The Insurance Customer Journey: A Masterclass in Customer Friction
Getting car insurance in 2026 should be easier than ever.
Brian Walsh
6/19/20263 min read
Getting car insurance in 2026 should be easier than ever.
Instead, it often feels like competing on a gameshow where the prize is simply being allowed to legally drive your own car.
This year’s challenge involved:
entering the same information repeatedly
proving my identity multiple times
navigating broken portals
surviving an IVR maze
and discovering that the “Print Cert & Disk” button did not, in fact, print the cert or disk
The fascinating part is not that systems fail occasionally.
It is that so many businesses have normalised customer effort.
At every stage of the process, the customer is expected to:
remember more
repeat more
verify more
search more
and tolerate more friction
Meanwhile, the systems already know most of the answers.
The portal knew my email.
The agent had my policy details.
The IVR knew my policy number.
The insurer already insured me the previous year.
Yet somehow I still had to repeatedly prove I was myself like a suspect attempting to cross an international border.
The irony is that all of this is introduced in the name of “customer convenience.”
Digital self-service can absolutely improve customer experience.
But only when it removes effort.
Too often it simply relocates effort from the business to the customer.
The customer becomes:
the administrator
the data-entry clerk
the document retriever
the troubleshooter
and eventually the support technician for the company’s own systems
And here’s the hidden danger:
Businesses become blind to this friction because internally the process appears efficient.
The portal works.
The chatbot exists.
The IVR routes calls.
The documents are technically available somewhere.
But from the customer’s perspective, the experience feels fragmented, repetitive and exhausting.
That exhaustion matters.
Because customers may remember the frustration longer than they remember the price.
At UXY, this is exactly the type of friction we look for:
repeated authentication
disconnected systems
unnecessary effort
confusing customer journeys
dead-end automation
processes designed around departments instead of humans
Most businesses do not lose customers because of one catastrophic interaction.
They lose them through accumulated frustration.
One menu.
One form.
One portal login.
One repeated question at a time.
The UXY Insight
Many organisations view digital transformation as a success when customers can complete a process online.
Customers apply a different measure.
For them, success is not whether the process is digital. Success is whether the process is easy.
Replacing a paper form with a web form is not transformation. Replacing a phone call with a portal is not innovation.
Adding an app, a chatbot or an IVR system does not automatically improve the customer experience.
The real question is whether the customer has to invest more effort or less effort to achieve the same outcome.
Too often, organisations digitise processes without redesigning them. The result is that inefficiencies, duplication and unnecessary complexity simply migrate from the back office to the customer.
What was once an internal administrative burden becomes a customer responsibility.
The customer enters the data.
The customer repeats the information.
The customer navigates the systems.
The customer joins the dots between disconnected departments.
Meanwhile, the business congratulates itself on improving efficiency.
True customer-centric design starts with a different question:
“What is the minimum effort required for the customer to achieve their goal?”
Every additional form, authentication request, portal login, menu option and repeated question should have to justify its existence. Because customers rarely see individual points of friction.
They experience the cumulative effect.
And while any single irritation may seem insignificant, the combined weight of dozens of small frustrations can make even the simplest transaction feel exhausting.
The organisations that stand out are not necessarily those with the most sophisticated technology. They are the ones that use technology to make life easier.
Because from the customer’s perspective, convenience is not measured by how many digital tools a company has.
It is measured by how little effort they have to expend to get the job done.
“Too often, organisations digitise processes without redesigning them.”