by A pioneer in the insurance comparison industry, today, Confused.com serves millions of consumers a year, helping them find the best prices to protect the things they love, power their homes and finance big purchases . With rising living costs and economic uncertainty, consumers are increasingly looking for informed and reliable advice that enables them to make confident financial decisions. According to Mintel, 73% of adults in the UK have used a financial comparison website in the past year when they want to find the best deals on financial products quickly and easily.
In such an aggressive and fast-moving sector, Confused.com must continually provide a superior customer experience to maintain its competitive edge. This relies on understanding exactly what customers need and why, to alleviate the anxiety that so often surrounds financial decisions. Being truly customer-centric relies on optimizing data, as Nick Sharp, director of data and technology, Confused.com explains: “Delivering a seamless customer journey, enabling real-time interactions, personalized experiences, and offering range of tools beyond. the price comparison itself is about being data-driven. It’s about making decisions based on data insights.”
Confused.com’s traditional in-house data framework hindered this ambition. “When you have on-premises infrastructure and simple integration, you’re dealing with silos,” says Sharp. “We wanted to bring that together to provide a more integrated customer journey. Financial decisions can be overwhelming – our aim is to reduce that burden as much as possible.”
This need prompted the company to seek help from long-term partner Microsoft, who also works with many of Confused.com’s partners, giving him peace of mind that the technology company understood how it wanted to improve the customer experience. Confused.com chose to move to Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, a solution that enables it to securely manage and store its data, as well as giving it access to multiple applications, services and tools. “Microsoft’s maturity and range of assets made it attractive,” says Sharp. “The cost aspect was also important, as well as the huge support provided by Microsoft, which made it a very easy six month migration.”
The move to Azure, and being cloud native, has initiated a culture shift at Confused.com, putting technology at the forefront of the business and allowing it to innovate and challenge the market. “It focused their minds on how technology could enable us to go beyond basic service delivery and scale up what we were doing, helping us gain greater insight and make a difference do more for customers,” says Sharp. “It’s allowed us to position ourselves as thought leaders, and that mindset is driving success.”
Confused.com’s panel of partners was critical to the decision. The company’s motor panel alone currently has more than 150 suppliers, and the multiple data feeds between customers and partners need to be strong and fast. “That was a driving factor in choosing Azure, along with the ability to experiment and scale,” says Sharp. “It was also about leveraging cloud technology and Azure’s out-of-the-box and customizable solutions.”
As Sharp says: “If we get the right message to the right customer at the right time, they’re more likely to buy.” This need to deliver exactly what the customer is looking for at any given time is what also attracted Confused.com to Azure. Its generational AI enables companies to quickly build and scale smart apps, training them to work with their customer data. “That’s really where we’re seeing the rise,” says Sharp.
For Confused.com, technology has supercharged its marketing, improving spend by 10% through data enrichment and personalized offers and recommendations. “That engagement with customers shows that we are getting things right.”
Sharp adds that the integration of AI is in line with the company’s commitment to being a customer champion. “By leveraging AI for personalized services and gaining insights into customer needs, we can continue to disrupt the insurance industry for the benefit of our customers.”
After all, people visit Confused.com looking for advice and reassurance. “For example, can we make any recommendations based on the information provided by a customer? If they’re actively telling us they’re interested in a product, or if there are any nuances we can respond to, we can be more helpful,” says Sharp. “It allows us to anticipate what customers need and potentially save them more time and money by informing them of the most relevant product at the right time and at competitive prices.”
A key part of elevating technology to a more central role is using Azure’s AI capabilities to automate, freeing employees from repetitive tasks to focus on what Sharp describes as “the gnarly stuff”. He says: “We can tackle the unsolved problems for customers – that’s where we can really add value – making that content relevant and personal, revealing insights.”
Sharp adds that Azure’s impact goes beyond the company’s technologists. “All of our employees benefit from AI—ultimately it helps them do their jobs better, spend more time helping customers save money, and add more value.”
While using Azure’s AI tools doesn’t eliminate the need for human input, Sharp says it’s invaluable for generating ideas and starting conversations, as well as improving efficiencies. “It allows us to worry about infrastructure provisioning and scaling because that’s all taken care of. Both AI and the cloud keep us operating at speed and meeting customer demand – that’s where it matters and where we want our staff to spend their time.”
Since implementing Azure, Confused.com has reduced its analysis initiation time by 50%, thanks to improved availability, speed and richness of data, which is driving informed decisions. This benefits your customers directly. “Customers depend on us for timely data products and services, not just a price,” says Sharp. “We’re looking at the entire customer journey, identifying friction points and quickly testing and addressing them, and we’re able to respond quickly to customer feedback.”
Azure has also realized the company’s relentless drive to add value to customers, allowing the company to introduce reimbursement and rewards, which are customized incentives rooted in data. “We can now give customers a lot more back and make sure the experience is the best it can be,” says Sharp. “Our move to Azure has enabled that additional capability.”
Confused.com has big plans to continue building on its partnership with Microsoft and its success with Azure, and Sharp says it will continue to leverage Microsoft’s latest components and off-the-shelf solutions to solve problems to resolve. “It’s promising to know that we don’t have to build everything for ourselves or find our own solutions. We can benefit from the expertise of a partner who really understands our industry.”
He adds that the “ultimate dream” is to simplify the customer journey: “The more we can remove the friction points, the closer we get to automatic switching. It’s great from a technology standpoint but it’s also great from a customer standpoint. With so many people feeling the pinch right now, where people spend their money is important. So for us, it’s now more important than ever to save people time and money and allow them to make confident decisions, at no cost to them.”
Azure’s cloud and AI capabilities play a key role in ensuring Confused.com remains dominant in a fierce market. “Being completely cloud native is amazing, and AI promises to be a very exciting next chapter,” says Sharp.
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