Designing a New Portal for PZU Customers

Can an Online Portal Rival PZU Agents?

As PZU offers products and services to clients of all ages and from all walks of life, some clients require more support to identify what they really need. Moreover, financial and insurance products are usually quite complex and have their own difficult terminology.

In traditional sales channels, PZU knows perfect solutions to these issues. Well-trained agents and consultants understand customers’ needs and offer the relevant services; at the same time, they also translate the complicated language of finance and insurance into an easy-to-understand language for the customer.

Given the subject, it’s no surprise that PZU’s former portal could not match traditional customer service agents. This meant that while PZU clients were eager to contact company representatives with problems, they did not attempt to search for information online. A new portal was proposed that would:

• reduce call center traffic,
• reach an important customer segment, i.e. young people who prefer online, self-service channels,
• better exploit the potential of the Internet as a sales and customer service channel.

To Serve and Inspire Users

The keynote of the project was expressed in the slogan: “Simply, clearly, on target!” We wanted PZU clients to use the portal and feel as good as when they were talking to a consultant. We wanted the solution to guide clients through the entire process – to provide support in recognizing their own needs, help users select and configure a given product, and teach them how to use it.

Building a New PZU Portal

Getting to Know PZU Clients

To deliver on the project, we created an interdisciplinary team of PZU and e-point members. On PZU’s side, this included people from the e-marketing department, product managers, and representatives from the R&D department.

For the newly designed portal to be as useful as human consultants, the project had to start with understanding company offer and customer needs. Invaluable insights were provided by input from the e-marketing team and multiple surveys that PZU had previously conducted. Early on, e-point also carried out our own customer needs and expectations survey, which laid the foundation for further work.

User-friendly design is critical for such a project; at various stages in the design process, the e-point UX team employed three UX designers, a UX writer, a strategist, an art director and a graphic designer. We decided that the most efficient method to run such an extensive project would be a series of UX sprints. Each sprint was devoted to tackling particular problems and started with building deep awareness of issues at play. During each sprint, a goal was set for further work. Workshops with experts and stakeholders were critical to this stage. Finally, each sprint ended with testing proposed solutions and optimizing them according to the test results.

A New Product Classification Method

To create a portal which performs strongly, we had to devise a new product structure. We wanted to make it easy for PZU customers to find products which met their individual needs, so we:

• split the entire range into two segments: individual clients and corporate clients,
• determined product categories that align with users’ thinking (and not always with the Group’s internal structure, which was a valuable lesson both for us and for PZU members),
• introduced filters to narrow down product selection in the widest categories,
• designed additional solutions (such as a tool to check what type of investor someone is) to provide vital support in the product access and selection processes.

With the new portal, PZU’s most important and popular products can be accessed in no more than two steps: either directly from the home page or from the menu. This eliminates the need for the customers to visit category pages. Also, portal navigation was enhanced by an intuitive browser and an autocomplete feature, which allow clients who already know what they need to quickly find the desired products.

Clear and Accessible Product Pages

PZU’s product pages also had a massive overhaul. Guided by the principles of plain language, the PZU team made the new website content as reader-friendly as possible, ridding it of lengthy compound sentences and complex terminology. The e-point team proposed a cleaner layout and new graphic forms to enhance communication.

Each page includes a clear product description from the customer’s perspective and supplementary content to help the customer find the needed information. Also, pages for similar products share a similar structure, which makes them easy to compare.

Easy Self-Service

Promoting self-service was also a major goal for the new portal. Each product has an understandable description of all possible forms of purchase. But insurance and finance are not just sales. Extended service is an important factor in customer satisfaction, especially when it becomes necessary to claim insurance.

The Help and Contact section got special attention. This is the front line of customers’ online information search, so we wanted it to be very clear and highly relevant. Based on the information received from the call center, we designed a FAQ section covering real customers’ most frequently asked questions. Additionally, it’s now easy for consultants to report new topics that clients often raise.

To account for clients who can’t solve problems on their own or who aren’t interested in doing so, we prepared forms that are easy to fill out and help contact the insurer, including options to make an appointment with an insurance agent or to report damage to an insured object.

The new portal has also naturally become the heart of the PZU Internet ecosystem. Equally handy on mobile and desktop devices, it is the gateway for logging into all PZU Group’s services. More importantly, thanks to implemented RWD solutions the portal adjusts to the context it is used in, for instance by facilitating the purchase of travel insurance shortly before setting out on a trip or by helping to use road assistance.

Built Using Active Content CMS

The new PZU portal was developed with Active Content, e-point’s proprietary CMS, as its backbone. What makes it unique?

• It’s a great way to visually build websites – the editor can build a website from ready-made elements (components) and immediately see what it will look like.
• It supports building responsive websites.
• Users can quickly create new visual components for project use.
• Companies can roll out multiple versions of content and files.
• It includes a long list of modules available out-of-the-box, including the CMS, file server, news and FAQ service module, branch base module, and an extended authorization system that can be implemented without much modification.

The Outcome

After the launch of the new PZU website, there was a considerable rise in conversion on the moje.pzu.pl website: