Hi Marley Innovation & Technology Culture

How does your team gather customer feedback? 

We work with insurance carrier customers as design partners who are willing to provide feedback, iterate and learn with us as we build the product.

One valuable way we receive feedback is by observing the people who use our product daily and understanding their workflows for new features we are developing. Product works cross-functionally with design to immerse ourselves in their work environment, sitting with them at their desks, watching them process claims and seeing the steps they take to move them forward. Together, we can identify areas that need improvement. 

Before bringing a feature to a more technical implementation, we craft a prototype and gather a ton of feedback from our design partners in user reviews. We walk through the designs step-by-step. We’ll ask open-ended questions, like “what do you think this button does?” or “what do you think this option means?” We want to make sure our designs make sense to the persona we’re solving for. We create an open line of communication with our design partners. We don’t wait for the next meeting or in-person visit — if they think of something, they’ll let us know right away, which helps us iterate and build our product faster.

When was a time that you saw the impact of customer feedback in your product development process?

An auto total loss is very stressful and requires many touchpoints with the insured throughout the claims process. With our Total Loss Assist product, our design partners are cognizant of the end-user experience, which has helped us build a better solution that, in turn, enables operators to work more efficiently while enhancing customer satisfaction.

For example, the data that comes in during the total loss process triggers different logic or rules for the carrier. We thought we had all the different courses of action that would take place after a rule would trigger, but there was a variation we had not considered. By sitting and observing the claim reps and their workflow, they pointed out a field that indicates if a car is at a residence or a shop — a checkbox that seemed insignificant at first. However, it turns out that communication with the customer looks very different based on each scenario. With this insight, we could quickly iterate and add more workflows based on that one check box, showcase that field in the UI prominently and create separate work tracks based on that data. As a result, the customer experiences more personalized communication and faster cycle times. 

How do you prioritize what to work on first? 

Every carrier has very specific and different ways of working a total loss case. So, as we’ve built our Total Loss Assist offering, we’ve needed to ensure that this product can fit a multitude of different workflows. 

There are certain pieces of feedback that we need to address or build quickly to ensure our customers, particularly for our early adopters and design partners, can use the product efficiently. Those requests are pushed to the top of the list. 

We are very lucky to have trusted relationships with our design partners — no feedback or requests are too small to be documented and groomed out. However, we’ve learned to prioritize the requests that can transcend across multiple carriers and benefit all of our customers. 

However, sometimes, feedback is unique to a single carrier’s workflow. Luckily, at Hi Marley, we have industry experts who really understand what our customers are trying to accomplish and can collaborate on alternative ways to achieve the same goals or test a hypothesis before introducing a more technical solution. With that insight, we can scale the product to fit the needs of many different types of carriers and their workflows.