APOLLO Insurance

As Product Design Lead at APOLLO, I have been privileged to be able to create an entirely new experience for customers. APOLLO started in 2017, and by the time I joined in 2021 they had a profitable, thriving wholesale business with insurance brokers. But, as so often happens in my work, the company wanted to create a completely new consumer product experience and grow their presence in the retail insurance space. In the least two years, I have been able to lead four development teams through an array of redesigns and rethinks for their entire product journey – tailored to consumers and specifically to rental tenants. 

Revamping the APOLLO website really brings all the work behind the scenes into focus. Designed to maximize conversion from SEM and SEO traffic, turning traffic into leads, this sleek, modern presence creates the right impression and entices users to become customers.

To create a customer experience that would stand out in the marketplace by radically simplifying the process of buying insurance. Not just the experience of buying insurance from a broker, but disrupting the entire way insurance is sold to customers in Canada (or anywhere else for that matter). This includes a complete website redesign, a complete rethinking of the online quoting experience and underwriting process, as well as a customer portal for customer self-service. Nothing less than the entire online insurance customer journey.

We started by rethinking the way a customer buys insurance online. The experience among even the best of our competitors was long and unnecessarily complex. By rethinking the way insurance underwriting happens online in real time, we were able to radically simplify the quote experience and reduce the number of questions to the bare minimum. At the same time I designed an experience that is memorable, unique and super usable. And maybe just a little bit fun.

Next we redesigned the website experience to create a simple, engaging and unique experience that is highly optimized for conversion. The new website represented the new ideas and brand evolution involved in the quote process redesign. The website proved to be a great place to evolve the brand and the overall digital design language of marketing and applications.

The last step was to create a deluxe self-service portal for customers to manage their policy online any time of day or night. The customer portal features a registration-free access model that uses the customer’s email address to provide secure access to their policy details. 

The relaunch of the insurance experience resulted in the business making and exceeding sales targets consistently in every quarter it has been active – for the first time in the history of the company. It has proved to be the basis of an entirely new direction for the company, leaning into the scalability and high conversion of the new user experience. What’s more, the system provides a superb basis for experimentation and optimization of insurance recommendations and pricing behind the scenes, as well as a modular design the can be reworked in real time to respond to user input.

The self-service customer portal has set a new standard for customer service in the company, and the industry. Adoption has been rapid and overwhelmingly positive among customers, and the load on the customer service call centre staff has been reduced by more than 75%. In addition, the customer portal has become the basis for all of APOLLO’s customer journey based design thinking going forward. How do you make a relationship with customers that goes beyond sales and (hopefully) renewal? The customer portal, naturally.

The entirely redesigned quote & buy flow for tenant insurance is leading the way for APOLLO’s new product and customer experience. In less than a minute, a customer can have their insurance policy in their inbox. This is THE simplest way to buy insurance in Canada, or anywhere else for that matter.

The customer portal closes the circle and forms the basis of the entire retention plan for consumers. Customers can update their policy information, access payments and customer support any time day or night. The portal is also the main place to interact with customers for upselling, renewals, reminders and more.