Elephant Insurance Sees Gains Through Behavioral Data and Analysis – Part 1

In a recent blog post, we defined behavioral data and highlighted its benefits including increased fraud detection, reduced friction for the customer, and lowered rates of false positive declines. As a continuation of this series, we’ll explore how Elephant InsuranceTM realized the immediate benefits of seeing their behavioral data.

Like many insurance companies today, Elephant Insurance is a “digital-first” auto insurance company with most of its policies coming through online channels. Their online application and the journey for their customers and agents is of critical importance. “Even small changes in throughput or conversion can have a large impact on our business,” said Colleen Benzin, Head of Product for Elephant Insurance.

“I really wasn’t looking at behavior as a solution,” noted Benzin. “But after seeing a demo of the Neuro-ID Friction IndexTM Platform, I immediately went to my CEO and IT Director and said, ‘You need to see this.’”

Neuro-ID, a TransUnion partner, is a behavioral data and analytics company pioneering the use of behavior to help determine the intent and experiences of online consumers during interactions with a digital brand. Neuro-ID data can uncover issues with the onboarding process, such as friction that causes abandonment, flag potential fraud, and identify signals of genuine users and people ready to buy. The Friction Index is a platform that monitors and measures friction as customers navigate a form or application and provides a dashboard for easy interpretation of each users’ behavior.

“You’re always a bit skeptical when a vendor tells you how easy their product is to implement,” said Benzin. “But in the case of Neuro-ID, it really was easy. To give you an idea of the timeline, I saw the demo in late October of 2020, started talking about a pilot in November, and by mid-December the JavaScript was installed and we had our first set of insights. That’s when I had my first, ‘Aha!’ moment. We’ve been optimizing and learning since then.”

“We’re able to see the frustration some of our customers experience during certain interactions with our forms. Without Neuro-ID, these friction points would have taken much longer to discover, if at all,” stated Benzin. “Seeing the actual customer experience, in a consolidated format, makes it much easier to reduce frustration and increase the completion of applications and improve overall satisfaction.”

Until now, many companies have relied on tools like surveys, NPS scores, A/B testing, and session replay to diagnose a customer’s experience with a website, checkout page, form, or application. However, these methods may not provide the in-depth data of a customer’s experience — down to the question level on a form — at scale. Data analyzed once the customer hits the submit button may only provide part of the picture.

“We have not seen this level of data before. We are now able to see patterns in the behavioral data that we weren’t able to identify in our own research,” said Benzin. “Another area of opportunity we’ve seen is around the manipulation of data on an application. Data manipulation for rate evasion is an obvious underwriting use case and tells us much more about the users’ intentions. The data is powerful.”

The promise of behavioral data for fraud detection and genuine user signals is real and ready to use today. With the right analysis, behavioral data can answer two key questions that should concern every carrier:

1. Is the user who they say they are? That is, are they a genuine customer/prospect?
2. Is the genuine customer having a good experience?

These insights can be a game-changer for insurers as they continue to accelerate digitization. Future success relies on understanding customers as best as possible and providing tailored services and experiences that effectively satisfy their needs. Stay tuned for the final blog of the series about Elephant Insurance implementing behavioral data into their application process.

About Elephant Insurance

Elephant Insurance is a customer-centric auto insurance carrier headquartered in Richmond, VA. Elephant provides auto insurance policies to consumers in Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. Elephant is a wholly owned subsidiary of Admiral Group, plc., an FTSE 100 company and one of the U.K.’s leading insurers with a presence in eight countries and millions of customers worldwide. Elephant is a certified as a Great Place to Work®. To learn more, visit elephant.com.