by A pioneer in the insurance comparison industry, today Confused.com serves millions of consumers annually, helping them find the best prices to protect the things they love, power their homes, and finance big purchases. In a time of rising costs of living and economic uncertainty, consumers are increasingly seeking informed and trustworthy advice to help them make confident financial decisions. According to Mintel, 73% of UK adults have used a financial comparison website in the last year as they struggle to find the best deals on financial products quickly and easily.
In such an aggressive and fast-moving 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 alleviate the anxiety so often associated with financial decisions. Being truly customer-centric depends on optimizing data, as Nick Sharp, chief data and technology officer at Confused.com, explains: “Delivering a seamless customer journey, enabling real-time interactions, personalized experiences and offering a range of tools beyond the price comparison itself is data-driven. “It’s about making decisions based on data insights.”
Confused.com’s traditional internal data framework was thwarting this ambition. “When you have on-premises infrastructure and simple integrations, you’re dealing with silos,” Sharp says. “We wanted to bring that together to offer a more coherent 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 its long-term partner Microsoft, which also works with many of Confused.com’s partners, giving it peace of mind that the technology company understood how it wanted to improve the customer experience. customers. Confused.com chose to migrate to Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Azure, a solution that allows you to securely manage and store your data, in addition to giving you access to multiple applications, services and tools. “Microsoft’s maturity and array of assets made it attractive,” Sharp says. “The cost element was also important, as was the tremendous support offered by Microsoft, which made the migration in six months very easy.”
The migration to Azure and cloud-native conversion has initiated a cultural shift at Confused.com, putting technology at the forefront of the business and allowing it to innovate and challenge the market. “It focused on how technology could allow us to go beyond basic service delivery and actually expand what we were doing, helping us gain greater insight and make a bigger difference for customers,” Sharp says. “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 suppliers, and the numerous data transmissions 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,” Sharp says. “It was also about leveraging cloud technology and Azure’s customizable, out-of-the-box solutions.”
As Sharp says: “If we get the right message to the right customer at the right time, they are much more likely to buy.” It was this need to offer exactly what the customer is looking for at any given time that also attracted Confused.com to Azure. Its generative AI allows businesses to quickly build intelligent applications and scale them, empowering them to work with their customers’ data. “That’s where we’re really seeing the increase,” Sharp says.
For Confused.com, technology has supercharged its marketing, improving spend by 10% through data enrichment and personalized offers and recommendations. “That relevance to customers shows that we are doing things right.”
Sharp adds that the integration of AI aligns with the company’s commitment to being a customer advocate. “By leveraging AI for personalized services and gaining insight into customer needs, we can continue to revolutionize the insurance industry for the benefit of our customers.”
After all, people come to Confused.com for advice and reassurance. “For example, can we make recommendations based on information a customer has provided us? If they actively tell us they are interested in a product, or if there is some nuance we can respond to, we can be a big help,” says Sharp. “It allows us to anticipate what customers need and potentially save them even more time and money by alerting 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 to focus on what Sharp describes as “the gnarlier stuff.” He says: “We can address problems that haven’t been solved for customers – that’s where we can really add value, making content relevant and personalized, and uncovering insights.”
Sharp adds that Azure’s impact goes beyond the company’s technologists. “All of our employees benefit from AI; it ultimately helps them do their jobs better, spending more time helping customers save money and adding greater value.”
While using Azure’s AI tools doesn’t eliminate the need for human involvement, Sharp says it’s enormously valuable for generating ideas and starting conversations, as well as improving efficiency. “It allows us to worry less about provisioning and expanding infrastructure because all of that is already taken care of. Both AI and the cloud allow us to operate at high speed and meet customer demand; “That’s where it matters and where we want our team to spend their time.”
Since deploying Azure, Confused.com has reduced its analytics delivery time by 50%, thanks to increased availability, speed, and richness of data, which is driving informed decisions. This directly benefits customers. “Customers trust us for timely data products and services, they don’t just get a price,” Sharp says. “We are looking at the entire customer journey, identifying friction points, experimenting and addressing them quickly, and we can respond quickly to customer feedback.”
Azure has also realized the company’s relentless drive to add value to customers, allowing it to introduce rebates and rewards, which are personalized, data-driven incentives. “Now we can give back a lot more to customers and make sure the experience is optimal,” Sharp says. “That additional capacity has been made possible by our migration to Azure.”
Confused.com has big plans to continue leveraging its partnership with Microsoft and its success with Azure, and Sharp says it will continue to leverage the latest components and solutions available on the market from Microsoft to solve problems. “It’s a game changer to know that we don’t have to build everything ourselves or find our own solutions. “We can leverage the expertise of a partner who truly understands our industry.”
He adds that the “ultimate dream” is the simplification of the customer journey: “The more we can eliminate friction points, the closer we will be to automatic change. It’s great from a technological point of view, but it’s also great from a customer point of view. With so many people feeling the pressure right now, it’s important where they spend their money. “So for us, saving people time and money and enabling them to make safe decisions, at no cost to them, is more important now than ever.”
Azure’s cloud and AI capabilities are playing a key role in ensuring Confused.com remains dominant in a cutthroat market. “It’s amazing to be completely cloud-native, and AI promises to be a very exciting next chapter,” Sharp says.
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