What Would Aliens Think of Your Claims Process?
What Would Aliens Think of Your Claims Process?
When redesigning a service, I sometimes ask:
What would aliens think of the current design?
Zog heads Public Services on the planet Glorb.
His council is worried about spaceship accidents and aliens who can’t afford the repairs.
“We hear Earthlings have insurance,” they tell him.
“Go and study their claims system. We’ll copy it.”
(More should try this. Amazing what’s to be found).
Zog travels to Earth and temporarily inhabits the body of an ordinary man.
Who promptly crashes his car.
Convenient, I know.
He calls his insurer.
Seven options to reach claims.
Five more to find the correct team.
He is triaged and put into another queue.
I’m an alien, thinks Zog, but even I find this strange.
Eventually, someone answers.
“We’ll email you a form.”
“I’m telling you what happened now. Can’t you complete it?”
“No.”
Zog fills it in.
He waits.
He chases.
“There’s a five-day SLA. You’ll have to wait.”
Eventually, someone calls. Information is missing.
Another form.
More waiting.
More chasing.
He is told to find a garage, arrange an estimate and wait for approval.
Then call the garage again.
Then the insurer.
Then the hire-car company.
Then someone else to discover where the hire car is.
Finally, he collects the hire car, drops off the damaged one and—one week later—completes the entire journey in reverse.
Total elapsed time: 49 days.
Useful work required to repair the car: approximately 12 hours.
Zog leaves the man’s body.
The man’s family complain that they preferred him yesterday.
Zog returns to Glorb and presents Earth’s claims design.
The council wets itself laughing.
Then decides to do the opposite.
This is a light-hearted version of my own experience after an accident. I appreciate that many insurers do it considerably better.
But between April and June 2026, the Financial Ombudsman received 4,100 car and motorcycle insurance complaints—up from 2,800 a year earlier. Claim delays were among the concerns raised.
And the research found that 96% of customers experiencing a high-effort interaction became more disloyal.
Nobody deliberately designed the journey to be ridiculous.
Each individual step probably made sense to somebody.
That is precisely the problem.
Sometimes it takes an outsider—or an alien—to see the system we have accidentally created.
On Tuesday, I explained why loyalty is too important to be bought—and why it must be designed into the service instead.
Read it here:
https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/the-low-effort-advantage-7115709448672657409/
And yes, this is slightly different from my usual posts.
Some will say silly even. No sillier than how we design services at times in the uk.
And it’s Saturday. I get some latitude today. 👽
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