If your car needs repairs after an accident, you want your insurance company to pay for a rental, and you want it to be easy, right? Allstate employee Kelly London always knew that coverage was important.
"It allows customers to go to work, get their kids, get their groceries – do their daily business while we handle the rest," she said. Little did she know she'd come to understand just how valuable that coverage could be.
London's car was rear-ended by a cab in Chicago. She wasn't hurt, but she needed a way to get around. The cab driver's insurance company gave her a lot of control over securing a rental, and she appreciated the flexibility.
Around that time, London was working with teammates on simplifying the rental process during a claim as part of a new auto insurance product Allstate was rolling out.
"We said: What if we created a coverage that provided the customer immediate relief, allowed them to use the transportation of their choice, and we took all the middlemen out of it?" she said.
That's exactly what London and the team helped create.
With this new Allstate product, available in a growing number of states, customers can buy "transportation expense coverage" in an amount that works for them – say, $200. If they're in an accident and need transportation while their vehicle is being repaired, Allstate will issue the full amount of coverage as a one-time payment – no extra paperwork required. Customers can use that money for the transportation of their choice – rental car, bus, rideshare or even gas money for a friend.
"We meet the customer's needs without them having to ask," said Allstate employee Daynah Marriott.
New ways of thinking
This transportation expense coverage makes things easy for customers. But to create it, employees had to do something hard: forget about how they used to do things.
Orlando Mercado, another Allstate employee, said building the new coverage meant focusing only on the customer's biggest needs and the best way to meet them.
"It led us to creating something completely different," he said.
Mercado and his team also had to rethink old assumptions – namely, that this coverage should offer customers a ton of options just because that had often been the approach in the past. He said the team left the "soup to nuts" approach behind in favor of solving the customer's most pressing need in the fastest and easiest way possible.
"That was a big deal for us," he said. "We've never approached it that way before. Here it was about, how do you make it simpler and still give customers what they need?"
