Lemonade: Smarter use of data brings the zest to insurance company's growth
About Lemonade
A leader in insurtech, Lemonade provides renters, homeowners, life, pet and car insurance to consumers in the United States and three European countries. Its digital-first business model leverages technology to streamline the process of buying and using insurance, earning it top satisfaction ratings from its customers.
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- Pioneered disruptive digital-first insurance company through smarter use of data
- Empowers users across the organization to innovate by establishing a single source of data truth to improve and accelerate decision-making
- Quickly adapts to new challenges and increasingly complex business needs as it expands product lines and geography
- Achieves industry-leading customer satisfaction with data-driven personalized experiences
Smarter use of data brings the zest to insurance company Lemonade’s growth
Urging customers to “forget everything you know about insurance,” Lemonade is a digital-first insurer that has disrupted an old-line industry. As a new kind of insurance company, Lemonade has put data at the heart of its business model and its effort to improve the overall customer experience.
Promising “instant everything, incredible prices, big heart,” Lemonade has been a hit with consumers. The company had a 150% annual compound growth rate in its first five years and hit 1 million paying customers faster than Netflix, Spotify, or Amazon. Started in 2015 in the United States with a focus on renters insurance, Lemonade’s digital first approach has allowed the company to grow to global scale and quickly evolve into new markets and insurance products.
Younger demographics have flocked to its mobile-first experience, and about 70% of Lemonade’s policyholders are under age 35. The company, which is certified as a socially responsible B Corporation, annually donates to nonprofits selected by its customers any leftover premium that exceeds claims and expenses.
"We operate like a tech company, very much at the frontier, in a traditional, data-heavy business. An advantage we believe we have is our ability to quickly query data, understand what’s going on with our customers, and analyze their policy information as agilely as we can."
—Christian Dulmaine, Business Intelligence Lead, LemonadeRefreshing the insurance industry with agile data use
Analytics are foundational to everything Lemonade does, and maintaining data integrity and reliability is critical. As its more than 40 teams interacting with data for their specific uses, the company needs to know that there is a single source of truth, and that data definitions and metrics are consistent at every instance.
Breaking down data silos for a unified 360-degree view of the organization required a business intelligence tool that offers this flexibility.
From Lemonade’s early days, the company has used Looker, Google Cloud’s development platform for data-rich experiences like modern BI, embedded analytics, and custom applications. Looker has been an important tool in Lemonade’s effort to innovate in one of the world’s oldest industries, delight customers, and grow rapidly.
Establishing a single source of truth with data reliability
Lemonade values Looker’s ability to ensure data integrity and consistency, regardless of whether the user has technical skills.
"As we’ve expanded, we’ve been able to create and maintain data consistency. It has proven to be a good reason to choose Looker,” notes Christian Dulmaine, Business Intelligence Lead. “We have been on a hyper-growth trajectory. We wanted to make sure that, as we scaled, people were using the same consistent definitions of data to build that trust."
LookerML, Looker’s universal semantic modeling layer, ensures data is trustworthy by giving the business intelligence team a collaborative Git development environment and version control over every data definition and metric that business users interact with. This is especially important in insurance because of the industry’s multiplicity of data points that have subtle differences among them, especially at global scale.
“Without the layer within Looker to define the metrics, there would have been a lot of room for misunderstanding and dangerous interpretations of the data,” explains Dulmaine. “I’ve been really impressed with the amount of control we have in Looker. I have confidence that when someone goes in and builds their own report, the insights are consistent and trustworthy because users are leveraging the unified model of our defined business logic.”
Lemonade depends on Looker for a diversity of modern data experiences such as interactive, real-time dashboards and Slack integration. These enhance productivity by incorporating data insights into existing workflows.
Redesigning the insurance value chain around data
Lemonade has successfully innovated on the traditional insurance business model by structuring its operations like a technology company. As they would at a technology company, product heads manage each business line vertically, rather than having each function, such as underwriting, operate across product lines.
Looker enables product managers to monitor already defined KPIs and ask new questions about customer behavior to improve both the product and customer experience. Additionally, new product opportunities have been discovered through these insights, expanding Lemonade’s overall offerings and market presence.
For example, how many customers are adding optional coverage for expensive items like wedding rings? Or what are the average claim values of customers who carry coverage within a specific dollar range? What’s the loss ratio and growth rate of certain customer segments? Product managers use this information to define coverage options, identify features that will be attractive to existing and new customer segments, while increasing efficiency.
When Lemonade was ready to expand into the car insurance market, they were able to incorporate new datasets and sources, such as auto body shop data to strategically develop a plan for a new insurance product. Looker played a central role as the single source of truth as the strategy was developed and launched. Insurance product managers had the agility of their technology industry counterparts to closely monitor, track and adjust different parts of their offering and product for a superior insurance customer experience.
“We operate like a tech company, very much at the frontier, in a traditional, data-heavy business,” says Dulmaine. "An advantage we believe we have is our ability to quickly query data, understand what’s going on with our customers, and analyze their policy information as agilely as we can. And that’s because it’s in our DNA to be a tech company, not just an insurance business that’s trying to be technologically savvy."
He continues, “Analytics are used across the full value chain of building the product, designing the product, figuring out the pricing, as well as all the more traditional tech company use cases around how a different product initiative's performing, what's going on with our sales, etc. We must have visibility for every team across the value chain, because it really is a data-based product.”
"I've been really impressed with the amount of control we have in Looker. I have total confidence that if someone goes in and builds their own report, the insights are consistent and trustworthy because users are leveraging the unified model of our defined business logic."
—Christian Dulmaine, Business Intelligence Lead, LemonadeLeveraging analytics for happier customers
Lemonade is relentlessly focused on customer happiness. It uses analytics to make sure its customer experience and claims process delivers satisfaction and quick resolutions. The company relies on Looker to track efficiency, performance, and trends in customer service so it can make continual improvements.
"Across the customer journey, we use Looker for monitoring the source of truth about what's actually going on. When we launched in a new European market, we wanted to know how many customers we have there and where exactly they are. That's on a Looker dashboard," Dulmaine explains.
Traditionally, the claims process can be a pain point and disappointment for insurance consumers. Lemonade has turned it into a source of customer delight and a competitive differentiator. Claims are filed on the Lemonade app with no paperwork and often no phone calls, and 30% of claims are handled instantly. The company’s fastest claim was paid in 3 seconds. Lemonade’s insurance for renters was rated no. 1 for customer satisfaction by J.D. Power for two years in a row.
Lemonade has thrilled its customers with simplicity through hard work and diligent tracking of metrics that matter, not vanity metrics. It uses analytics to identify trends in customer experience, prevent traditional processing bottlenecks, and continually find ways to improve their service and offerings
Using data to create the future of insurance
In little more than five years, Lemonade has built a leading digital first insurance business and product model, which included using Looker for the smarter use of data, to become a disruptive power in the insurance marketplace. The company has scaled globally, turning traditional challenges into ripe business opportunities with a data-driven product and business strategies in service of a superior customer experience with an insurance company.
As it expands further into the domain of legacy insurers, Lemonade will apply these data-driven strategies to guide product innovation and market expansion while exceeding customer expectations. Wherever this future leads, Lemonade will use Looker to ask new questions with agility and track critical organizational metrics, driving the company’s competitive advantage.
"As we’ve expanded, we’ve been able to create and maintain data consistency. It has proven to be a good reason to choose Looker."
—Christian Dulmaine, Business Intelligence Lead, LemonadeTell us your challenge. We're here to help.
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About Lemonade
A leader in insurtech, Lemonade provides renters, homeowners, life, pet and car insurance to consumers in the United States and three European countries. Its digital-first business model leverages technology to streamline the process of buying and using insurance, earning it top satisfaction ratings from its customers.