poor confidence in insurance shopping

So here i am, hopefully about to buy a new home within the next month and as a stipulation of that purchase I need to organise insurance. My mortgage provider's quote felt very expensive so I decide to get some alternative quotes to compare against.

What an experience!

First I try the two big comparison sites. I manage to get to a list of quotes with one of them but I end up in an eternal loop of fatal errors on the other site and I abandon it all together. With the first site, many of the 'cheapest' quotes are from brands I've never heard of and maybe i'm exposing my shopper mentality here, but when I'm insuring the biggest investment of my life to date, I want someone reputable. So I make a note of a couple of the quotes from the bigger brands to take it to the next level.

Quick and generic is ok for investigation but not purchase
However, i'm not completely confident in the coverage of the quotation system of the comparison site. It's generic and quick, which is good to generate some leads but not enough for me to purchase from. I want to make sure all the extras I need are included and all the extras I don't need are not included.

Rather than repeat the exercise online I decide to call, so that at least I can talk to someone to understand my options.

Price difference between channels
My first big issue is the big price difference between channels.  I understand that online shopping is 'cheaper' because there are no wages to pay for customer service centres etc, but with insurance in particular, it makes me nervous that I have not entered or disclosed the right details or got the right level of cover and there is no way to really. Especially when you are getting completely different prices. I wished the internet would say (for example) total policy cost £200.00 per year plus 15% discount for online purchase is £170.00 per year. Then I have the confidence that I am comparing apples with apples when I look at the online and offline prices.

Single channel only
Then there are the insurers, Axa for example, who won't even let you speak to a customer service person. There is no sales contact number on their website at all! You apply online or go elsewhere. How can I check that all my needs are covered? Well I think I'll take my business elsewhere thanks.

Information we want first
Most insurers are getting better at this but there are a guilty few who still get this badly wrong. They start by asking for all your personal information first (online and offline), rather than the subject of the enquiry, which in my case is home insurance. I feel much more inclined to give my personal information once they have satisfied my need.

Ask only the relevant information
Why ask about details that are obviously related to a contents policy when I am only requesting buildings insurance? I already had to spend 15 minutes in a horrid holding pattern before speaking to someone please don't make this any longer than necessary!

Provide detailed feedback.
'I'm sorry we can't offer you insurance right now. Please try again next year'
??? I'm sorry what? What the heck does that mean? Is your site down? Did I do something wrong on the form? Do you have a problem with my property that no-one else does, if so any chance you could tell me about it before I shell out a fortune for the next 25 years? As for trying again 'next year'...erm no chance!

So i'm no nearer at the moment - happy to take recommendations for UK home insurance suppliers :-)

Remote-facilitated-user-testing in multiple global locations

This is brief story about how Webex became the answer to my complex user-testing problems.

I had an interesting XD situation recently which I thought I’d share in case you end up in a similar position. The client I am working with is based in the UK. Some of the users we wanted to test with are dispersed around the globe. What’s more we have an offshore development team working in India to build our product. So the issue was how to get rapid end-user feedback on the design concepts in development without blowing the entire development budget on travel. It was also essential to us that members of the development team experienced the user-testing first hand so that they could appreciate and learn about the users behaviours, mind-sets and mental models.

I have used a number of remote testing software packages previously such as Loop11 or Usabilla to get feedback on a user-interface in development. However most of these packages offer unfacilitated, or software-facilitated test options. While remote unfacilitated testing is great the downside is that there is no opportunity to explore the users perceptions or ask the probing questions that come as a direct result of observation of their reactions or behaviours. The kind of research that is pivotal in early stage UI development. Certainly none of them were offering the ability to have multiple people in multiple geo-dispersed location logged into a single session simultaneously.

I knew there must be a solution out there somewhere, either that or I’d stumbled across a potential new product idea that could make me wealthy. To my surprise the answer had been under my nose all the time in a product I had only really associated with business communications and hadn’t previously associated with user-testing. Webex! The business communication tool. It allowed me to do everything I needed including:

• Ability to support multiple users in different geo-locations simultaneously in one session
• Ability to stream webcam and audio contribution from multiple or limited participants in the session
• Ability to view the participants screen and interaction with the screens to be tested, while simultaneously viewing a webcam of their facial responses and listening to verbal cues.
• Ability to record both audio and video tracks from the session and access them or share them later.
• Ideally software-as-a-service, rather than client-side thin or thick applications that the user needs to install.

Webex had it all! What’s more it was easy to set up*, control during the session and because I was fortunate enough to have access to an existing corporate Webex account  there were no additional overheads or expensive subscriptions. Perfect!

*The easy to set up part comes with the advice of enquiring with your users in advance of the session about their operating system and internet connectivity. If your users are on a fairly standard OS with ‘decent’ connectivity then there should be no set up required. However, as according to Murphy’s Law, we didn’t check in advance and our first participant was using Linux and had low connectivity and the combination meant we had to abandon that particular session! Doh!