Hastings Direct (Hastings) is a fast growing, digitally-focused general insurance provider, offering a range of insurance products and services including car, bike, van and home, as well as additional products like breakdown cover and home legal expenses.
Through their website and app, Hastings serves over 3 million customers in the UK. Multi-award winning and Defaqto 5-star rated, their vision is to provide refreshingly straightforward products and services to their customers – simple and human.
Today’s insurance customer expects a highly personalised, quick and easy experience at each stage of their journey. This experience need to be consistent and delivered through their preferred communication channels.
When it came to customer communications, the team at Hastings relied heavily on manual processes which lead to generic customer experiences. This resulted in missed revenue opportunities and put pressure on an already over-stretched customer service call centre, who had to field customer queries that could have been resolved online (instantly and at a fraction of the cost).
Operating in such a highly competitive insurance landscape, the Hastings team needed the ability to offer a best-in-class customer experience designed to retain their existing customers, win back churned customers and attract new customers through new channels.
The Massive Rocket team initiated a full audit and built out a roadmap outlining the future digital experience. Through planning, discovery and strategy sessions with the Hastings team, user journeys were mapped out across the business. These included onboarding, pre and post-renewal, auto and non-auto renewal, cross-sell, abandoned browse, prospecting and reminders for each of the products.
Massive Rocket reviewed and optimised Hasting’s marketing technology stack. mParticle was used as the CDP (Customer Data Platform) in order to integrate the entire customer experience. The CDP helped unify data across all sources to create a single customer view and make it possible to create segments across the business. Snowflake was used to store and manage the data, this provided deep insights, allowing the team to understand the past and predict future customer behaviours.
This real-time data was then pushed to Braze, in order to create automated, targeted campaigns with personalised messaging at each stage of the customer journey. Massive Rocket supported the Hastings team with the execution of complex lifecycle campaigns and renewal journeys.
Massive Rocket helped us future-proof our business and accelerate our transition from manual to automated customer engagement. We are truly excited about the impact this will have on our Customer Lifetime Value.
John Armstrong
Commercial & Marketing Director
Hastings Direct
Leveraging Massive Rocket’s agility and unique ability to deploy every component of the marketing stack in parallel and with speed, the Hastings team were able to rapidly start driving ROI. Cleaner data enabled the team to activate more accurate campaigns which in turn delivered better results.
In a highly regulated industry, compliance and customer data protection were of utmost importance. These considerations were at the heart of every decision. The CDP provides a single customer view and can now integrate claims data into Braze, to allow automated proactive claim related communications and alleviate the customer service team.
Lifecycle emails are now automated in Braze, saving the team hours per week and removing the need for manual sends. Unified, clean data being sent into the CRM enables real time segmentation and truly personalised communications across email, SMS and in-app messaging.
The team have now automated and personalised communications throughout the entire customer journey, starting with the initial pre-renewal stage to demonstrate why customers should renew, to educational communications around claims, as well as leveraging upsell and cross-sell opportunities.