How Matic uses Twilio to make the insurance shopping process fast, transparent, and customer-friendly

Challenge

Matic, a digital insurance agency, wanted to make the insurance shopping and communication process easier for customers and sales agents. 

Solution

With Twilio Flex, Matic’s digital experience and shopping process is streamlined and cohesive.

In 2014, Matic co-founder and CEO Ben Madick consistently observed delays in closing a home caused by issues in setting up homeowners insurance. Leveraging his extensive background in the mortgage industry, Ben knew there had to be a better way to help borrowers secure insurance and help them achieve their goal of becoming a homeowner while helping lenders avoid costly loan closing delays. 

Embedding homeowners insurance into the home ownership experience was a revolutionary concept back then. Today, insurance is becoming more integrated into related experiences—not just around home buying, but also around purchases for cars, pets, and other valuable assets. 

For Matic, embedded insurance isn’t just about “striking when the iron is hot.” It’s about presenting unbiased options in order to empower consumers to make informed decisions. 

Factors such as rising interest rates, inflation, increasing costs of building materials, plus more frequent and severe weather events have made it challenging for consumers and insurance carriers to find common ground. While insurers are increasing premiums and placing more restrictions on new business, consumers are burdened with finding affordable policies on their own.

With the help of Twilio Flex, Matic is simplifying the world of insurance and turning a typically tumultuous process into a trusted and satisfying one. Ultimately, it’s a win for consumers, insurance companies, and mortgage companies who source better ways to protect customer assets. 

Making insurance make sense, with a little help from Twilio

One of the biggest problems customers face when purchasing insurance of any kind is policy comprehension. Consumers can get frustrated when they don’t clearly understand the value of what they’re buying, which has contributed to a sense of negativity towards insurance.

Matic’s insurance marketplace of  about 50 different carriers enables customers to quickly identify available insurance options with transparency into pricing and coverage. In addition to a digital experience, Matic’s in-house agency provides  assistance for customers so they understand the policy.

But prior to partnering with Twilio, Matic wasn't able to create a truly omnichannel experience for its agents and customers. This limited their ability to meet the customer where they wanted to communicate, and personalize their insurance shopping journey. Since most of the tools Matic used were built in-house, they weren’t looking to completely rebuild from the ground up.

According to Brian Barker, Product Manager at Matic, the flexibility of Twilio Flex allowed them to own their roadmap in terms of customer experience. “We have really great engineering resources,” said Barker. “We were looking for a foundation we could then start building on top of, which is what made Twilio Flex so appealing.” 

Twilio helped Matic realize their vision of simplifying insurance with a centralized solution to manage all of their contact center systems and properly support sales agents. Each customer has a different insurance need, which requires personalized engagement to meet customers where they are. At the end of the day, both customers and the sales team get a better experience.

Disrupting the insurance industry

Flex was initially used as a disaster recovery solution Matic built a simple prototype on Twilio Flex to maintain communication during outages. After experiencing the power of Flex firsthand, Matic decided to make the switch. With the help of Matic’s dedicated engineering team and the easy and flexible customization options of Twilio, Matic was able to fully migrate off their previous platform within six months.

Matic leverages dialers within Flex to start the outbound sales process with prospects, and they’re experimenting with predictive dialers as the next advancement of dialing technology. “We've got pretty sophisticated routing within our communication system that makes sure that we are always matching someone we get on the phone with someone who is licensed to sell insurance in that state,” said Barker. 

That’s important, because transferring customers to different agents creates a poor experience. “We're able to build out a lot of different routing schemas to support that, but also simplify it down quite a bit and make it much more flexible for an admin or a product user like me to use,” said Barker.

As for sales, Matic uses Flex to lean into SMS and email channels. When someone replies to one of those channels they are using AI to categorize that email automatically, understand what the request is, and automatically reply back to that customer. This addresses customers’ needs quickly and in their preferred way. Flex’s open API architecture makes it easy to quickly integrate AI tools into your omnichannel communication strategies to streamline the customer experience.

Growing with Twilio technology

Over the past five years, Matic has experienced impressive growth. As their sales increased, so did the size of their agent workforce, and they needed to find better tech to support them. While their initial out-of-the-box solution was adequate to support the start of their growth spurt, the company was forced to frequently build custom solutions that were not scalable. 

With Twilio Flex, they no longer have these limitations. Building solutions is faster and simpler, and Matic is more in charge of their own future. 

One of Matic’s strategic pillars is to meet customers where they are. To do this, they needed to understand how and where customers want to be contacted. “We've run several tests to understand the importance of that,” said Sarah Berg, VP of Marketing at Matic. “We were only able to do that test after we integrated Twilio into our contact center operations. It’s been really important for us to be able to fulfill that part of our strategy.”

Additionally, according to Barker, “We’ve started to get more sophisticated with testing out strategies we’re looking to deploy to try to drive additional growth and optimize what we can do from a customer service standpoint.”

The future of insurance is automatic

Matic makes insurance fast, easy, and automatic for consumers. Their digital marketplace of about 50 insurance carriers matches people with the best possible policies based on their property facts and answers they provide in a simple, single online form. Within seconds, customers can quickly identify  policies that may meet their needs, compare pricing, and purchase with confidence online or with a licensed Matic advisor.

As Matic continues to use Twilio technology to test, evaluate, and reimagine the way insurance integrates into our lives, their omnichannel approach to engagement improves the insurance experience and drives costs down for everyone. Matic will continue to focus on finding new ways to automate and engage customers with conversational-style interactions, not only on the sales side, but also on the service side as well. 

“We’re really trying to lean into the diversification of how we talk to customers,” said Barker. 

Twilio and Matic took on a titan of a challenge with the insurance industry and have made life a lot easier for customers looking for peace of mind (and a great insurance policy) along the way.