Beyond Shipping Insurance: Building Better Products by Delivering Seamless Experiences
Chapter 1: Discover how our Anansi engineers, product managers, and designers are using insurance to drive better business by focusing on the customer.
At Anansi, we’re not just about delivering shipping insurance. Our mission is much bigger. We want to provide an innovative solution, one that removes the headaches of lost and damaged parcels for retailers, logistic providers and couriers that drive a better customer brand experience. A solution that ultimately helps them do better business. Here at Anansi, that starts with the belief that the best way to deliver upon this promise is to focus on delivering a solution that turns complex issues into seamless experiences.
To do this, as a team of engineers, product managers, and designers we rely on three key pillars to align behind : customer-centricity, data-driven decisions and empowered teams. These are more than just buzzwords—they're the foundation of how we approach product development and how we’ve managed to innovate within the shipping insurance space. An area not traditionally known for much innovation.
We’re incredibly proud of the approach we’re taking and want to share insights into how we’re driving innovation and building against our core value of accountability through a series of blogs opening up and exploring each of those three pillars. The first being customer-centricity.
What will make our customers’ lives better?
At Anansi, our product decisions don’t start with “what’s next on the roadmap?” They start with one simple question: what will make our customers’ lives better?
At Anansi we’re stepping into a space that has lacked any sort of innovation. The problem we solve has had ramifications that seed themselves across different areas of the business and the full extent of the challenge has been hidden. Unlocking that and keeping the customer front and centre can be challenging for any organisation.
So what is the challenge?
Retailers, 3PLs and couriers face a large and increasing problem managing lost or damaged parcels. No matter where you are in the process, the challenges can result in frustrated customers, time-consuming admin, and, ultimately, financial losses. As we say, failed deliveries cost you more than you realise. There has been a real lack of accountability within last-mile shipping, which we’re trying to tackle with our solution.
It starts with the premise that insurance isn't just about peace of mind; it's about driving growth, efficiency, and profitability. Ultimately it’s about helping our customers do better business. You’ll hear us say this a lot but it’s a misconception about insurance that we’re trying to address both in what we deliver as well as how we deliver and solve the problem.
Customer centricity demands that we work from the belief that our primary objective is to help retailers, 3PLs, and couriers do better business and solve their problems. We just happen to use insurance as the tool to deliver upon this promise.
Our solution was born from listening closely to our customers and deeply understanding the pain they experience in handling loss and damage claims. One of the biggest challenges the industry faces is the admin-heavy process of claims handling. The inefficiency is staggering. Some businesses in order to ensure they don’t miss the window of opportunity are actually starting claims for every single shipment! And when claims can take hours to complete this is sucking budget and resources at a staggering rate.
If you want to learn more about the impact of the claims process on businesses, check out our blog here.
Leaning into that challenge is how we started to expand and deliver on our automation approach. By using data from over 1,200 couriers, we identified an opportunity to turn this process on its head. Instead of waiting for customers to discover a problem and manually submit claims, we developed a system that automatically creates claims as soon as an issue arises. In many cases, the claim is settled before the retailer even realises there’s a problem.
One of the things that surprised us most was how quickly our automated claims process became a differentiator in the market. Retailers aren’t just using our product because it covers loss or damage—they’re choosing Anansi because we’ve removed a major source of frustration and cost from their daily operations. We’ve turned shipping insurance from a reactive, manual process into a proactive, automated one.
Customer Centricity to drive our product roadmap prioritisation.
We can all get busy delivering on our objectives, so spending time listening to customers can often slip down the priority lists. However, one of the fundamental tenets of successful startups, and one we’ve committed to adopting at Anansi, is making time to listen to customers to unlock other opportunities you might not have initially seen or recognised.
A great example of this happened during a routine conversation with one of our customers who opened up about a challenge they were facing. They needed better access to data and analytics, particularly around their risk profile. They wanted more insight into how many of their shipments were problematic, which could help them make more informed decisions internally.
While this issue wasn’t part of their core insurance needs, we recognised it as an opportunity to add value. As a result, we decided to build a custom analytics tool within their Anansi account, giving them flexible access to the data we collect so they could monitor their risk profile and use the insights for their own internal purposes.
This may seem like a small shift, but for the customer, it was incredibly impactful. By adjusting our short-term priorities to solve a pain point that, for us, was simple to address, we were able to enhance their experience with Anansi and strengthen our partnership. It’s also opened a new opportunity which we’re continuing to evolve.
In product development, there are plenty of techniques to better understand customer needs—surveys, interviews, behavioural analysis tools—but sometimes a simple conversation and good relationship are all you need to uncover important problems that allow you to pivot and add more value to your service.
That’s the level of customer-centric innovation we’re striving for—removing pain points entirely and opening up new opportunities.
All this customer-centricity also generates a huge amount of data.
Next time, Chapter 2! We’ll dive into our next pillar - Data Drive Decisions.
JP O’Hara is leading the product development at Anansi and invites you to keep in touch.
