Elsewhen

Summary:

Zego is a digital-first commercial motor insurance provider. Its customers include professional drivers of private hire vehicles and food delivery scooters - and it is a preferred insurance partner to Uber, Just Eat and Deliveroo.

As an evolution of its digitally-enabled offering, Zego wanted to use app-based telematics technology to identify and reduce risk for customers through helping them improve their driving behaviour. During a 10-week period Elsewhen helped Zego develop an innovative app-based telematics product.

The challenge:

Zego believed that app-based telematics technology presented an opportunity to better understand individual risk and significantly reduce the cost of claims. This would help Zego to price its products and policies more fairly - providing better outcomes for customers.

App-based telematics uses the sensors in a driver's smartphone to monitor driving behaviour - making it easier to deploy than conventional telematics devices. However, many drivers are reluctant to install an app that monitors them, and see little incentive to improve their driving, while many users uninstall such apps within a month.

Zego tasked Elsewhen to overcome these challenges - building a strong business case for telematics and accelerating its app-based product to market readiness in a timescale of just 10 weeks.

Our strategic approach:

To develop Zego's new telematics product with a focus on changing driving behaviour, Elsewhen followed an Agile methodology. We used two-week sprints and daily stand-ups to ensure collaboration and transparency between team members from Elsewhen and Zego. We also managed the project in two workstreams.

Product & Design: In order to have a 360° view of the project, we ran user interviews and surveys, held more than 45 hours of workshops, and organised internal hackathons. Our team benchmarked telematics market competitors, drew inspiration from multiple industries, mapped out the full customer journey, and designed key app UI screens.

Technology: We made sure that all the designed solutions were technically achievable using available technology - and mapped out implementation routes, with a focus on SDKs and APIs.

Our solution:

Elsewhen provided a comprehensive range of deliverables for Zego to advance the new telematics product to market. These included a product strategy, end-to-end customer journey design, rewards mechanisms, competition benchmarking, customer insights analysis and incentive ideas.

Our technology work included a design technical feasibility study, analysis of SDKs and APIs, collated data strategy and data architecture analysis.

Elsewhen's strategic work and insights guided the creation and launch of the new Zego Sense telematics app in late 202. The app enables customers to automatically share driving data. This enables Zego to assess risk more accurately - and consequently offer insurance products to professional drivers at a fairer price.

The outcomes:

Elsewhen helped Zego use telematics to improve pricing transparency, personalise service, build a closer customer relationship and improve user engagement.

The Zego Sense telematics app launched in October 2020 on iOS and Android platforms. During the first month, customers bought more than 3000 of the new telematics policies, successfully meeting Zego's launch objectives. The Zego Sense app has earned a user rating of 4.7 out of 5 on the Apple AppStore (as of January 2022).

Our delivery of a strategic B2C open market telematics proposition has helped Zego become the UK's first Insurtech 'unicorn' - achieving a business valuation in 2021 of over $1 billion (£0.7 billion).

Overview:

Google asked Elsewhen to design and develop a simple, intuitive experience on mobile and desktop that would allow people to explore and interpret findings from two of their largest online surveys of consumer behaviour: the Consumer Barometer questionnaire and the Connected Consumer Study. Together, they are the largest ever study of online behaviour and cover thousands of adults in over 50 countries.

The challenges:

Our design and code had to be world class to stand up to scrutiny from both Google and the community. We were building a product while the collection of data and research was still in progress, our challenge was to maintain high quality output in a complex, live environment.

Over several months, we defined the system architecture, competitor landscape, user experience, brand identity and visual language. Having been given early access to the Google Design Material Library, our work could be used to validate the Google design system before it was released. We were also one of the first developers to use AngularJS to build a consumer facing product at scale.

Our approach:

Working closely with stakeholders and our research partner, we fed live data into our agile delivery process for the product. We took the statistics, turned them into an API which could be consumed in clusters and used to generate reports.

The outcomes:

A scalable tool that simplifies the processing of big sets of data, so users can ask questions, discover new insights and extract real value

Overview:

Global payments technology company Mastercard works to connect and power an inclusive digital economy – by making transactions safe, simple, smart and accessible across more than 210 countries worldwide. Recently, Mastercard’s prepaid cards business worked with Elsewhen as a strategic partner to help enhance and accelerate its product delivery and user acceptance testing (UAT) processes – based on Elsewhen’s experience in quality assurance (QA) and wider strategy. We established an implementation plan for Mastercard to achieve rapid improvements to team structure, methods and workflows.

The challenge:

Mastercard faced a challenge to meet the growing market demand for its prepaid card services. Their testing process was siloed from the rest of the development process. This lack of visibility and collaboration meant they were unable to respond effectively to demand. The team was also very under-resourced and lacked senior input from the business.

Elsewhen worked with Mastercard as a strategic partner to clarify the underlying symptoms of the problem. We made a set of recommendations to help them implement positive change. Key issues to address included:

Resourcing: The teams were too under-resourced, and lacked clear oversight of the process.

Collaboration: UAT teams were siloed, with insufficient use of collaboration techniques.

Product practices: Too much manual activity and duplication of work was happening, with issues being found late, and insufficient test automation.

Our strategic approach:

Assess:

We conducted a detailed assessment of the current internal state of play. This involved mapping out each stage of the current processes, the key pain points and their impacts – and the causes behind these issues. We interviewed team members and stakeholders, building trust and hearing their perspectives on the problems.

Recommend:

With the insights gained, we developed recommendations for Mastercard on building an improved UAT team structure, defining new roles and responsibilities. On a broader strategic scope, we also identified ways to Improve wider QA and delivery practices.

Implement:

Finally, we developed a practical plan for Mastercard to implement our recommendations. This included an in-depth handover to equip the teams with the required insights, skills and methodologies. We also helped the prepaid business recruit its first specialist UAT director, to drive and oversee the process.

Our solution:

Mastercard’s teams had faced a ‘brain drain’ caused by staff turnover and over-reliance on contractors. We recommended skilled new hires in the areas of the bottlenecks – bringing leadership and knowledge to open the lines of communication between teams.

In terms of team structure, we recommended better alignment of UAT with product owners and Scrum teams, with a UAT analyst for every two teams. We also clarified how the Agile Scrum process should operate.

Finally we recommended they “shift ‘left” along the timeline – starting testing, collaboration and risk assessment earlier in the development process. We also encouraged more automation of testing, rather than the reliance on manual regression testing.

The outcomes:

Elsewhen was proactive on team resourcing issues, helping Mastercard hire the right people – including a senior leader – by putting together a detailed process to follow.

By reinforcing how testing should operate, we provided a structure for better and earlier collaboration in the wider product processes employed at Mastercard. This has enabled quicker, more rigorous testing – so any problem is caught earlier, by teams empowered to resolve it.

The primary outcome of our recommendations was a much better product process throughout, as well as key improvements to the QA and UAT layers. For example, the introduction of automated end-to-end regression testing has reduced UAT effort by 87.5%, – helping to accelerate delivery and assure quality for Mastercard.