The Pizza Tracker for Claims: Steve Johnson on Insurance UX, Mobile and AI With Guardrails

Steve Johnson has spent more than two decades in insurance. He started as a policy processor, became an underwriter, and fell into technology at a Northern California MGA writing non-standard auto, a line where policyholders call you constantly. He saw a large gap between what customers needed and what insurance technology could deliver, and he has been working on it ever since.

Today he is the Founder and Chief Product Officer of insured.io, a customer experience platform for insurers, and the author of The Insurance UX Survival Guide. The second edition came out about a month before we recorded, with a new chapter on AI and customer experience.

In Episode 174 of InsurTechTalk, Steve and I covered why claims is where customer experience is won or lost, why mobile is still the first thing to get right in 2026, and how to use AI in front of policyholders without trapping them in a loop.

About Steve Johnson

Steve got into insurance, in his words, by nepotism and accident, because a family member worked in the industry. He processed policies when that meant hitting buttons by hand, then spent a long time as an underwriter. While at an MGA he and his business partner, Michael Kassing, started building the company’s internal systems. Steve brought a design background, including a clothing company he tried and failed to launch, and found that the design of how things work, not just how they look, was what interested him most.

They left the MGA and founded the company in 2011, building products for insurers. In 2018 and 2019 they launched the platform that insured.io is built on, focused on customer experience across every channel a policyholder uses. Steve says the platform has been in the market for about eight years.

UX Is Not UI

Steve’s favorite chapter in the book is an early one on the difference between UX and UI. Executives hear “UX” and think about the color and position of buttons. His point is that user experience is how a process actually works for the person using it, not only how it looks. He explains it with a section built around velociraptors and Jurassic Park, and the book is sprinkled with other pop-culture references, including 1980s horror and The Fast and the Furious.

For a carrier CEO short on time, he points to the last chapter, a “too long, didn’t read” summary of the whole book.

What Policyholders Actually Do

A policyholder is not scrolling an insurance app the way they scroll Instagram. Steve says there are only a handful of things people need to do: make a payment, get a document, change a policy. Many do it once a month, some once every six months, some only at renewal. They do it because they have to, so those few functions must be easy, obvious and not buried in menus.

He cited research his company ran a couple of years ago: when people shop for insurance, the user experience of buying and interacting ranked about as important as brand, and both ranked behind price. His line: technology equals trust. If a carrier looks like it does not know what it is doing technologically, that undermines confidence that it knows what it is doing as an insurer. Insurance is also a commoditized industry, he added, and with more direct interaction with consumers, carriers can no longer get by on good premiums and commissions alone.

Mobile Still Comes First

Steve said that across his carrier customers there are well over two million active users, and about 87 percent of them use the platform on a mobile device, across auto, home, commercial and workers’ comp. These are company figures, not independent numbers. His comment: it feels strange to say in 2026 that you must focus on the mobile experience, but you still must.

Tier 1 Brands, Tier 2 Experience

Tier 1 carriers spend heavily on brand and marketing. Thousands of smaller carriers cannot. Steve’s customers are mostly in that group, and his goal is to give them an experience that rivals the big carriers, which lifts the whole industry.

UX Debt, Not Technology Debt

Coming back from ITC, I said it felt like every booth was about AI, while a long tail of carriers is still working on the basics. Steve’s answer: the debt is huge and it constantly has to be paid. Many AI companies are niche, he said, and some of it is good and some is not, but he often talks to carriers that are still trying to figure out what they should have been doing five years ago, let alone five years from now. He uses the term “digital transformation” but does not love it, because it is generic, and he thinks a platform should not force a carrier to keep going through one.

A Story: Moving Payments Off the Phone

Steve described a carrier, which he did not name, that was very customer-centric but almost entirely through phone calls. It had little digital tooling for payments or after-hours service and ran three or four policy administration systems.

His company placed one customer experience layer on top of all of them, with no changes to the carrier’s internal systems. Over time, well over half of the carrier’s payments shifted to self-service, including a large number after hours, which showed how many people wanted to pay when no one was available to take the call.

He does not see this as a way to cut customer service. The point is to free those people to spend more time with the policyholders who need them. Hold times fall, the people who prefer digital are satisfied, and the people who need a human get more of one.

The Channels That Matter

Steve lists the channels a policyholder uses:

• Human customer service, which will always exist
• Policyholder portal and mobile app, including the web experience
• Automated voice (IVR) for payments and routine questions
• Text messaging, both inbound and outbound
• WhatsApp, which matters less in the US but exists
• A separate claims pipeline that uses all of those same channels
• An AI layer of chatbots and conversational AI on top

The Pizza Tracker for Claims

Most people do not understand how insurance works, and claims is the least transparent part. Nobody leaves a review about a carrier’s actuarial skill. They review the claims experience.

Steve ties the idea to the Domino’s Pizza Tracker, which he says came out of a company-wide commitment to operational transparency. People want the same visibility from a claim: where it is, what comes next, and above all when the payment will arrive. His platform includes a step-by-step claim tracker for that purpose.

Steve says about 30 percent of calls into a claims department are people asking what is happening with their claim. Showing the status visually, combined with text or push notifications, removes much of that call volume, and the notifications matter because people do not log in all the time.

How Much Transparency Is Too Much?

I raised the Uber problem: it has been two minutes away for five minutes. Steve’s answer is that a carrier has to commit operationally to what it makes visible. If your claims process is notoriously bad, show transparency only after you have also improved the process. And you do not have to be amazing, he says. Doing things pretty well is enough for most customers.

Who Gets Credit for the Savings?

Steve’s answer was retention, repeated several times. Fewer claims calls lower service costs. A policyholder who had a decent claims experience renews, which means more earned premium. Keeping a policy is cheaper than acquiring one. Reviews improve, new business improves, in-force count grows, and the effect runs through every department, including the actuaries, who do not have to keep revising rates.

Where AI Helps, and the Doom Loop

Use AI Inside Workflows That Already Work

The old chatbot offered four options because those four tasks are what most policyholders need, and those workflows are well designed. Steve sees AI’s power as interpreting what a person is trying to do and sending them to the right workflow, the way it improves on “press 1, press 2” phone menus. The mistake is trying to make AI do everything. Guardrail it inside workflows that already exist.

The Doom Loop

A doom loop is when a person is stuck in an endless “I need to get this done and the AI is not helping” cycle. The fix is simple to state: always provide off-ramps so a person can escalate to a human. If chatbots are going to be used, they cannot be frustrating, and humans have to be brought in when they need to be.

First Notice of Loss

Claims is a good fit for AI because the workflows are controlled and end to end with few branches. Keep it tight and concise, ask specific questions, and do not ask people about insurance concepts they do not understand. Digital FNOL exists to take the information-gathering burden off the adjuster, not to replace the adjuster. His rule of thumb: if your first notice of loss takes more than about ten minutes, something is wrong.

One Platform, Not Another Digital Transformation

Asked how he competes with core vendors and big platforms, Steve said many vendors offer pieces of what he does as an add-on to payments or a core system. His approach is to build the best version of each piece and unify them in one platform, which reduces vendor sprawl, lets updates ship across channels at once, and avoids shopping again every few years. He says his customers have received every iteration of the platform since 2019, and that it is a different product today than at launch.

What Insurance Should Talk About More

Steve’s answer was, selfishly, user experience. His broader point: the newest shiny thing, AI now and blockchain a couple of years ago, takes over the conversation, and digital transformation gets framed as a total overhaul. You can make small, individual changes that matter to customers without gutting your core systems or reinventing every operational process. That, he says, is what gets lost.

Key Takeaways

• UX is how a process works for the user, not only how it looks
• Policyholders do a few things, infrequently and by obligation, so those things must be fast and obvious
• Technology signals trust, and user experience ranks close to brand when people shop, behind price
• A claim tracker answers the most common claims call, “what is going on with my claim?”, and pairs best with notifications
• Transparency needs operational commitment behind it, and doing things pretty well is often enough
• Retention is where the financial benefit shows up
• Use AI to guide people through proven workflows, with guardrails and clear off-ramps to a human to avoid doom loops
• Digital FNOL should help the adjuster, and a process longer than about ten minutes is a warning sign
• Small changes to the customer experience can matter more than a full digital transformation

Steve’s figures, including 2 million-plus active users, 87 percent mobile use, 30 percent of claims calls, and the payment shift, are company-reported and were not independently verified.

Connect

• insured.io
• The Insurance UX Survival Guide by Steve Johnson (second edition)