behavioural research
Behavioural Research for Insurance Brokers: Find the Friction Before the FCA Does
Insurance brokers operate under Consumer Duty and FCA oversight. When customers abandon a quote journey or misread a policy summary, that is a compliance signal as much as a UX problem. OpenScouter runs remote behavioural research sessions that show you exactly where and why it happens.
Your Quote and Renewal Journeys Are Losing Customers You Cannot Afford to Lose
The FCA's Consumer Duty, introduced under PS22/9, requires firms to demonstrate that their products and services deliver good outcomes for all customers, including those who are vulnerable or have cognitive differences. For insurance brokers, that obligation runs through every touchpoint: the quote form, the policy summary, the renewal notice, and the claims initiation flow.
Standard analytics tell you where customers drop off. They do not tell you whether a customer abandoned a mid-term adjustment form because the language was confusing, because the page layout created uncertainty, or because a critical call-to-action was simply not noticed. Without that behavioural evidence, remediation is guesswork.
Neurodivergent customers, people with ADHD, dyslexia, autism, or low vision, are disproportionately represented among those who struggle with dense policy wording and multi-step quote flows. They are also disproportionately represented among the customers the FCA expects you to identify and serve with appropriate care. The gap between what your journey looks like in a design review and what it does to a real user under real conditions is where revenue and compliance risk accumulate.
FCA defines a vulnerable customer as someone who, due to their personal circumstances, is especially susceptible to harm, particularly when a firm is not acting with appropriate levels of care
The FCA's 2021 finalised guidance FG21/1 is directly relevant to insurance brokers because it places the obligation to identify and appropriately serve vulnerable customers on the firm, not on the customer to self-declare. For brokers, this means the design of a quote form, a policy summary, or a renewal notice is not a neutral UX decision. It is a regulated touchpoint. Behavioural research with neurodivergent participants is one of the most direct ways to generate documented evidence that those touchpoints were tested against the population the FCA has in mind when it uses the word vulnerable. Without that evidence, a broker asserting good outcomes under Consumer Duty is relying on assumption rather than observation.
Our approach
Three Behavioural Streams, One Correlated Report
Each OpenScouter session captures interaction signals (clicks, scrolls, rage clicks, hesitation patterns), think-aloud voice commentary, and facial expression data processed locally on the participant's device. An AI pipeline correlates all three streams. A human researcher confirms findings before the report is delivered. You receive evidence, not inference.
A Higher-Signal Panel for Insurance Journeys
Our neurodivergent panel includes participants with ADHD, dyslexia, autism, and related cognitive profiles. These testers surface usability failures in quote forms, policy wording, and renewal notices that neurotypical users overlook entirely. They are not an accessibility panel as an afterthought. They are a higher-signal usability panel for exactly the journeys insurance brokers need to get right.
Designed to Complement Your Existing Tools
OpenScouter is not a replacement for Hotjar, Maze, or your in-house design team. It is the layer those tools cannot provide: synchronised behavioural evidence from real users with documented cognitive profiles, structured into a report your compliance, product, and design teams can act on without further interpretation.
What you receive
- Session recordings with timestamped interaction, voice, and expression data correlated by AI and confirmed by a human researcher
- A written usability report identifying friction points in your quote, policy summary, and renewal flows, with severity ratings
- Annotated journey maps showing where neurodivergent participants hesitated, raged-clicked, or disengaged and why
- A prioritised remediation list your design team can take directly into a sprint
- A summary section written for non-technical stakeholders, suitable for sharing with compliance or senior leadership
Frequently asked
- How does this relate to our Consumer Duty obligations under PS22/9?
- Consumer Duty requires brokers to demonstrate good outcomes for all customers, including vulnerable and cognitively diverse ones. Behavioural research sessions with neurodivergent participants generate documented evidence that your journeys were tested against that population. OpenScouter reports are evidence of due diligence, not legal opinion, and we are explicit about that distinction.
- Which parts of the insurance broker journey do you typically test?
- The most common scopes are the online quote flow, the policy summary or IPID presentation, the mid-term adjustment process, and the renewal notice journey. We work with you at briefing stage to define the scope that reflects your current compliance and conversion priorities.
- How long does a study take from brief to report?
- Most engagements move from a signed brief to a delivered report within days rather than weeks. The exact timeline depends on session count and the complexity of the journey being tested. We confirm a schedule at the start of every engagement.
- Do you work with brokers who already use tools like Hotjar or UserTesting?
- Yes, and we are designed to complement them. Hotjar shows you aggregate click and scroll data. UserTesting gives you general user commentary. OpenScouter adds synchronised behavioural streams from participants with documented cognitive profiles, which is a different kind of evidence and one that is specifically relevant to FCA expectations around vulnerable customer identification.
- Are participant sessions conducted remotely?
- Yes. All sessions are remote. Participants use their own devices. Facial expression data is processed locally on the participant's device and is not transmitted to OpenScouter servers, which addresses the most common data privacy concern brokers raise at the start of an engagement.
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Tell us about the vertical, the journey, and the evidence you need. We will scope a pilot in days, not weeks.