A fully digitized insurance offering for low-income Brazilians.
ToGarantido is a Brazilian insuretech company which saw an opportunity to capitalize on the growing popularity of chat technologies, such as Whatsapp and chatbots, to deliver insurance cost-effectively to low-income Brazilians.
As part of a Catalyst Fund engagement, I worked with ToGarantido to identify how it might strengthen its value proposition among low-income Brazilian customers and to test and improve the user experience of the chatbot for onboarding and purchase prior to its launch.
ToGarantido knew from experience that low-income Brazilians often don’t see value in insurance policies, particularly in the absence of a claim incident. Thus, they wanted to understand which tangible benefits might increase the value of insurance for potential low-income customers.
We devised a two-phased approach to user research. We first conducted a Google Survey with low-income Brazilians with smartphone or internet access. These surveys were split between insurance holders and non-insurance holders that had considered purchasing insurance in the past. The surveys were designed to understand the demand for various insurance products, to identify pain points and barriers to the traditional purchasing process, and to gain insight into the perceived benefits of current insurance policies among insurance holders.
The results of these surveys guided focus group discussions and design research activities with potential clients during our visit to Brazil. Prior to this research, ToGarantido had been agnostic about which product (auto, dental, health, or life insurance, for example) to offer low-income clients. However, both the surveys and focus group activities surfaced a strong demand for affordable health insurance products with benefits such as discounts for medicines or doctor’s exams. Particularly in the favelas of Brazil, participants told us that specialized health coverage is extremely limited and prohibitively expensive but that they were willing to pay for such services.
The research also confirmed that customers in our target segment use smartphones and the internet with ease even for purchases or accessing banking services. A number of participants told us that they expect companies to use messaging and technology to improve their user experiences. Several respondents had even interacted with chatbots for online retail enquiries and noted that conversations that came off as too programmed or robotic were off putting. These findings confirmed that a chatbot could work as a viable channel for insurance sales but that the chatbot personality and script would need to be carefully designed.
Following the focus group activities, we conducted usability testing to improve the language and flow of the chatbot journey to increase the likelihood that customers would complete a purchase. Given that insurance purchases require personal information, we wanted to confirm that users would be willing to provide this information in a chatbot interface.
Usability testing confirmed that users were comfortable with navigating e-commerce options and messaging apps as we had learned during the focus group discussions. Participants were enthusiastic about the chatbot and found the script fairly straightforward. We identified opportunities to streamline the discussion and to improve the collection of sensitive personal information. Other suggested improvements included ways to increase trust throughout the user journey, better integrate the chatbot and website for a seamless experience, and improve the payment process.
Based on the insights that we gathered, ToGrantido and Chubb, a global insurance provider, co-designed a fully digital insurance product to cover a combination of accidental death, hospitalization, and severe diseases combined with valuable medical benefits, such as discounted medical consultations, exams and medicines. Through a partnership with Vida Class, a company which promotes access to affordable medical services, ToGarantido clients have access to these discounted health services at more than 6,000 specialist doctors, 10,000 medical laboratories and 22,000 pharmacies throughout Brazil.
Read more about the research and takeaways here.