A modern policyholder portal for a 75-year-old insurance co-op

The brief

Co-operators is, by any reasonable measure, a great insurance company — trusted by Canadians for three quarters of a century, owned by its members, deeply embedded in local communities. Its digital self-service experience was, by the same measure, badly behind. The customer portal relied on PDFs, downloadable forms, and a contact-centre as the de facto fallback for almost every meaningful action.

The bet: a modern portal could absorb a large fraction of contact-centre volume, lift NPS, and pay for itself in operations savings inside a single fiscal year.

What we built

A single-page policyholder portal organized around three jobs customers actually do — see what I am paying for, file something, find a document. We rebuilt the claims-filing flow as a guided form that auto-populates from the customer's existing policy data and reaches a human assessor inside four minutes on the median submission. The documents area surfaces every artifact the customer has ever received from Co-operators with search and date filters, replacing a "request this from your broker" flow.

Real-time claim status comes from a webhook bridge into the claims back-end — the portal does not poll for status; it gets pushed an event the moment an adjuster moves the claim through a stage. Customers see the change before they would have called.

Outcome

Inbound contact-centre volume on covered topics dropped by roughly 28% in the first quarter after launch. NPS lifted 22 points on the post-claim survey. The portal went live across all 10 provinces in a single rollout, with no parallel-run requirement from the legacy flow.

The product is now the front door for every new policyholder.

"It is the first time in a decade our customers have used the words "insurance app" and "easy" in the same sentence."