Short-term cover specialist GoShorty has firmly established itself as one-to-watch in the UK insurtech scene. It launched on CDL Strata four years ago and is enjoying notable industry success, with hundreds of thousands of motorists a year buying their temporary insurance; it tripled its policy count in the 12 months to September 2023 without a single sale via a price comparison site. Its success has won it accolades including the Insurance Times award for Personal Lines Broker of the Year 2023 and the Innovation Product Award at the 2024 National Insurance Awards. For this issue of the CDL Newswire, founder and managing director Andy Moody tells us how they did it and the key take-aways for brokers looking to grow their direct sales channel.

Starting anything from scratch comes with challenges, but also significant opportunities. For us, the curve ball was that we ended up going live mid-pandemic in June 2020, when there were arguably fewer cars on the roads than at any point in the last several decades.

But while this may have meant a tougher context in the early days, the principles which informed our business model served us well as the world shifted to doing everything digitally.

Long before the first face masks were being worn and Zoom calls became ubiquitous, our vision was to put the customer front and centre of the GoShorty operation and innovate in how we used digital to create a super-slick pay-as-you-go insurance shopping experience — from the quote-and-buy journey, through to onboarding and subsequent brand interactions.

We knew that for short-term cover, consumers would simply not want to invest hours completing lengthy online forms. We made a pledge to make the process from the point of starting a quote to driving away insured less than two minutes long.

We set out our criteria before recruiting partners to support us to deliver this. We looked at front end and data capabilities that could drive the customer experience, as well as the things that mattered to us as a provider: operational efficiency, resilience, scalability, and the security of our systems.

Working with insurtech CDL as our insurance platform provider integrated to our in-house tech stack, we harnessed technology to inform the customer experience, as well as the product proposition itself. By continually analysing detailed customer behaviour and product data, we gained insight into the customer journey — from a Google search, through to our website to new business, repeats and claims. In turn, we were able to share this with insurers to assist their pricing and acceptance decisions. This led to a win-win both for us as a broker and for our insurers — supporting all parties to grow their businesses.

Part of the process involved identifying segments of the motorist population in need of short-term cover for whom we were able to create more attractive propositions. These included drivers at both ends of the age spectrum, city dwellers and expats.

The ongoing analysis of data to attract the right customers has also contributed to our ability to reduce GoShorty's loss ratio to sub-50%, outperforming traditional car insurance.

The take-away from this for all brokers is that knowledge really is power when it comes to shaping product and pricing propositions that work for the customer.

As well as collaborating with our tech providers, investing time into developing insurer relationships is critical, not only to build the right panel, but also to ensure the broadest possible acceptance.

The outcome of this collaboration, supported by the data insights we have been able to provide back to insurers, has led to a huge 85% in customer quotability.

This has been helped by our single-minded focus on the target audience. By designing everything around the needs of short-term cover customers, we have made it easier for consumers to find us and then to find a proposition that works for them when they get to us.

We proactively contact our customers daily to check they are happy, and to hear their ideas about how we can improve. We incorporate their feedback into our products to help make us stand out, and our repeat purchase rate of over 50% shows that they love what we do.

We were aware that if we were going to achieve our aim of trading independently of price comparison sites, we needed to ensure our sales process stood out and offered customers a refreshing alternative to the traditional insurance shopping experience.

As with all things digital, speed is essential as is the overall relationship with the brand. Features such as an easy-to-use quote-and-buy app, engaging branding, integration with Apple Pay and 'buy again' functionality all combine to make the customer journey simple, quick and slick.

While customer service is arguably always key to business success, short term cover makes it even more critical as by its nature, it's already far removed from the model where consumers buy a policy and then forget about it for a year.

Having customer-focused key performance indicators helps ensure that a customer-first model is promoted. Important measures for GoShorty are maintaining our 5* Excellent Trustpilot rating, as well as continuing to drive up our already very strong conversion and repeat purchase rates.

Ultimately, it is the combination of winning new business and keeping customers coming back for more that leads to volume growth, and our experience has shown that by harnessing data and digital, and being ready to think a little differently, brokers can achieve just that.