Recently, Whateverland held a presentation for a health insurance network where representatives from several insurance companies participated.
During the lecture we provided insights on how our brain tends to make decisions, common behavior challenges to buying health- and accident insurance and tips on how to solve these challenges. At the end the participants did a workshop exercise where they walked through a behavioral design process, from defining a behavior challenge among their customers to coming up with a solution.
The main thing we emphasized: The key to behavior change is to make desirable behaviors as easy as possible to perform. Other insights and ideas from this very fun and interactive session was:
We are visual beings. Take advantage of this when creating text-heavy documents by using a lot of images, icons, bulleted lists etc. to visualize the information. This will make it both easier to navigate and to remember. Communicating via video can also be an effective way to make information easier to comprehend.
Studies have shown that we have a weak emotional connection to our future self. Buying insurance in case of accident or saving for retirement are actions we do today but not reap the benefits of until later. This can feel demotivating. However, by making customers visualize their future "dream life" and then rewind back and think about what they can do today to reach that life can trigger motivation to act now.
State the time it takes to read a longer text (advance purchase information, terms & conditions, etc.). It has been found that by simply telling customers how long it takes to read a policy, the number of people who opened a policy increased by 105% (from 16% to 34%).
Reduce people's cognitive overload by making the choices as few as possible and if possible, make some choices "standard".
We like to behave as others do. Add social norms ("so many have…") to influence others to do the same.