Expat Insurance
Expat Insurance has protected more than 30,000 expatriates in Singapore since 2009, and needed a website that could win leads in a market full of global giants. Over a multi-year partnership we rebuilt their site around a new brand, added a Salesforce-connected chatbot, and built a comparator that turns 2,000+ insurance products into real-time quotes.
A long-term partnership that took Expat Insurance from a dated, bug-ridden site to a mobile-responsive WordPress platform with a lead-generating chatbot and a self-serve insurance comparator.
The Challenge
What we were solving
Expat Insurance started in 2009 as a one-woman show and grew into the brokerage globally mobile professionals in Singapore turn to first. The team covers employee benefits, business, individual medical, home, travel and life insurance, with more than 2,000 products to choose from, and the company is now part of the Siaci Saint Honore Group as a subsidiary of MSH International. Since 2009 they have protected over 30,000 expatriates.
Their problem was the market they compete in. An independent broker fighting for search visibility and enquiries against the likes of AIG, Chubb and Liberty cannot afford a website that leaks leads. And theirs did: the brand was due a refresh, the site was not mobile responsive, and bugs introduced by other service providers were driving visitors away before they ever asked for a quote.
The partnership began in 2017, on a recommendation from Delilah Creative, the design studio handling the rebrand. What started as a website build became a working relationship spanning four major stages plus monthly support.
Success meant three things the client could measure: more leads from the website, a lower bounce rate, and an end to the bugs.
Our Approach
How we tackled it
Build the new brand into a site that behaves
The first stage was the rebuild itself: a mobile-responsive WordPress site carrying the new branding and partial designs supplied by Delilah Creative. Insurance is one of the most considered purchases a family makes, so the site had to explain cover in plain language and hold up under scrutiny (tested and debugged across browsers and devices, not just the ones in the office). Later, we revisited the header, footer and homepage to bring them up to current best practice and clear out accumulated bugs, without disrupting business as usual for a site that was earning enquiries every day.
Make the website ask for the sale
A brokerage lives on enquiries, so the second stage reworked the contact forms around lead generation and added a chatbot integrated with Salesforce. Instead of a static form sitting at the bottom of a page, visitors get multiple points to start a conversation, and every lead lands in the CRM the sales team already works in.
Turn 2,000 products into one honest answer
The most ambitious stage was the insurance comparator: a custom, retina-ready JavaScript web application built as an extension of the WordPress site. Visitors step through an interactive quiz, one question per screen, and get real-time quotes from a range of providers.
The hard part was not the interface. It was the data. Mountains of provider information had to be distilled into structured tables that Expat Insurance's admin team can update themselves whenever an insurer changes a product, so the quotes stay accurate without a developer in the loop. For a purchase where trust is everything, a comparator is only as good as the data behind it.
The Solution
What we delivered
The rebuilt site is fast, bug-free and mobile responsive, with clear calls to action wherever a visitor is ready to ask for a quote. The chatbot feeds enquiries straight into Salesforce, and the comparator gives expats something no brochure site can: a real answer, in real time, from a broker who has done the product research for them.
The relationship did not end at launch. Monthly website support has kept the site current and error-free, and the site is still live on expatinsurance.com.sg today.
What we learned
Long client relationships are built one useful stage at a time. Nobody scoped a four-stage engagement in 2017; each project earned the next, from build to lead generation to a full web application. The pattern repeats across our best client relationships: deliver the thing in front of you well, and the harder, more interesting work follows.
The comparator taught us that data products live or die on who maintains the data. Handing the admin team update access to the product tables was a bigger decision than any design choice, because it made the tool sustainable after we stepped back.
And inheriting other providers' bugs is part of the job. The discipline is fixing them without breaking what works, on a site that has to keep trading while you operate on it.
