Picture yourself 400 kilometres from the nearest town when a stone cracks your windscreen. You are isolated, far from help, and need to start a claim. This is where Club 4x4 comes in. They insure the 4WDs, caravans, and camper trailers that take people a long way from anywhere.

The only option for Club 4x4’s customers was to wait for business hours, call the office, and join a queue. There was no self-service; whatever you needed to do, you were stuck on the end of a phone line.

Around 80,000 members insure their vehicles with Club 4X4, enthusiasts who care about their vehicles and their trips, and every one of them managed their policy the same way: by phone. Every alteration and every claim went through the call centre.

The cost of a phone-only service 

The business could feel the cost. Club 4x4 handles around 112,000 contacts a year across a frontline team of ~40, and much of that volume is routine.

“Everything a member needed to do came through the call centre,” Mike Ippolito, Head of Product and Marketing at Club4X4. “Changing a number plate, updating where the vehicle is parked, asking for a document.” Time the team wanted to spend talking to enthusiasts about their trips went on tasks the members could have done themselves.

Like most organisations with a mature core policy system, Club 4x4 saw two doors: 

1. replace the platform to get a modern digital experience, at the cost of years of work, millions of dollars and real risk to the business while it happened. 
2. Or leave the platform alone and keep every interaction on the phones. Transform expensively and dangerously, or not at all.

CEC worked with Club 4X4 to discover a third option.

‍

CEC proposed a third door: leave the core policy system exactly as it is, still running the business and still holding every policy, and build a modern experience layer on top of it. Members get the digital experience they expect and nothing underneath has to move.

It was an idea worth testing before it was worth trusting, so three questions had to be answered first: 

1. Could the portal integrate with Club 4x4’s core platform quickly enough to be worth doing?
2. Would security and authentication meet an insurer’s standards?
3. Could the front end be engaging for customers, built at the pace the business needed?

By the end of a six-week proof of concept, the integration was live, secure authentication was in place, and a working portal had been through stakeholder validation. The third door was real, and Club 4x4 could walk through it.

With the idea proven, CEC ran the build as one team. The people who did the customer research and set the product strategy stayed with it through to the code, so the decisions made for the member in design were the decisions that shipped. There was no handover in the middle for those decisions to fall through.

From concept to production

The build itself was an exercise in restraint. The core policy platform was not touched. No data was migrated. The first release covered the ten policy alteration types behind most of the call centre volume, and nothing else. This was a conscious decision to progressively introduce new functionality as evidence that members wanted it became clearer.

After a 12 week build, the first release covered the eight to ten most common policy alterations, the everyday changes behind most call centre volume, alongside claims and policy documents. A member sees a clean dashboard and a short path to whatever they came to do. The complexity stays behind the scenes.

‍

Picture that member again, 400 kilometres from the nearest town with a cracked windscreen. Today they open the portal on their phone or laptop and lodge the claim in a couple of minutes, with the next steps laid out. No queue, no callback.

Half of all Club 4x4’s claims are windscreen claims, and the portal now handles them from start to finish. “It doesn’t have to touch our claims team at all,” Mike said. What used to be a phone call in business hours is something a member can now do from anywhere they can get online, and on any device.

The portal has been live for a couple of months, and the early numbers are promising. Club 4x4 set out to remove 40 to 60 percent of routine calls, and with up to 20 percent of claims and alterations already going through the portal and uptake running higher than expected, the team believes that target is within reach. “We’re very much on track,” Mike said. “The time the team gets back is going into the work that needs a person: complex claims, sales, and the conversations with members that build the relationship.”

‍

‍

Everything under one roof

For Mike, the CEC difference showed up day-to-day. “Everything was done under one roof,” he said, “which from my perspective minimises that drift, minimises that uncertainty, and you have the same party accountable the whole time.” What he did not expect was the thing he now points to first: “CEC were always thinking about the customer rather than just the software ... tying all of their decision-making into that. That’s a big part of where the success has come from.”

Club 4x4 did not replace its core system, and it did not stay on the phones. It took the third door, and within weeks its members had a channel they could use at any hour, from anywhere. The platform underneath is untouched. What changed is the experience, and for the member, the experience is the product

‍

If there is a digital product you have been told your business cannot build, CEC would like to show you what is possible.

‍