Insurance Affiliate Platform

1 ~ Background

Enhancing the Affiliate System for a Broader Audience

The old affiliate program, known as “Friend Gets Friend,” was integrated into a mobile app. However, participation was limited to insured persons, creating a significant barrier to expanding the customer base.

To address this limitation, the program was redesigned to allow referrers to participate without needing to be insured persons. This change removed a key barrier, enabling a wider audience to engage with the program and driving customer acquisition.

Pain Point that We Know (and Our Gaps)

To begin, we collaborated with the Marketing team, who managed the current affiliate program, to uncover its key pain points:

• Limited Access: Only policyholders could register for the affiliate program

• Redundant Registration: Users were required to register twice once for the app and again for the affiliate program.

• Delayed Payments: Affiliates experienced payment delays of up to 85 days.

• Excessive Notifications: Users were overwhelmed by SMS notifications, even after payments had been completed.

Despite identifying these challenges, several gaps in understanding remained…

• Behavior: Who were the affiliates, and what motivated them?

• Needs and Pain Points: What unique challenges did affiliates face?

"…For develop a more effective solution,
we agreed on the need for a deeper understanding of our users
so we decided to conduct user interviews..."

2 ~ Hearing from Our Existing Users

Starting with Internal Users

Since the affiliate program allowed both external users and internal employees to refer others, we began by interviewing internal participants who had successfully made referrals. Collaborating with the Data team, we identified employees who had completed referrals and scheduled interviews with them.

Continue with External Users

After interviewing internal users, we interviewed external affiliates to deepen our understanding of their experience. Collaborating with the team, we identified external affiliates and conducted phone interviews.

Due to time constraints, we opted for 10-minute phone interviews instead of in-depth sessions. To streamline the process, we refined the interview questions, focusing on the most critical areas informed by insights from the internal interviews.

3 ~ Insights from User Interviews

Combine User Interviews Insights

We organized a session to synthesize the findings, to identifying patterns and uncovering key insights.

What We Learned from Users

Key Insights 💡

• Referral Patterns: Most users preferred referring family members or close acquaintances over distant friends or casual contacts.

• Motivation for Referrals: Referrals often happened because the referred individual had already shown interest in purchasing insurance.

Pain Points 😠

• Lack of Transparency: Users were unclear about the payment process and only knew if a referred person completed a purchase when informed directly by that person.

• Excessive Notifications: Frequent SMS notifications, especially after the referral process was completed, were seen as disruptive and annoying.

Wants 🎁

• Increased Rewards: Many users suggested that higher incentives will make the program more attractive and encourage them to refer more people.

Sharing the results

We presented user insights through detailed visuals and data-driven presentations. A dedicated session with stakeholders was organized to build a shared understanding of customer behaviors and pain points.

Competitive Audit

In addition to the insights gathered from our user interviews, I also wanted to draw inspiration from well-designed applications that addressed similar challenges. I researched platforms with affiliate systems that featured a clean layout and clearly presented user information to created an board to document the inspirations we collected.

4 ~ Our Concept

Making Affiliate Registration Accessible to Everyone

Shifting registration to the website’s user profile section ensures that anyone can register effortlessly. By integrating the process with user profiles, previously registered users benefit from autofilled details, reducing repetitive input and streamlining the overall experience.

Eliminating Redundant Steps

Previously, affiliate registration required users to submit both their application details and payment information in a single step, leading to feedback that the process was too lengthy and overwhelming.

To improve the experience, we divided the process into two steps:

• 1 — Affiliate registration
  can be completed without providing payment details immediately.

• 2 — Payment setup
  can be done later at the user’s convenience.

This change shortens the initial form, reducing frustration and creating a smoother onboarding experience.

Stay Informed with a Tracking Dashboard

To improve visibility into affiliate status, we introduced a tracking dashboard that provides users with real-time updates. This eliminates the need for frequent SMS notifications, reducing frustration and enhancing the user experience.

The dashboard displays essential data to keep users informed about their affiliate activity:

• Earnings to Receive: The amount the user is about to receive.

• Bonus to Receive: Bonus earnings from campaigns awaiting payout.

• In Review: Amount currently under review.

• Purchased: Number of policies successfully purchased by referees.

• Cumulative: Total accumulated earnings.

• Unsuccessful: Number of policies that didn’t meet the criteria.

These data points were developed collaboratively with stakeholders and informed by market research, using insights from other affiliate platforms to ensure a user-friendly design.

Making it Easy to Share Plans for Affiliates

Users can now easily share a link to a specific insurance plan directly from the plan page. Each shared link includes an embedded affiliate ID, ensuring that any purchases made through the link are accurately tracked. Affiliates also benefit from real-time updates to their dashboard, reflecting new transactions as they occur.

5 ~ Impact Outside the Interface

Insights from user interviews not only informed our design decisions but also provided a strategic for broader improvements. These findings drove impactful changes to the affiliate program, enabling the marketing team to optimize key aspects

• Increased Rewards: Adjusted the affiliate payout to 1,000 THB per policy sold, creating a competitive and motivating incentive.

• Improved payment process: Payments are now scheduled on the 25th of each month following verification, simplifying the process.

• Enhanced Communication: Transitioned from SMS promotions to email campaigns, fostering more engaging and trackable interactions.

Project Achievements

As a result of these changes, the affiliate program has achieved:

• 100+ policies referred through the program.

• 1,500,000 THB in additional revenue for the company.

6 ~ What I learned and wish I could explore more 🧐

Currently, user behavior is being tracked using Hotjar. However, if I had more time, I would have measured the conversion rate and user satisfaction of this design concept. This would help ensure that the solution addresses the user pain points we aimed to resolve.