How Empathy and Curiosity Helped Transform the FNOL Experience

I started my career as a mechanical engineer at a small company where everyone did a little bit of everything — engineering, marketing, project management and customer relations. Since I got to experience a lot in this first role, it gave me a solid foundation to eventually transition to a product management role. I was always interested in technology and then started working towards my MBA to learn more about the strategic side of the business.

When my wife and I moved to Boston, it was the perfect time — and city — to make a career change to the software space. I started reading through job descriptions for roles I could apply for with my background and found product management. It seemed like a perfect fit.

I was fortunate that my leap of faith into product management paid off. I loved it. It allowed me to be close to the product while also being able to talk with internal and external stakeholders to figure out how we could delight customers in ways that drove positive business outcomes.

After three and a half years in my first product management role, I joined Hi Marley. Ultimately, I love helping create things that people love, and that’s what I get to do at Hi Marley. 

Endless Curiosity and Empathy Matter in Product Management

With Product Management, there’s always something new to learn. I love keeping up with podcasts, blogs, books and articles. I even co-host my own podcast, Prod Squad, where we explore topics and share insights to help other product managers grow.

Endless curiosity and empathy are essential for product managers. To find the best solutions, you need to put yourself in your users’ shoes. What are they feeling while using the product? How can you make their experience 10 times better? What’s their journey before and after? Asking questions and listening to customers’ feedback can uncover instrumental insights for product teams that often lead to product breakthroughs.

Asking ourselves these key questions led us to build and launch Hi Marley’s Conversational First Notice of Loss (FNOL). 

What are Policyholders Feeling During an FNOL?

A loss can be emotional; FNOL is a critical moment when policyholders want to feel supported. We know the FNOL experience directly impacts policyholders’ claim satisfaction.

As Glenn Shapiro, retired President of Allstate, said during our recent webinar, “If you get to the point where the customer can avoid repetition and ensure the case is in the right hands at the right time, you can elevate and make more of FNOL’s moment of truth. For instance, if somebody mentions a fatality, a catastrophic injury, or a total house fire during their report and the carrier captures that information and instantly engages, that’s a way to show up and show how quickly you respond to a customer in need, I think that it’s a stronger moment of truth than you have otherwise.”

How Can We Make a Policyholder’s FNOL Experience 10x Better?

This question led us to reimagine what the most lovable FNOL experience could be. What if a policyholder could describe the loss in their own words, upload a few photos, and be done? No more rigid forms or long waits to speak to a representative. Conversational FNOL was born from that vision.

With Conversation FNOL, we first allow policyholders to tell their stories in a free-form way and then upload any photos they have. We analyze the story and photos, then we only ask the policyholder follow-up questions to collect FNOL data they haven’t already provided. With this approach, we can collect all the required data with the least number of inputs from the policyholder.

As easy as the experience is, we still wanted to ensure every step was frictionless. We tested a lot and leveraged qualitative and quantitative feedback to improve the FNOL process. On the quantitative side, having detailed analytics very early on in the product’s life was a huge benefit. We could see exactly where policyholders were struggling and quickly iterated to make improvements.

We also interviewed policyholders to hear what they did or didn’t like about the experience. When asked to rate the ease of their experience from zero to ten, our average score was a nine. One of the interviewees said, “I’d never had a claim before, but all my friends made it sound really hard, but this process was so easy.” And that’s exactly what we wanted to create—a frictionless, lovable experience during a critical moment of truth.

What’s the Policyholder’s Journey Before and After an FNOL?

It is one thing to create a 10x experience, but it’s another thing to get users to engage with it. We looked at existing policyholder behavior to understand when and how we should offer Conversational FNOL. Policyholders overwhelmingly gravitate to the phone when reporting a loss. Given that we wanted to ensure we were meeting policyholders in their channel of choice, the phone, and making them feel heard.

After completing an FNOL, policyholders want to be contacted quickly to understand what happens next. And, when an adjuster does reach out, they want the adjuster to have context about their loss. That’s why we didn’t set out to create a solution that just captures the FNOL; instead, we built a solution that facilitates the end-to-end claim conversation in a single, trusted thread. This means the policyholder’s story is always front and center, and an adjuster can reach out quickly and with the appropriate empathy.

Innovative Technology Enables Us to Solve Old Problems in New Ways

Conversational FNOL also wouldn’t be possible in its current form without generative AI. While I’m a techno-optimist, I also know it’s important to balance technology readiness and market readiness. We talked with carriers and ran internal AI testing, and the combination of those efforts led us to the responsible AI approach used by our Conversational FNOL product.

With Conversational FNOL, generative AI analyzes policyholder inputs (voice, text, photos) and extracts relevant FNOL data into a structured, integration-ready format for the insurance carrier. Meanwhile, any messages sent to the policyholder are contextual but predefined. This enables policyholders to communicate freely, as if they were texting a friend, but still gives the carrier the structured FNOL data they need and the peace of mind knowing erroneous messages won’t be sent to their policyholders.

Delivering a Lovable FNOL Experience

Empathy and curiosity helped shape all aspects of Conversational FNOL, creating a seamless, intuitive, and supportive experience that meets the needs of carriers and their policyholders.

Looking forward, we’re focused on further enhancing the FNOL experience, exploring new use cases, and ensuring policyholders continue to feel heard and supported at every step.