Admiral Insurance delivers highly targeted user experiences

Admiral Insurance is a leading insurance provider in the UK, founded in 1993, with its head office located in Cardiff, Wales. The company quickly gained traction due to its innovative approach to offering lower insurance premiums for drivers in urban areas. Beyond car insurance, Admiral Insurance diversified its product line to include home, pet, and travel insurance. The company is widely known for its MultiCover insurance policies, an innovative product allowing customers to insure multiple cars on one policy. 

A major player in the UK, the company’s success is highlighted by its inclusion in the FTSE 100 Index, denoting it as one of the UK's most valuable companies. Renowned for its strong customer service and excellent employee satisfaction, Admiral Insurance is truly a pillar of the UK insurance market, underscoring its commitment to quality, accessibility, and innovation.

Admiral operates several sub-brands, each catering to specific needs. Gladiator, for example, focuses on commercial van insurance, offering protection to business owners and their commercial vans. Diamond, another Admiral sub-brand, was specifically designed to cater to women's car insurance needs, addressing the market with targeted products and services. 

With their wide availability of multiple products, each catering to specific types of customers and needs, Admiral’s team needed a better way to personalize specific customer journeys for current and potential customers. 

Aside from the need to improve customer journeys, the company’s ongoing responsibility of compliance with government regulations complicated the change management process. All of these issues contributed to hindering customer journeys and user experiences while slowing the frequency of releases. Naturally, this also wasted time across teams due to the many dependencies in the way.

Admiral’s innovation within the insurance industry has led to the company offering multiple types of insurance—including coverage for commercial vehicles and electric vehicles. For instance, their innovative MultiCover product allows customers to insure multiple vehicles and even their household all under a single policy, promoting convenience and potential savings. The quote process involves leveraging different aggregate comparison tools, but, as noted, different customers and vehicle types require different customer journeys. 

However, if the Admiral team needed to change a feature to alter the user experience, they had to update variables in a database manually, which was a painfully slow process for several reasons—many of which revolved around bureaucratic processes and involving third parties. If the team wanted to make something visible for a customer, they would have to go make a change in the database. This meant getting in touch with a database analyst, coordinating blocks, and so on, which was unnecessarily complex and time-consuming. The company needed a way to trigger specific customer journeys based on internal ratings on the backend, and that’s what LaunchDarkly provided.

Vaibhav Vaja, Senior Test Automation Engineer at Admiral, breaks it down: 

“Let's take an example of Admiral and then Gladiator, which is our commercial van coverage brand. We only provide two aggregators—one for each brand. Suppose we have developed some new functionality, let's say for Gladiator, but we want to turn it on currently only for the Admiral. We can use a segment called “Admiral only variation,” and then “Admiral Gladiator both,” or “maybe Gladiator only variation.” We can then turn on “only Admiral, only variation,” And that basically means that whatever the new functionality is, it will be only turned on for Admiral.”

With LaunchDarkly, Admiral’s team can now set up automatic triggers that generate targeted customer journeys depending on the provided user information in the backend. With so many brands servicing so many different insurance needs while utilizing the same tools to generate quotes and pricing, LaunchDarkly provides a seamless way to offer Admiral’s customers the exact path they need to obtain their precise coverage.

Like any company in the UK, Admiral must pay close attention to constantly changing government regulations and update their site and products to remain compliant—something the company can often do with new feature releases. Before using LaunchDarkly, Admiral’s releases were not as frequent as needed due to all the complexities and dependencies in the way, making ongoing compliance a burdensome task. 

LaunchDarkly has eased this issue by enabling what the teams describe as a hybrid approach, which allows them to use feature flags for unfinished changes. With this approach, several teams can work on different epics using the same branch, and the work gets released once one of the epics finishes.

Furthermore, the company has adopted a change management process where they schedule the release of a software change. First, they request approval for that change from a governing body internally. Then, they tell that governing body when the change is scheduled. Once the governing body approves, the dev team can ship that change as scheduled. 

Admiral uses workflows to schedule when a particular change for a certain day and time. They can set approvals for turning flags on/off in production and pre-production environment. In their current system, two approvals are required for production and only one for the pre-production environment.

LaunchDarkly now enables Admiral to offer customers a vastly improved user experience that targets their needs while simultaneously increasing the frequency and quality of releases—all while making compliance easier (and, in most cases, automatic). For a company as prominent and innovative as Admiral, these changes have only served to bolster their products and make them more accessible to current and potential customers. In fact, all of Admiral’s products and brands now use LaunchDarkly in some way, from comparison tools to small features. To quote Laura Paulsen, a Squad Lead at Admiral: 

“LaunchDarkly has given us so much more control. That’s the goal, after all. And we’re honored to be along for the ride."