Milestones, Milestones, Milestones

Rarely a day goes by without a start-up posting that they have reached a ‘milestone’. Sometimes it’s about customer numbers, sometimes about a revenue milestone and sometimes it is a country launch.

My problem with these is that they are all targeted solely on the investor community and not at all on the end consumer. And that all feels really odd to me.

Paying attention to the VC/PE houses is clearly important but we see it as just the means to the end, not the end in and of itself.

At worst the numbers can distract from a business’s purpose or the value it really offers. Many were dazzled by WeWork’s rapid expansion as it launched in country after country and rolled out thousands of square feet of office space. But when people started to crunch the real numbers and not just its press releases, its valuation tumbled.

Don’t forget that milestones are just markers on a journey that show how far you’ve come or how far you’ve got to go.

At Bought By Many we do talk about milestones (if you are a VC with a short attention span, feel free to skip to the end) and celebrate our achievements but our destination is customer satisfaction – building an insurance business that people can love. And we measure customer love in via our Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Our NPS has never been below 70. It covers all our customer touch points, including the spiky ones: claims, complaints, mid-term adjustments and cancellations. In fact, the claims subset of this NPS score in August was 90. Yes, you are not misreading this. 90. I am pretty sure that this is as close to insurer love as you can get.

How did we do this? It’s simple. We worked through insurance pain points one by one and fixed them.

In the past few months we became the first UK pet insurance provider to introduce video vet consultations into our claims process. It’s been massively popular with customers who want to see a vet urgently and without the inconvenience and stress of getting their pet to the vet.

We have also removed the two-week waiting period for switchers. Why? Because it’s one of the biggest barriers to switching. People switching to us can now can claim straightaway if they need to.

What’s next? We’re making all of our policies Lifetime products. This means that every year a customer renews with us, their vet fee limit resets. It improves the quality of their cover and simplifies our offering for consumers.

And there is a lot more in the pipeline. When we launched pet insurance, we had 19 points of differentiation over the market leader. Now we’re up to an astonishing 26 points – what’s not to love?

Sounds great, doesn’t it? You might still be looking for some harder metrics and, of course, I’m happy to oblige:

• We've passed 100,000 live cat and dog insurance policyholders in UK and we have over 130,000 live policies across all our products
• Our annualised run rate in insurance premiums is now $100m (we know how much you love a milestone in dollars)
• We completed our launch into Sweden last month without deploying a single person on the ground. Insurance really can scale across borders.

Watch this space for our next big move. And if you are a customer or an investor (we know plenty of people who are both), we’re pretty sure you’ll love it.