Building Customer-Focused Insurance Experiences for TruStage®
Overview
CUNA Mutual Group helps more than 3,500 credit unions and more than 21 million consumers build financial security through insurance and investment products and services available through TruStage Insurance Agency, LLC. CUNA Mutual Group partnered with Velir to create a new digital experience for its TruStage® offerings that educates customers on available products through content and tools, helps them find the right products, allows them to receive customized insurance quotes, and provides a place for them to review and maintain their insurance policies after purchase.
URL
trustage.com
Challenge
CUNA Mutual Group challenged us to improve and modernize its TruStage® digital experience to reach mobile-focused customers more effectively by merging two sites (trustage.com and service.trustage.com). Combining the sites would allow customers to learn about insurance, apply for it, and self-service their accounts all in one place.
Merging these sites offered the opportunity to increase quote sale conversions, to allow personalized quote experiences by demographic data, and to improve the business logic that helps customers service their accounts. Account service functionality involved enabling credit card payments, making guest payments, updating personal information, and updating beneficiaries. It also involved handling complicated factors like addressing late payments or changes in payment and policy dates. To do all this required enabling complex personalization to cater to customer experiences based on their unique interactions and history with TruStage® from quotes to active policies.
The project workflow itself needed careful coordination between Velir’s development team and the large CUNA Mutual Group team, which spanned marketing and IT. We planned to work on the customer-facing parts of the site, while the CUNA Mutual Group team planned to tackle the technology integrations needed for all their necessary systems to communicate effectively. We knew we would need to make iterative knowledge transfers between our team and the CUNA Mutual Group team so CUNA Mutual Group developers could own our contributions moving forward.
Creating a site that’s accessible to a wide range of audiences was also critical to CUNA Mutual Group, so the final challenge for this project was to make sure all our development work passed multi-level quality assurance tests and certifications to meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA Accessibility compliance.
The client’s challenges were:
- Merging sites so customers could learn, sign up, and service their insurance in one place
- Improving and creating business logic to serve a variety of needs
- Enabling complex personalization based on customers’ unique experiences
- Coordinating efforts between team members that spanned Velir and CUNA Mutual Group marketing and IT
- Meeting multi-level quality assurance tests, certifications, and accessibility compliance
Approach
To address all CUNA Mutual Group’s needs during this website redesign, we rolled out key features in phases, used component-based development, adapted to CUNA Mutual Group’s development technical workflow, created a flexible personalization framework, tested developed features for accessibility compliance, and trained their team on the marketing features available to them through Sitecore, their digital experience platform.
Phased Rollout and Component-Based Development
Due to the size and scale of the TruStage® site, we used a phased approach to rolling out new features, which minimized disruptions to customers and the CUNA Mutual Group team. It also made the final hand-off to CUNA Mutual Group’s developers minimal because the team knew what we did during each development phase.
We leveraged component-based development to support reusability across CUNA Mutual Group’s digital properties and to facilitate personalization. By building a shared component library in Sitecore, we also enabled CUNA Mutual Group content authors to easily make updates all in one place, and to get a more streamlined view of complex customer scenarios and testing. Additionally, we set configured dynamic quoting and personalization.
Agile Collaboration with Vue.js
As we collaborated with the CUNA Mutual Group team in an agile manner to ensure our teams were integrated the whole time, we also adapted ourselves to CUNA Mutual Group’s tech stack by using Vue.js. By leveraging Vue.js we could bind to prerendered templates, which allows dynamic components like quoting and search to be easily edited from Sitecore. This provided content authors a smoother and more robust experience when editing complex components.
Continuous Accessibility Testing
To ensure the site met WCAG 2.1 Level AA Accessibility compliance, we kept accessibility in mind from the start of development. We included accessibility requirements in development specifications, ran automated testing using an Accessibility Management Platform (AMP) while developing features, and performed manual accessibility testing for each completed component. Then we assessed the site for accessibility by partnering with a third-party specialist to run an audit in their AMP tool. Based on this audit, we prioritized blockers and critical issues to resolve for launch. To set CUNA Mutual Group up for future success, we also trained its QA team on how to use screen readers to run manual tests on the site.
Sitecore Training and Platform Roadmapping
To bring it all together, we helped the CUNA Mutual Group marketing team take advantage of Sitecore’s marketing features through in-depth training sessions, documentation, and workshops where we formed a roadmap to guide the platform’s future based on business goals. We also made sure that we provided a flexible framework to enable enhanced personalization over time, so the CUNA Mutual Group team could expand upon personalization efforts as it became more comfortable with the new site.
Our approach included:
- Rolling out new features in phases to minimize disruptions
- Leveraging component-based development for reusability
- Building a shared component library in Sitecore ease of use for content authors building pages
- Testing accessibility compliance throughout the project with the help of a third-party specialist
- Configuring dynamic quoting and personalization for customers
- Training the CUNA Mutual Group team on how to maximize Sitecore’s marketing benefits
Solution
The new TruStage® website is a cutting-edge insurance experience that allows customers to learn about and purchase available insurance programs, and to manage their accounts all in one place. It uses a unique insurance quoting system, which takes a customer’s budget and easily displays and compares available products so they can make informed decisions based on their options. It can also handle a variety of customer billing and benefit needs, including guest payments or policy updates, and provides dynamic product-level personalization to reflect each customer’s unique history. The site is also easy for content authors to use and allows them to perform more strategic marketing activities. Lastly, it’s accessible to a broad range of customers using assistive technologies, who can effectively use its features.
Results
- 60% user growth in 2020 vs. 2019
- 20% additional user growth predicted (based on Q1 2021 data) for 2021
- More than 40% increase in guest pay completions due to improved user experience and processing
- Improvements in all key sales metrics including quote opportunities, the quote completion rate, and the rate at which users moved into the insurance application process
- Accessibility scores in the 90% range or higher based on third party audits for sales/service sites
- Increased throughput with payments verified at a much higher rate post launch vs. pre-launch
- Increased volume of sales that turned into service visits
- A Communicator Award for Distinction in Financial Services Websites