Confused.com is a pioneer in insurance comparisons and today serves millions of consumers each year by helping them find the best prices to protect the things they love, power their homes and finance major purchases. At a time of rising costs of living and economic uncertainty, consumers are increasingly seeking informed, trusted advice that empowers them to make confident financial decisions. According to Mintel, 73% of British adults have used a financial comparison website in the past year, as they aim to find the best deals on financial products quickly and easily.
In such an aggressive and rapidly evolving industry, Confused.com must continually deliver a superior customer experience to maintain its competitive advantage. This relies on understanding exactly what customers need and why, to remove the fear that so often accompanies financial decisions. Being truly customer-centric depends on optimizing data, as Nick Sharp, director of data and technology at Confused.com, explains: “Delivering a seamless customer journey, enabling real-time interactions, personalized experiences and offering a range of tools that go beyond just the price comparison itself is all about being data-driven. It’s about making decisions based on data insights.”
Confused.com’s traditional internal data framework frustrated this ambition. “When you have on-premise infrastructure and simple integrations, you’re dealing with silos,” says Sharp. “We wanted to bring that together to create a more cohesive customer journey. Making financial decisions can be overwhelming; our goal is to reduce that burden as much as possible.”
This need led the company to seek help from long-term partner Microsoft, which also works with many of Confused.com’s partners, giving the company peace of mind that the tech company understood how it wanted to improve the customer experience. Confused.com chose to migrate to Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, a solution that allows it to securely manage and store its data, as well as access to multiple applications, services and tools. “Microsoft’s maturity and range of resources made it attractive,” says Sharp. “The cost element was also important, as was the tremendous support Microsoft provided, which made the six-month migration very easy.”
The migration to Azure and the company becoming cloud-native has initiated a culture change at Confused.com, putting technology at the forefront of the company and enabling it to innovate and challenge the market. “It focused attention on how technology could enable us to go beyond providing the basic service and actually scale what we were doing, allowing us to gain greater insight and make a bigger difference for customers” , says Sharp. “It has allowed us to position ourselves as thought leaders, and that mindset is driving success.”
Considering Confused.com’s panel of partners was key to the decision. The company’s engine panel alone currently has more than 150 providers, and the numerous data feeds between customers and partners must be robust and fast. “That was a driving factor in choosing Azure, as well as the ability to experiment and scale,” says Sharp. “It was also about leveraging cloud technology and Azure’s turnkey and customizable solutions.”
As Sharp says, “If we get the right message to the right customer at the right time, he or she is much more likely to buy.” It was this need to deliver exactly what the customer is looking for at any given time that also drew Confused.com to Azure. Generative AI allows companies to quickly build and scale intelligent apps, training them to work with customer data. “That’s really where we’re seeing the increase,” Sharp says.
For Confused.com, the technology has boosted marketing, improving spend by 10% through data enrichment and personalized offers and recommendations. “That relevance for customers shows that we are doing it right.”
Sharp adds that the integration of AI aligns with the company’s commitment to being a customer champion. “By using AI to deliver personalized services and understand customer needs, we can continue to disrupt the insurance industry for the benefit of our customers.”
After all, people visit Confused.com for advice and reassurance. “For example, can we make recommendations based on the information a customer has provided? If they actively tell us they are interested in a product, or if there are nuances we can respond to, we can be extra helpful,” says Sharp. “It allows us to anticipate what customers need and potentially save them even more time and money by pointing them to the most relevant product at the right time and at competitive prices.”
A key part of elevating technology to a more central role was using Azure’s AI capabilities to automate, freeing employees from repetitive tasks and allowing them to focus on what Sharp describes as “the harder stuff.” He says: “We can address the problems that aren’t yet solved for customers – that’s where we can really add value – by making that content relevant, personalized and surfacing insights.”
Sharp adds that Azure’s impact extends beyond the company’s technologists. “All of our employees benefit from AI – ultimately helping 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 is extremely valuable for generating ideas and starting conversations, as well as improving efficiency. “It allows us to worry less about supplying and scaling infrastructure because all of that is taken care of. Both AI and the cloud ensure we can continue to work quickly and meet customer demand – that’s what it’s all about and what we want our team to spend their time on.”
Since deploying Azure, Confused.com has reduced analytics turnaround time by 50% with improved data availability, speed and richness, driving informed decisions. Customers benefit directly from this. “Customers rely on us for timely data products and services, they don’t just get a price,” says Sharp. “We look at the entire customer journey, identify bottlenecks and experiment and address them quickly, and we can respond quickly to customer feedback.”
The company’s relentless drive to add value to customers has also been realized by Azure, allowing the company to introduce cashback and rewards, which are tailored incentives rooted in data. “We can now give much more back to customers and ensure that the experience is optimal,” says Sharp. “These additional capabilities were made possible by our migration to Azure.”
Confused.com has big plans to build on its partnership with Microsoft and its success with Azure, and Sharp says it will continue to leverage Microsoft’s latest off-the-shelf components and solutions to solve problems. “It’s a game changer because we know we don’t have to build everything ourselves or find our own solutions. We can benefit from the expertise of a partner who truly understands our industry.”
He adds that the “ultimate dream” is to simplify the customer journey: “The more we can remove the bottlenecks, the closer we can get to automatic switching. It’s great from a technology perspective, but it’s also great from a customer perspective. With so many people feeling pinched, it’s important where people spend their money. So for us, it is now more important than ever to save people time and money and empower 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. “It’s great to be completely cloud native, and AI promises to be a very exciting next chapter,” says Sharp.
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