We’ve worked with a number of insurance providers over the past few years to help them redesign their websites, including Coverme.com, CaaLife.ca and CaaHealth.ca. In each case, the changes we’ve helped to implement have had great results—CoverMe.com even won an International Business Award last year—and have helped to address the needs of customers at each step of their purchase journey.

But there’s no doubt about it; insurance is a complicated subject. And, with more and more consumers conducting their own product research online, insurance websites are becoming an important point of sale. Consumers often visit multiple insurance websites, multiple times before they make their final purchasing decision, and in a crowded marketplace, an organization’s website can be a key tool that differentiates them from the competition.

To be effective, an insurance website not only needs to be user friendly and informative, it needs to make a connection with consumers and capture their attention.

Here are 6 insurance industry-related tips about how to create a customer-centric experience:

  1. Keep content and language user friendly. Insurance products are complicated and can get confusing.  Help your users through their learning process by keeping product descriptions simple and straightforward, use point form to make content easy to scan and offer comparisons.
  2. Make it easy for users to transact and take action.  Make access to quote and application forms globally available and make these calls-to-action prominent and easy to find.  Even better, embed the form into web pages to keep it front of mind.
  3. Support the user through the purchasing process.  Users tend to return to a purchasing site multiple times and often request quotes from multiple sources before they make their final choice. Support this behaviour by allowing users to save, print and email forms for easy reference and access when they return.
  4. Build trust & empower users.  Provide research material such as purchasing tips, product descriptions and comparisons, FAQs, and other research. Provide phone numbers and emails, click to chat, and other contact methods to builds trust and confidence with your users.
  5. Serve the needs of your primary audience(s).  New users want easy access to product information, prices and transactions. While returning users want access to claims information.  Make it easy for your users to find what they are looking for.
  6. Set users expectations early on. Keep forms simple and straightforward. Let users know how many steps it will take to fill out a form, what is required of them to complete the form, how to find claims information, contact information etc.

Although this post is focused on insurance sites, these tips apply to any e-commerce site. The main thing to remember is to know your audience, and make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for.

To read more about our work in this area, see our CoverMe, CAA Life and CAA Health case studies.