moving the accept documents modal into the customer portal was born.

Moving the “Accept Documents” button into CP

After their purchase, the customer would immediately be taken into the Customer portal, where the “Accept documents” modal would greet them. During the transition, their official policy documents are generated on the backend. Once accepting their documents, users would land on the new documents tab, where they could download their Policy Packet (or the new single PDF with all their documents in the correct order)

Making Improvements

Once the modal was moved into the customer portal, it was clear that it needed improvement. The modal needed to more clearly indicate their electronic policy documents. This also gave us the opportunity to educate customers on what other features are available in their dashboard. The improvements enhanced the overall Customer Portal greeting and acted a warm, welcoming hello to new customers.

Welcome to the Dashboard.

Instead of pushing customers straight to the new documents tab, I wanted to ensure new customers got their bearings on the dashboard overview tab first.

The alert banner on the overview tab would alert users when their documents were generating and when they were done. The CTA on the banner would direct users to the new documents tab, where they could utilize the new single PDF function to download all their policy documents at once. Additionally, the banner could easily be repurposed for future customer portal efforts.

Our Chief of Insurance was dead set on continuing to allow customers to download individual pages. In certain use cases, a customer may need a single document (such as the Policy Schedule for a business loan), but the random delineation of document sections caused users quite a bit of confusion and made certain policy documents appear less significant than others.

After a few rounds of iterations, the decision was made to combine the list into a single “Policy Document” table.

More iterations. More personality.

To prevent customer confusion, the document table was also condensed to hide all the documents inside. A new link, “What’s inside?” was added below the single PDF download button that, when clicked, would open to reveal the individual policy documents.

Developer Handoff

As part of the handoff process, I created a design spec for PMs, developers, and stakeholders. It also served as a place for everyone at the table to leave comments and notes, provide additional clarity, and signal their sign-off.

Post-Launch

The CX team reported a clear drop in "where are my documents" calls — a request that had previously come in daily. The Head of CX confirmed the volume of document-related tickets fell off noticeably once the redesign shipped, which was the core success metric this project was scoped against.

I don't have exact call-volume numbers from this project, but the qualitative signal was strong enough that CX considered the problem resolved.