Читать книгу Service Design - Ben Reason - Страница 12

People say they make insurance purchasing decisions based on quality, but they find it hard to do this in reality. It is very difficult to compare what is inside different insurance policies and make a rational choice. People feel that insurance is not very transparent, especially with regards to quality, so it is easier to compare on price, because money is a fixed variable. This means designers cannot simply trust what customers say they want, but have to work smartly around price and quality issues.

Of course there is room for quality in the market, but with online price-comparison engines, the quality aspect of insurance has completely dropped out of the conversation with customers and all that is left is price. For customers, quality means, “Am I covered? Do I get a rental car when my car is being repaired? Am I actually covered for the things I think should be covered?”

With most other services and products, customers can easily see the differences between the premium version and something cheaper, but not with insurance. Customers are really asking what quality means—that is, the difference between the premium and budget products. This raises many other questions, such as what is actually covered and when, how much are the out-of-pocket expenses, and so on. It soon becomes complicated.

As with much service design, the challenge is to make the invisible visible, or to make the right things visible and get rid of the noise in the rest of the offering. In the Gjensidige project, then, one of the key challenges was to develop a service proposition that eliminated price as the key deciding factor.