Giving drivers more control of their car insurance with self-service cancellation

At Cuvva, we offer drivers the ability and flexibility of a rolling monthly car insurance subscription. Naturally, we see people coming and going — but they had to go through our support team every time.

 
 

Project overview

Customers are using our subscription product as a solution that’s a bit longer than short-term, but less committal than traditional insurance. Admittedly, we’re still trying to figure out the right balance between designing it to fit the way customers actually use the product and what makes sense for us financially.

But in the meantime, instead of sending customers into support every time they cancel, we felt that allowing them to do it themselves is a must-have for our product if we are to truly be a modern, “flexible” car insurance provider.

My role

  • Owned the content design and wrote copy as the sole content designer

  • Collaborated closely with product design, PM, engineering and customer support

  • Delivered design solutions in a quick turnaround with some tricky language constraintsBut first, research

Outcome

We don’t have any defined target metrics as this is a feature we don’t plan to take this away from customers, but since it’s rollout, we’ve had a 50% reduction in customers coming to support for cancellations! 🙌 

 
 

Language, the ultimate challenge

The challenge really came from writing about something the average person isn’t an expert in — and there are so many constraints and technicalities that come with insurance and industry compliance.

Through content choices, I had to answer questions such as:

  • How much about monthly policies do we already try to teach people?

  • How does our support team talk about subscriptions?

  • What are the distinctions, and its implications, between not renewing and cancelling a policy?

  • How can we urge people who churn to come back and re-engage, as simply restarting the subscription is not always possible?

 
 

Defining a writing approach

We didn’t have much research on what made the most sense to people. So, I relied heavily on individuals from our support team to get a better idea of how we talked about subscriptions to our customers, and from folks in compliance.

Here are some considerations I took into my writing approach:

  • People likely don’t understand that they get a new policy every time their subscription renews

  • We are legally unable to use the word “renew” as it only applies to annual cover

  • Look for opportunities to use friendlier and more comprehendible language, even if it means losing a bit of technical accuracy

  • Don’t offer too much information or make too many promises that add unnecessary complications – which can be difficult when weighing up user expectations

Basically, it was a tricky balance simplifying things and being transparent.

 
 

Thoughts and takeaways

A self-serve cancellation flow, on paper, sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? But this was a project that really challenged my ability to isolate essential information to communicate, make the call between comprehension and technical accuracy and solve for problems that… well, aren’t very easy to solve for.

How I influenced the cancellation experience:

  • Used a content-first approach for the designs, where the IA and content informed the final designs

  • Worked closely compliance team to make sure everything was legally sound

  • Aligned with the support team to make sure the user experience was consistent when carried over to live chat

And what I really wish we had more of? Research and data — specifically about content and word choices! But as a pretty small team at a startup, we’re working on it…