Issue #6 | April 2021 | Global Edition | thefloow.com
Quarterly Magazine by The Floow
Product Design: How Focusing on Our Users Will Empower Us to Transform The World of Motor Insurance + Future of Risk: The Future of Motor Insurance in a PostCOVID World
Photo by Ichio on Unsplash
+ UPLIFT: Ensuring Fairness Within Insurance and Technologies
Driven Magazine
Contents 04-05
Letter from our CEO by Aldo Monteforte
06-13
Future of Risk: The Future of Motor Insurance in a PostCOVID World by Andy Goldby
14-19
UPLIFT: Ensuring Fairness Within Insurance and Technologies by Sam Chapman
20-25
Introducing FloowClaims: Built To Deliver The Future of Claims Management by Ash Sarwar
26-35
Data Consistency and Data Quality: A Search For Reality by David Steele
36-41
Spotlight On…. Our Technical Customer Services Team by Charlotte Pearson
42-57
How Focusing On Our Users Will Empower Us to Transform The World of Motor Insurance by Gareth S.
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Aldo & Sam, The Floow
Welcome to issue 6 of Driven The Floow’s business updates publication. We are The Floow, a leading telematics provider whose capabilities include data science excellence, cutting-edge technology and the innovative use of social sciences to deliver unique insights to our clients - personal and commercial lines insurers, auto manufacturers and governments and local authorities - and their customers, including drivers and fleet managers.
company, working in an agile development methodology, we are ready and able to meet the changing needs of our clients and their customers wherever they are based.
We were founded in 2012 by CEO Aldo Monteforte with the mission to make mobility safer and smarter for everyone, a mission which still drives everything we do today.
Driven provides us with a platform to demonstrate our innovative, forwardthinking nature in the areas of insurance, mobility and road safety. Throughout each issue, we focus on how we see the future of mobility unfolding, where we are developing and innovating currently, and how we are collaborating with our clients to ensure that they are ready for the challenges of an ever-evolving and fast-changing market.
Our team, who are based across the UK, the US and mainland Europe, are experts in their fields of data and social sciences, app, web and platform development and user centred design. As a product focused
The future of mobility, and the effects it will have across motor insurance, transportation and infrastructure, is uncertain but extremely important make sure you stay one step ahead with Driven. Driven Magazine | 3
Driven Magazine | Letter from our CEO
04
The COVID-19 pandemic has been testing in many ways and I’m extremely proud of the commitment and resilience which The Floow team has shown as we continue to deliver excellence for our clients, under unprecedented circumstances.
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Aldo Monteforte, CEO, The Floow
Aldo Monteforte Letter from our CEO The Floow is on a mission to help convert policyholders into “partners in risk prevention”.
with end-users, ability to prevent outcomes, and dispatch support when the unexpected happens.
Powerful sensors proliferate across every aspect of our life and as data interpretation techniques continue to improve, individual risk will be increasingly measured from the observation of behaviour as it manifests in real-time.
The Floow’s two-pronged product range is carefully designed around this vision:
Any question an insurer may have asked of a customer can find a precise and instantaneous answer in behavioural and contextual data, provided the carrier’s operators have been trained and instrumented accordingly. We hold a conviction that over the next 5 to 10 years insurers will introduce “connectivity” into the majority of their products. It just makes sense as it provides: great and granular understanding of risk, intimate familiarity
The Floow’s Telematics range (FloowDrive, FloowKit, FloowFleet and FloowAPI) is about data acquisition (via mobile or third party devices) and exquisite mobile-first user engagement and behavioural conditioning in support of safer driving. The Floow’s Analytics suite delivers a unique combination of insights (Driver Scores, Data Consistency and Quality Indices, Integrity Monitoring, Crash Detection and many others) that make sense of the data we collect, enabling our partners to acquire intimate knowledge of endusers. One single, composite “vista”, enabling the complete management of a large connected portfolio.
In the Product area, I am delighted to share that Ash Sarwar, formerly at MoneySuperMarket, has joined us as Senior Product Manager. Ash will lead our efforts in the Telematics range, bringing to life our mobile product vision where the end-user is king. In this issue of Driven, you will hear from different parts of the organisation who will detail several facets of our work, including what we have learnt and produced over the last few months. Regardless of the author, I trust you will sense everybody’s passion to make mobility safer and smarter. If you are interested in what we do, or just share our passion, we would love to hear from you at info@ thefloow.com.
- Aldo Driven Magazine | 5
Driven Magazine | The Future of Risk
The future of risk The Future of Motor Insurance in a Post-COVID World Article written by Andy Goldby, Chief Actuary
06
2020 was a difficult year globally as we all came to terms with the impact of COVID-19 on our health, and that of those around us. In most countries, the authorities attempted to reduce the spread of the virus by limiting the number of people that could mix outside of their household, as well as closing entertainment venues, pubs, restaurants etc., and making it clear that working from home was advised wherever possible. Understandably, all of this had a significant impact on road travel across the world. Travel bans meant that people could not leave their own country, but they also meant that travel within a country was extremely limited.
The COVID-driven impact on mobility Overnight the workforce of many companies had to move to working from home and we all witnessed the significant reduction in traffic as a result. These drops in traffic were coupled with the associated increases in convictions for mobile phone use and speeding, as drivers reacted to the reduced traffic congestion where they were no longer limited by the actions of others on the road.
According to data collected by The Floow, in 2019, the average US and European telematics customers drove around 100 journeys per month. When the pandemic struck in March 2020, this dropped by 40% in the US, and by over 50% across Europe. Driven Magazine | 7
Driven Magazine | The Future of Risk
US average distance per journey and journeys per month
Europe average distance per journey and journeys per month
Since April 2020, the number of journeys per month and the average distance of each journey has recovered. But even by the end of the year, total average distance travelled per month was still down by around 15%, as many businesses remained closed or with the majority of their workforce still remote. 8 | www.thefloow.com
The challenge for insurers post-COVID Most importantly, drivers are now more aware of the mileage that they typically drive, or rather what they used to do but don’t now. As a result, they have become more open to flexibly priced policies that meet their mobility needs. However, this was not the only effect. McKinsey recently reported that, due to the challenges of face-to-face meetings, customer demand for digital products had increased from 38% to 54% within a couple of weeks of the COVID pandemic becoming widespread. In turn, this has increased the need for insurers to have a well thought out, multi-channel approach with a high-quality single view of the customer at its heart.
But there are even more challenges for insurers on the horizon as we move into 2021… Driven Magazine | 9
Driven Magazine | The Future of Risk
New legislative and technological changes in 2021 1. Increased penalties for mobile distraction The Floow has evidenced that distraction through the use of a mobile phone whilst driving, especially physical interaction with the phone e.g. texting, is the most significant factor to increase a driver’s risk of having an accident. Therefore it is very positive to see the UK Government recognising this increased risk, and 10 | www.thefloow.com
broadening the legal penalties so that being caught holding or scrolling through a phone or sat nav whilst driving, will earn a driver 6 points and a £200 fine. However, for insurers, this means that a driver’s past history of convictions will no longer necessarily be a good guide for the future, and as a result pricing models will need to be adjusted.
2. Advances in vehicle autonomy In addition, OEMs are making great strides in vehicle autonomy and ADAS features. So much so that in 2021, Automatic Lane Keeping Systems (ALKS) are on the road to approval in 60 countries via the harmonised agreements of the UNECE for ALKS type approval. Consequently, drivers will be able to delegate the speed and lane control of their vehicle to a computer at suitable speeds (including removing their hands from the steering wheel and/or feet from the pedals for extended periods of time), as long as the driver continues to pay attention to the road so they can retake control if required. Again, this will lead to pressure on insurance pricing systems which will need to adjust without having a true understanding of which vehicles are fitted with these systems as an option, or indeed when and how often they
are activated. However, many OEMs are seeking to reduce this ‘unknown’ factor by providing telematics data as an option directly from the vehicle. At its most basic, this data may only be the total mileage the vehicle has travelled, but many OEMs may choose to offer detailed telematics data comprising of when and where various safety or ADAS features were enabled and/or triggered, as well as the customary 1Hz telematics positioning and speed data. A good example of this is one OEM who we are working with. They are looking to provide a full VIN decoder which will enable insurers to understand exactly what ADAS systems are available in that vehicle (standard or optional) at the point of quote, as well as detailed UBI data for every journey.
3. Potential price optimisation changes Lastly and most importantly, in the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is currently finalising a market conduct review into what they refer to as ‘pricewalking’. This is where renewing customers are likely to pay more than a potential customer would do if they asked for a quote.
any form of proxy. This will mean that insurers will again need to do a significant review of their pricing systems and models. By the end of 2021, a factor, such as driving behaviour, could be one of the only remaining things that an insurer could legally use to differentiate prices at renewal.
It is extremely likely that the FCA review’s recommendations will be to, in effect, ban insurers from performing any form of price optimisation that uses tenure, or
All of these factors mentioned above, are combining to create a tidal wave of change which will catalyse the growth of telematics.
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Driven Magazine | The Future of Risk
How insurers can utilise telematics to successfully navigate these challenges We are already seeing many new UBI propositions coming to market, driven by growing customer acceptance of data sharing, as well as the need for flexible insurance products that can adapt to changing circumstances. In particular, this is driving a wave of UBI 3.0 where a combination of mileage and high quality behavioural driving scores can be used to educate drivers to be safer and more efficient, saving themselves both time and money.
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Photo by Charles Postiaux on Unsplash
UBI 3.0 is not limited to improving scores and education though, and it is enabling insurers to become more efficient by using sensor data to help to quickly identify any incidents that a customer may be involved in, triage a claim to the correct claims handlers (in some cases, chatbots or other AI solutions), and gather the correct claims information at the roadside. All of this will help to reduce claims fraud and speed up the claims service, ensuring that customers are without their vehicles for shorter periods of time. As we pass the COVID-related 2 million deaths mark globally, with over 100,000 in the UK alone, it is clear that even with vaccine
programmes progressing well, 2021 is going to be another difficult year for many. However, with the right help there is no reason why motor insurers could not use this as an opportunity to embrace technology in a fair way for all of their customers. The Floow is ideally placed to help insurers meet the UBI 3.0 challenge with our highly predictive range of tailored contextual scores, that can be combined with mileage metrics, to optimise overall understanding of risk. These scores can also be combined with our recently released crash detection and behavioural education programmes to provide further insights.
To find out more, visit our website and get in touch at info@thefloow.com Driven Magazine | 13
Driven Magazine | Uplift
Ensuring Fairness Within Insurance and Technologies Article written by Sam Chapman, Chief Innovation Officer
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The Floow has long been the leading example in predictive risk understanding for motor insurers and their policyholders. Our risk estimation is based upon actual driving correlated to claims rather than proxies which provides clear and demonstrable benefits to both insurers and their policyholders. For insurers, it can lower the requirement for some proxies, while fundamentally enhancing overall predictive risk insight to make policies smarter and more profitable. The solutions we provide to insurers offer clearer pricing which is linked to behaviour, allowing drivers to be recognised and rewarded for exhibiting safer driving behaviours behind the wheel.
However, with any new technology or approach, alongside the clear benefits that they bring, it is also vital to explore any potential unexpected impacts. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that the technologies and approaches not only perform core risk prediction well, but that they also ensure that they do not unintentionally add bias, or decrease fairness in any manner. The Floow has always worked extremely hard to ensure that we continually focus on these aspects throughout all of our innovation work and our day-to-day activities.
All of our teams bring a vast amount of experience gathered from years of industry knowledge, leadership in innovation, and a novel understanding of mobility data, which ensure that we deliver the unique ability to understand risk in a highly detailed manner.
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Driven Magazine
The Project UPLIFT (Utilising Processing to explore Insurance Fairness using Telematics) was a project funded by the UK’s Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund which aimed to strengthen advanced data solutions for the insurance sector.
The project sought to discover possible areas where bias could theoretically be present in advanced motor insurance, and develop new methods to address and improve any areas of bias which were identified, as required. However, it is important to stress that telematics, despite its recent growth, already delivers a much fairer experience compared to proxy-based policies, as drivers are rated based on actual driving, not proxies. Despite this, it doesn’t mean that telematics approaches cannot be further improved. It is clear that in order to achieve unprecedented levels of fairness, both old and new biases need to be removed, to provide optimised and fair risk understanding. 16 | www.thefloow.com
Bias and technology The UPLIFT project drew inspiration from the idea that predictive systems, machine learning and dataled approaches have the potential to: encode old biases from prior data and understanding, or add new undesired changes to otherwise accurate systems. These potential impacts are more commonly discussed in relation to technologies including facial recognition, where despite their accuracy, they can
be open to bias (if they are not developed, configured and tested carefully) which can impact on fair decision making. Some of these biases can be extreme but it is also possible to have a range of small hidden biases included within any system. To address this issue, it requires a mature and investigative understanding to be developed before employing carefully tested technical mitigations.
Looking beyond traditional biases The UPLIFT project focused specifically on telematics motor insurance, and it sought to explore and investigate any traditional biases relating to personal data, such as gender and ethnicity, but it also went further than this. It looked at potential areas where bias could emerge including - the device(s) used to capture data, the operating systems and chipsets within them, plus the geographical location bias, usage bias, and importantly real world data quality issues and the differentiated impacts for individuals. All of these aspects go beyond the minimum required for predictive accuracy, and extend beyond the normal quality assurance approaches. This is because these investigations focused on policyholder needs, such as
individualised ethical fairness for all. Simply put, systems that serve all users equally, rather than focusing purely on overall predictive accuracy, are fairer and have less bias To investigate this, it requires the identification of demonstrable edge case scenarios, where risk understanding may deliver slightly differentiated results for some users in varying conditions or circumstances. Despite this analysis being guided by the identification of edge cases, the work undertaken, as part of the UPLIFT project, found zero connection with any traditional protected data - gender, ethnicity etc. Instead, the areas for further investigation included: the device used to gather mobility data, the device’s operating system, rare specific geography (rare locational issues), ionospheric radiation, etc. Driven Magazine | 17
Driven Magazine | Uplift
How UPLIFT has influenced our telematics solutions The areas highlighted on the previous page also identified further points of study aimed at determining the potential of bias, its impacts, and how to address and mitigate any observed bias.
These areas have helped to enhance many of The Floow’s core capabilities including: • Passenger vs. driver detection in smartphone-monitored solutions where accuracy enhancements can ensure fairer processing for multi-driver policies. • Severe crash detection on nomadic devices to enable better reactions to major incidents, which will help drivers and claims handling. • Risk estimation differences as a result of routing choices.
• Driver education feedback with differences highlighted between journeys which originate from varying devices. • GPS data quality issues from different devices to ensure a fair methodology for end-users, regardless of originating data quality, and; • Further areas where both large and small gains can be made with new or improved methodologies.
The improvements which we have made to our core capabilities, as highlighted above, allow us to remain the leading example in risk understanding, and ensure that our solutions continue to offer benefits to insurers and their policyholders. The most recent examples of how the work completed as part of the UPLIFT project has been utilised within our solutions can be seen with the launch of FloowClaims - our claims module, and our Data Quality Assessment Service
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Photo by Charles Postiaux on Unsplash
which was introduced in our latest release, release 9.1. Both of these solutions aim to enhance our already powerful algorithms and create fully connected insurance solutions which provide insurers with in-depth insights and provide policyholders with the robust and fair capabilities which fulfil the requirements they have for their insurance policy.
A change in focus, delivering successful results Although we initially set out to understand and enhance fairness, we instead found solutions to issues that have produced products which are better balanced, and which enable accuracy improvements. By addressing edge cases within the UPLIFT project, we were able to remove previously unknown outliers and demonstrate a predictive uplift in scoring - ensuring that the use of telematics within insurance remains fair for all.
To find out more about the work which we have carried out as part of the UPLIFT project, visit our webpage and check out our project update blog from August 2020.
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Driven Magazine | Introducing FloowClaims
Introducing FloowClaims: Built to deliver the future of claims management
Article written by Ash Sarwar, Senior Product Manager
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Driven Magazine | Introducing FloowClaims
For any policyholder, the true test of their insurance provider is when they need to make a claim, particularly if they have been involved in an accident. The experience of the drivers through the entire claiming process from the first notification of loss (FNOL) to resolution - can make or break their opinion of their insurer, and can affect their decision to renew or recommend the insurer. As a result, managing a claim is a key moment in the lifecycle of any motor policy, and it is vital for the insurers to have the processes, procedures and systems in place to provide the fastest, easiest and most robust claims service to their customers.
Focusing on the future of claims management At The Floow, we are very aware of the importance of claims to insurers, and policyholders, and that is why we have always worked towards the ultimate goal of a touchless claims management process. A process which provides the opportunity to compress claims resolution time from months to days, reduces the expenses associated with claims management, and enhances the end-user experience with quick cycle times and interventions. Providing reliable and scalable claims solutions for our customers has always been a key part of our vision, and it has led to the development of FloowClaims; our claims service, launched at the end of 2020.
Photo by Charles Postiaux on Unsplash
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Driven Magazine | Introducing FloowClaims
Introducing FloowClaims FloowClaims is our claims module which features a number of capabilities relating to crash detection and claims processing. It follows on from the launch of our robust smartphonebased crash detection algorithm in July 2020. The algorithm was developed by our data scientists who collated and then examined a large amount of data from crash tests and other related sources. They used these insights to build a solution designed to identify large incidents based on data from the smartphone. The algorithm has since analysed millions of journeys, and has been evidenced through testing against real-life claims from the books of multiple global insurance carriers. Our FloowClaims solution can be added to any of our FloowDrive or FloowKit propositions, to create a fully rounded connected insurance product that uses the smartphone to track and condition driver behaviour behind the wheel, but also to detect road accidents. Built utilising machine learned algorithms, our crash detection algorithm assesses, in near realtime, the factors and conditions of each journey, and evaluates if a high severity impact has taken place. A detailed crash notification can then be sent back to the insurer or dedicated contact centres either in near real-
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time, using an API push, or daily as aggregated CSV reports. To make it easier for the insurers, we have also added the option to use instant email alerts, which contain information about a potential incident, and are sent to a designated insurer inbox when an impact event meets the configured crash alert threshold. This relates to the probability and severity thresholds which can be set by an insurer to define which impact events are communicated. For our FloowDrive clients, these email alerts also contain a link to view further information about the detected impact in the insurer portal. By providing insurers with a variety of options, we want to allow them to choose the methods which best suit the requirements for the proposition they want to offer. For example, an insurer may want to use the data to provide roadside assistance and therefore they will require immediate crash notifications whenever an impact is detected. Alternatively, an insurer may only want to use the data as another factor in creating a clear and in-depth picture of a driver’s risk level. In this case, immediacy is not the requirement so our CSV reports which are sent daily may be all that the insurer requires for their particular insurance proposition.
Making improvements to current processes The instant crash notifications, and the CSV report, allow for quick and effective claim handling including services such as early First Notice of Loss (FNOL) surveys. This can speed up the processing time of claims and significantly reduce the cost of claims, with less legal intervention, shorter replacement vehicle periods and faster fraud intervention. The opportunity to be alerted immediately when a crash has occurred allows insurers to proactively respond by offering vehicle recovery and roadside assistance. This can help to save lives and add significant value to policyholders when it matters most. This is extremely important in a world where policyholders expect more from their insurers and where they are constantly on the lookout for the best, and most valuable service. By correlating this data with other information, insurers can determine a driver’s risk profile based on their actual driver behaviour. As a result, drivers can be priced much more accurately, providing them with a fairer price for their insurance premium.
Continuing to focus on customer experience FloowClaims was developed to provide insurers with visibility of high severity impacts which occur during the course of a driver’s journey and it does just that, but there is further to go on our journey towards touchless claims management. We need to ensure that the experience of the policyholder is as good, or even better, than the processes and procedures which are developed and put in place to manage and handle their claims. This is only the beginning for FloowClaims as we continue to work hard to bring further developments to the service over the coming months, to ensure that it truly delivers for policyholders, as well as insurers, at the most important and testing time of any policy lifecycle.
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Driven Magazine | Data Consistency and Quality
Data Consistency and Data Quality: A search for reality Article written by David Steele, Head of Data Science
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At The Floow, we see ourselves as the data equivalent of an oil refinery. Where an oil refinery takes crude oil and refines it to make fuel with the impurities removed, The Floow takes raw sensor information from driver journeys, such as GPS and accelerometer values, and refines it into a clean data set that can be ingested by our scoring and analytical processes. At a fundamental level, this process works very well. Our scoring implementations and analytical processes are designed in a highly robust way. This means that any impurities which may pass through the cleansing routines and into our system, do not break it or make it crash. However, as with most software and models, our systems are designed using an iterative process. The idea
behind this is that each new iteration brings about enhancements and improvements, which will produce a better performance than the baseline performance of the current iteration. ‘Data Consistency’ and ‘Data Quality’ are two such enhancements. They are specifically designed to measure and better handle the impurities of the data that our systems may be exposed to during the scoring and modelling processes. Driven Magazine | 27
Driven Magazine | Data Consistency and Quality
Why do we need these enhancements, and why now? Over the last 12 months, The Floow’s Data Science team, including myself, have been developing and working on a number of enhancements around Data Consistency and Data Quality to introduce to our current systems.
There are many reasons why we decided to make these enhancements to our systems, but here are a few of the key motivators which prompted our decision to undertake this work: • As the technology that collects journey data becomes more sophisticated, it can deliver a richer data set which must be cleansed properly before being ingested. A rich data set may have increased sensitivity to subtle outliers and oddities, so we need processes that can spot such things with a high degree of accuracy. • We are constantly improving our visual representations of data, therefore we need to make sure that the data can be easily understood for any output which may be shown. • Being aware of data issues is not enough, we need to cleanse the data according to the correct contextual purpose. With Data Consistency and Data Quality, we can apply our cleansing processes to obtain the best possible representation of an individual journey that took place in a real-life scenario, so that users are not unfairly scored due to bad data. 28 | www.thefloow.com
• Poor data can cause problems with our algorithms. For example, our tagging algorithm predicts the journey type (car, train, plane etc) and if the data is poor, then these predictions are more likely to be wrong. • More recently, we have seen increased demand for Pay As You Drive (PAYD) style propositions and interventions, such as speeding interventions. In order to judge driver risk at a journey level, we need to ensure that the data we use to make these judgements is as robust as possible, and we also need to be able to confidently say if the quality of the data is too poor to use. • Continual improvement of our data processes and procedures to ensure that our algorithm and our scores are the best and truest representation of a driver’s behaviour.
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Photo by Charles Postiaux on Unsplash
Driven Magazine | Data Consistency and Quality
What is Data Consistency? Simply put Data Consistency is a best estimation replacement algorithm. It aims to replace GPS speed dropouts (or spikes) with sensible speeds using distance and time calculations. The end result helps to smooth out issues to boost our Anticipation score.
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Figure 1: Showing the difference between actual speeds and Data Consistency speeds
The graph in Figure 1 (above) shows two speed traces taken from a real-life journey. The blue speed trace is the collection of best speeds that could be derived from the given journey data. As you can see, there are three dropouts during the journey (the blue drops) as well as an initial issue at the start of the journey.
Data Consistency looks at the speed trace, locates the dropouts (or spikes), and then estimates a more likely speed, based on the surrounding information. This can be seen by the red dotted line. The result is that the red speed trace more closely reflects what would have happened in real life.
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Driven Magazine | Data Consistency and Quality
The importance of Data Quality The key part of Data Consistency is that it uses the surrounding good data to make best estimates where erroneous speeds occur. However, this process (as well as other processes) can be adversely affected when the surrounding data is also not good, and this is where Data Quality comes in.
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Data Quality uses a range of metrics to ascertain the overall quality of the data for a given journey. The idea being that if the quality of the journey data falls below a given threshold, then judgements should not be made on the insights derived from the data. Also, we should not expose our scoring and analytical processes to this low quality data as it could produce results that are not correct, and this could have a detrimental impact to the end-user, and the reputation of an insurer. For an example of this, we can look back at Figure 1. Without the cleaning steps being applied to this data, the blue speed trace would likely suggest that the driver is behaving very erratically, by speeding up and slowing down in a dramatic, and unrealistic, fashion.
Therefore the work we have done around Data Quality is very important as it enables us to: • Assess whether a journey should be scored / processed, or not • Identify areas which may be prone to poor GPS • Identify the possibility of faulty GPS devices • Discard or handle journeys with GPS issues • Identify ghost / phantom / ping journeys • Ultimately be fairer to the end-user by only using accurate data
It will also pave the way for future enhancements to how we process and score data, as well as helping to advance our Digital Education portfolio such as driver coaching and in-app feedback provided to drivers after each journey.
To further showcase the importance of our Data Quality work, on the next page are a couple of examples of driver journeys.
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Driven Magazine | Data Consistency and Quality
Figure 2: A poor scoring journey
The image in figure 2 (above) shows a journey that has scored very poorly for Data Quality. The individual data points shown in the image are not aligned to the road, with half of them being over water. Also, the bearings (the green arrows) and the speeds shown are erratic with extreme changes being observed.
To judge a user’s driving behaviour on this data is both inadvisable and unfair, and therefore we would say that this journey is ‘too poor to score’. On the other hand, the journey shown in Figure 3 (below) is in stark contrast to that in Figure 2.
Figure 3: A snippet of a good scoring journey
The journey in Figure 3 shows a section from a journey that has scored much better on Data Quality. The individual points map well to the road, the bearing follows the road nicely, and the speeds 34 | www.thefloow.com
follow a nice smooth pattern. Therefore we would say that this data is a good representation of the real life journey, and it can be used for processing.
Ensuring the best possible outputs for everyone GPS sensors are now ubiquitous across many devices including smartphones, cars and OBDs, but the output from these devices is not always good quality which could be due to a device being faulty, the driver going through a weak signal area, etc. Although the vast majority of data which we receive is very good and works well with our processes, we need tools that can automatically handle erroneous data. Data Consistency and Data Quality are tools which allow us to do just that, and that is why the work which we have undertaken over the last 12 months is so important, as it ensures that the insights into driver behaviour which we deliver to our clients, and end-users, is fair and reliable. Driven Magazine | 35
Driven Magazine | Spotlight On...
Spotlight on...
Our Technical Customer Services Team 36
Our Technical Customer Services team works to ensure that our client’s insurance propositions, which are built using one of our telematics or data analytics solutions, are working correctly. They handle, and oversee, any technical issues which may occur within our FloowDrive apps, our mobile SDK - FloowKit, or on our platform, and they are the first port of call for all technical queries sent into us from our insurance clients, and their customers.
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Driven Magazine | Spotlight On...
Last year, one of our Product Owners, Andrew Oliver, was promoted to Head of Technical Customer Services and since then, he and his team have worked very hard to improve the processes and procedures surrounding customer service and dealing with technical queries and issues at The Floow. The team now works on a weekly cadence, focusing on ensuring all open support tickets move through our service desk from investigation to resolution, keeping a regular line of communication open with the stakeholder who raised the ticket. They work closely alongside a number of teams at The Floow, including our Client Development and Operational Engineering teams, and regularly engage with our clients to understand where we can make improvements to customer service across the organisation.
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Andrew Oliver, Head of Technical Customer Services, The Floow
Meet our Head of Technical Customer Services We spoke to Andrew Oliver, our Head of Technical Customer Services, to find out more about his past experience working in this area, the work the Technical Customer Services team have undertaken in the last 12 months, and his focus for the coming 12 months.
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Driven Magazine | Spotlight On...
What’s your past experience? After graduating in electronic engineering, I started my career in telemetry, specialising in gas and water pressure and flow monitoring, and I was heavily involved in advanced meter infrastructure (AMI). I worked for a company for a number of years and during that time, I held a number of roles across the company including designing data logging equipment and software to analyse data and provide insights to support business decisions, and technical sales where I worked across the UK, Europe and South America, spending time onsite with some of the largest utility companies in the world, to understand their challenges and design new solutions to meet their needs. I also worked in hands-on engineering roles where I learnt coding and scripting languages, including C++, C#, and Java, HTML and Javascript. I went on to reorganise the company’s Service Desk and build a fully staffed 24/7 technical support service. From there I moved on to manage three software development teams and two IT teams, operating services from four data centres in two countries, leading a team of over 280 people across five locations. In 2012, I experienced a life changing personal event which led to a reevaluation of what I want to do with my life. While I had been very successful in my career to date, I wanted to try my hand at something else and find a new challenge. I moved to Sheffield and got involved in the city’s tech scene, and after a few months and working on projects which brought together social workers and technologists
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to help homeless people find the services they need, I started to hear about the great work of The Floow. I got in touch with The Floow’s HR team and quickly joined the team.
What’s your role at The Floow? As Head of Technical Customer Services, I control the operation of The Floow’s Service Desk, plus the development of the monitoring and control systems across the organisation. My main responsibilities focus on developing processes and procedures to ensure that technical queries which come into our Service Desk are dealt with quickly and effectively, and making sure that the procedures already in place continue to work as expected. I work closely with our internal teams and many of our clients to understand any specific pain points with the aim of improving or eliminating these issues. I also strive to ensure that we utilise monitoring and analytics to understand where we are doing well or need to improve as a team, and to gain visibility of areas of improvement within our products, based on customer queries, which is fed back to our Product and Technical Development teams for them to investigate ways in which we can improve these areas for our clients and their customers.
Since transitioning to this role over a year ago, how have you helped to improve
customer services and support at The Floow? My first action when taking on this role was to simplify our Service Desk and place all tickets into one instance rather than splitting tickets between different instances based on location. This allows us to have a singular, holistic view of everything, and provides us with the required visibility to see all issues at once and prioritise accordingly. I also worked to increase the collaboration and communication between this team and our clients, as well as The Floow’s Client Development teams, by establishing regular meetings where we could discuss any issues and any improvements which could be made. I have brought the skills I developed whilst working with IBM Business Analysts, on projects for The National Grid, to The Floow focusing on documenting the Service Desk process. So far, all of this work has been well received internally, and by our clients, and I’m confident that these changes have helped to deliver the extremely positive improvements which we saw in our most recent NPS survey, undertaken at the end of 2020.
What is your focus for the future of the Technical Customer Services team? What will you be focusing on over the next 12 months?
creation to registration and through to the creation of their first journey. This will help our Design Team to visualise the full process and make the correct and required improvements to our FloowDrive apps, and it will also assist our clients throughout the onboarding process.
How does the work which you and your team are doing impact/benefit our clients and end-users? The Technical Customer Services team work to ensure that any issues or problems which are discovered by end-users, or our clients, are addressed promptly and professionally. As mentioned, we monitor all support tickets which are raised to find common themes or issues which can be improved within our products, and work with the appropriate teams within The Floow to get this work off the ground. By keeping our attention on the issues that our clients, or end-users, are raising through the technical support system, we can identify any pain points in the user experience of our apps and platforms. This information can help our development teams to make any necessary updates, or build new capabilities, which will ultimately benefit our clients and end-users by providing them with the best possible products and experience.
Throughout 2021, we will be working to build improved tools which clearly show the end-user journey, from policy
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Driven Magazine | How focusing on our users will empower us
How focusing on our users will empower us to transform the world of motor insurance Article written by Gareth S, Head of Product Design
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Driven Magazine | How focusing on our users will empower us
Around three years ago, I joined The Floow as a Senior Designer at an important time in the company’s trajectory - as we were about to launch our first product, FloowDrive, to the market. Over time, we’ve continued to grow our product range and I have gone on to lead the design function within The Floow as our Head of Product Design. I was drawn to The Floow as I could see that they were developing some great and innovative products and I could also see the opportunity for improvement particularly
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with regards to the design of the products, and the design maturity of the organisation. I knew that all we needed to do was change our focus as a business but I was aware that these changes would not be a quick or easy thing to implement. The key priorities were to become a usercentred organisation and to adopt the Design Thinking ideology and process. Improving project visibility across the organisation and enhancing communication and collaboration between teams were also very important to
me but to initiate the changes that needed to be made, I knew that we had to focus on the first two points: user-centred design and implementing the Design Thinking ideology and process. We started this journey back in 2019 and although we are still working on this, I’m very proud of how far we have come as an organisation and the clear progress which has been made so far. A number of people have been involved in
this journey and many of the ideas we had are now starting to take shape which is very exciting. But as I’ve mentioned, there is more work to be done, and 2021 is going to be another important year as we continue to become a user-centred and design-focused organisation. Next I take a look at a couple of the areas we have been working on so far and how it has positively impacted The Floow and our working practices.
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Generating solutions that are revolutionary, not just incremental Initiating new processes and asking teams to change their ways of working can be quite difficult. However, we were absolutely sure that the changes we wanted to make would allow us to be more successful. I classed it as an ‘essential move’ so we could progress into the territory of being a user-led, product organisation.
Our focus started to slowly shift from the technology in our products to the people that use them. As a result, we could clearly see that we needed to build products that resonated with them more deeply if we were to be successful in driving engagement and growth. Working towards becoming an user-centred organisation is harder than you think. It requires everyone to recognise and learn about our users; those important people who use and interact with our apps, and who we 46 | www.thefloow.com
are solving that all important ‘problem’ for. The better we understand these individuals and their needs, the better that we can design and build products which work for them.
approach for overcoming the limitations of our traditional system-centred, outputorientated method of production - essentially helping to spark our move towards agile development methods.
To support this transition, I asked the Product Design team to immediately start involving our users throughout the entire design process. By involving them in various research and design activities which would lead us to create highly usable and accessible products. It was also an effective
In addition, we also measure success based on outcomes rather than outputs allowing us to continue focusing on the user even after a new development has been launched. Now we consider an update successful if we can show that we have been able to instigate a change in a user’s behaviour and experience. Driven Magazine | 47
Driven Magazine | How focusing on our users will empower us
Our Design Thinking ideology and process
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“
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Our aim was to encourage the organisation to stay focused on our users, ultimately leading us to design and build better products and services, whilst streamlining our internal processes at the same time.
Earlier I mentioned us adopting the Design Thinking ideology and process, let’s look into this a little deeper… Design thinking is a repeatable, non-linear, user-centred ideology and process that promotes creative problem solving and innovation. It sounds complex but once you understand and see the objectives of each phase, it usually provokes a penny drop moment where you question everything you’ve done before, and ask yourself why you haven’t implemented this way of thinking sooner.
Each phase in the Design Thinking process is meant to be iterative and cyclical, as opposed to being strictly linear, providing us with flexibility and freedom. It also allows us to repeat phases if needed, as it can often be necessary to do an exercise within a phase multiple times to arrive at the outcome which is needed to move forward. With many team members, all with different backgrounds and expertise, working together it is not uncommon for us to spend additional time ensuring that everyone is aligned before proceeding to the next phase. There are instances where we use alternative processes and methods to generate and validate hypotheses. But to improve consistency and alignment , we wanted something that everyone could relate to, be involved in and that was readily available. Therefore we made some subtle tweaks to the Design Thinking process by adapting the traditional six phase process to a seven phase process, by including ‘Measure’. Measurement is important in design and product development and we believe that by making it visible, it helps us to further showcase the importance of measuring success against user behaviour before making further changes or improvements.
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Having these phases in place is important, but it’s also important for each phase to be presented (and recorded if possible) for business transparency, knowledge transfer and to support cross-team collaboration.
Empathise Explore and create a deep understanding of the need or problem. Conduct research in order to develop knowledge about what your users do, say, think, and feel.
Define Combine all your research and observe where your users’ problems exist. In pinpointing your users’ needs, you can begin to highlight the opportunities for innovation. Generate some outcomes and set out measures.
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Ideate Brainstorm a range of crazy, creative ideas that address the unmet user needs identified in the ‘define’ phase. Give yourself and your team total freedom; no idea is too far fetched and quantity supersedes quality. Not every idea has to be ‘the one’!
Prototype
Test Test your prototype with real users. Ask yourself ‘Does this solution meet users’ needs?’ and ‘Has it improved how they feel, think, or do their tasks?’
Build real, tactile representations for a subset of your ideas. The goal of this phase is to understand what components of your ideas work, and which do not. In this phase, you begin to weigh the impact vs. feasibility of your ideas through feedback on your prototypes. Define your Minimum Viable Product (MVP).
Implement Put the vision into effect. Ensure that your solution is materialised and touches the lives of your end-users.
Measure Look at the data and the metrics you have in place. Was there a change in the behaviour of your customers, users and/ or stakeholders? Measure success and progress based on whether you are getting closer to the outcomes you defined. Driven Magazine | 51
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The benefits of implementing these changes We’ve worked in this way for a number of months now, so what are the benefits that we have seen so far?
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Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
1. Creating products which have user value and benefit Simply having a product in the market does not mean that people will use it, and if people aren’t using it, you need to understand why. Addressing this sooner rather than later will save you a lot of time, energy and money. The key is ensuring that a product makes a user’s life easier and more enjoyable, this will only be done if you solve the problems that the user is experiencing. Looking back at the updates which were made throughout 2020 to the production versions of our products (and concepts that are behind the scenes), we were able to validate that the work done provided value, and generated the important behaviour changes that we were looking for. There has been an enormous amount of work and effort put in, so there is almost certainly more success coming throughout 2021.
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Photo by Leon on Unsplash
2. Increased cross-team collaboration We’ve also seen an incredible improvement in the amount of collaboration occurring between teams. We now ask that every single team member knows who they’re designing and building for. They understand why these individuals are so important and work collectively on one shared goal; improving these users’ lives! It’s the one thing that connects us all, and we strive to create something that is not only of use, but something that
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they fall in love with. You’re probably thinking, how are you possibly going to make people fall in ‘love’ with motor insurance? Well, that’s our challenge and hopefully one day, we will give you our answer to how we did it.
3. The creation and development of a two-way conversation with our users One of the biggest benefits of having a user-centred focus is the relationship that we now have with our users - we’ve managed to create that all important two-way conversation. Digital technology has provided us with the ability to do this in a way we haven’t been able to achieve before and as a result, we can now outline our user’s unmet needs with ease and increased efficiency across an entire global audience. Giving us the key to unlocking value that we didn’t even know existed!
Having already established a twoway conversation with our users, we can develop tailored strategies based on what we know about a user - their preferences and frustrations rather than working on assumptions or designing generic campaigns, providing us with an increased chance of success.
Understanding user needs and developing great products is one thing but we then need to ensure that we engineer effective brand, marketing and sales strategies to go alongside them.
Our aim is to continue encouraging involvement from our team increasing these important relationships with our customers as they hold the keys to our success!
4. Focusing on outcomes, not outputs Focusing completely on outcomes rather than outputs has been a game changer for us in 2020. It allowed us to predict the themes and features our users want so we have clear reasons driving each development decision. It also elevated the importance
of measuring the success of our products, and the improvements we made to them, through changes to user behaviour.
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Continuously moving forward Over the last two years, we’ve worked extremely hard to implement the changes I’ve outlined above and change our way of thinking, by putting design and user experience at the heart of everything that we do. I’m really proud of how far we have come as an organisation and how we have managed to improve our products to make them more engaging and useful for end-users. There is still more to do but the updates that we’ve been able to make to FloowDrive as a result of implementing this new way of thinking and working, including updates to our journey screens to make them easier to navigate and the simplification of journey tagging to ‘driving’ or ‘not driving’ only, have improved the user experience (UX), and the user interface (UI), of FloowDrive exponentially.
As we continue on our journey, I will keep sharing the work that we are undertaking and how we are embracing user centricity, and the Design Thinking process. In my next article, we’ll be taking a look at some of the recent UX and UI updates which we have made to our FloowDrive platform.
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The Floow Ltd The Floow Campus, Wicker Lane, Sheffield, S3 8HQ +44 (0) 114 270 1114 The Floow North America The Floow North America 1990 N California Blvd, Suite 20, Walnut Creek, CA 94596, USA +1 855 447 9252 info@thefloow.com www.thefloow.com
Quarterly Magazine by The Floow 58 | www.thefloow.com
