Six years is a long time in technology-focused businesses which is precisely how long The Floow has been established.
During that time, listening to our clients has been of paramount importance to ensure we continue to build telematics solutions that help them to adapt to market opportunity and end-customer requirements. As The Floow marks its sixth birthday we’ve been reflecting on what we’ve learned about our clients’ needs and on how rapidly those needs are evolving as the mobility market changes.
Here’s some of what we’re hearing:
It’s not about the technology
That sounds like a rather challenging statement coming from a company which develops telematics-based technologies, but it’s true. In fact the technology that underpins a telematics solution has to be almost invisible to the user. The elegance of a reliable telematics platform should be experienced in a way that means it ‘just works’, delivering reliability and user-friendliness across any device. Delivering technical solutions that are truly device-agnostic has long been the intent of the team at The Floow, and though we believe that ‘smartphone as a sensor’ offers flexibility, speed to market and cost effectiveness, we know that other journey monitoring devices are also important to support, so we make sure we offer the same quality across any platform.
Scoring is just the beginning
As a company where a good number of our team are data scientists, we know that the provision of insurance grade journey scores is critical to delivering a telematics proposition. We do this for clients across the globe so we know that providing a solid scoring platform is just the beginning. And that’s because what insurance providers tell us they really need is to build their own unique IP by training those scores against their own claims data so that over time the capability to predict claims gets more and more accurate. We hear this need repeatedly and so allowing our clients to do this has become a core part of our proposition which we believe is unique in the market. This is critical to building true partnership and alignment with clients which in turn means we’re better placed to listen to their needs. And for the insurer, this pays great dividends with up to 3x the profitability per customer in telematics versus a traditional policy, and at least 25% improved claims benefit across the book.
It pays to be customer-centric
Early on in our development journey we acknowledged that consumers aren’t used to paying much attention to their car insurance policy and spend very little time thinking about most of the journeys they make. This lack of engagement requires careful attention if a telematics proposition is to make a connection with an individual driver and get them to think differently about their driving behaviour. It’s possible to do this by offering a number of value-added services that build on a driver’s scores and recommend improvements and helpful advice within an engaging app, or via additional services. These include rewards and incentive programmes, gamification, education and coaching which comprises of calls from our driver behavioural coaches. By successfully engaging drivers we can help them deliver very tangible improvements to their driver performance. For example, our research shows that well targeted rewards can result in driving improvements in up to 30% more drivers than a pure insurance discount-based proposition. Our driver coaching proposition, FloowCoach, is proven to help avoid 16 additional claims for every 100 policyholders in the poorest decile who complete the programme.
New telematics projects can be slow and complicated to get off the ground
One of the perceived barriers to entry with telematics is the time, and sometimes the cost and effort required to develop a new proposition and take it to market. This is a challenge that we’ve taken hold of here at The Floow and in the coming weeks we’ll be launching a new proposition that has crystallised the last six years of learnings from our clients, and uses it to offer an elegant, quick to market, cost effective and production-ready telematics platform. Please look out for more information around this capability, coming soon.
If the next six years are anything like our first, we’re facing a mobility market that requires innovation, fresh thinking and solid partnerships for success. If you’d like to talk more about how The Floow can help you introduce engaging telematics propositions to market which allow you to build your own IP, please email me at info@thefloow.com
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