Vitality creates healthy customer experiences and brings innovation to life with Dynatrace

Vitality is a UK health and life insurance provider, with a core purpose of making people healthier. As part of its commitment to that goal, Vitality and its parent company Discovery are working to get 100 million people 20% more active by 2025. To support this, Vitality offers a reward scheme that allows its members to collect points when they complete physical activities or eat healthily. These points can be redeemed for perks and benefits such as cinema tickets and gym memberships, providing an added incentive for Vitality’s members to become more active.

However, this scheme relies on a complex web of technology, systems, and integrations, spanning its members’ wearable devices, Vitality’s internal infrastructure, and its rewards partners’ IT ecosystems. Put simply, it could be a Garmin Watch, connected to Vitality’s App, with an integration to a third-party reward. Added to this, Vitality has undergone a major digital transformation over the last few years, migrating to a hybrid, cloud-native environment built on AWS and a microservices architecture.

Whilst this has granted the speed and agility that enables Vitality to accelerate innovation and bring new rewards to its members more frequently, it has also introduced significant complexity that makes it more difficult to manage user experience effectively.

Vitality realized that it needed a new approach to monitoring and managing the performance of its applications – one that was purpose-built for web-scale, cloud-native environments. Looking at the potential solutions, Vitality turned to Dynatrace, having identified that its automatic and intelligent observability capabilities held the key to addressing the challenges it was facing. With Dynatrace, Vitality would be able to simplify the complexity of the multiple digital service layers that support its member rewards scheme, so it could continue to innovate faster and deliver outstanding customer experiences.

“Earning, tracking, and redeeming points has to be simple and frictionless, so our members can access our benefits and improve their health in the ways they want to. Not only do we need to keep up with the rapid pace of development in wearable technology, but we also need to ensure our members have a brilliant digital experience when using our reward scheme, to keep them active and engaged,” said David Priestley, Chief Digital Officer, Vitality. “Digital innovation and customer experience are therefore critical to our ability to achieve our goals and execute on our proposition. Over the last few years, we’ve worked hard to build the digital foundations and capabilities we need to achieve our goals, and Dynatrace is a crucial component of that.”

• Rapid integration and innovation – The automatic and intelligent observability from Dynatrace enables Vitality to build faster integrations with partners. This was essential during the global pandemic, when many member benefits were inaccessible due to the closure of venues such as cinemas and gyms. With the insights from Dynatrace, Vitality shortened the timeframe for building a new partner integration from three months to just three weeks. This enabled Vitality to quickly bring its members new ways to earn points through home workout services like Peloton and Jennis, and redeem them for rewards such as movies through Rakuten TV.
• Building healthier customer experiences – The automatic intelligence provided by Dynatrace’s AI engine, Davis®, has enabled Vitality to adopt proactive servicing, so it can contact its members and rectify an issue if something goes wrong during their digital journey. For example, Dynatrace can identify if a member hasn’t received the points they’ve earned for a physical activity and automatically trigger an alert for Vitality to contact the customer and address the problem. This helps keep members engaged and turn potentially negative experiences into positive sentiment.
• Better business outcomes – Vitality estimates that for every 100 extra customers it retains, it saves around £200k per year, and £1million over the member’s lifetime. The proactive servicing model the company has enabled with Dynatrace has helped Vitality to reduce policy lapse rates amongst members that encounter problems in their digital journey by approximately two-thirds.
• Changing the way that IT works – Dynatrace’s AI capabilities are also enabling Vitality to adopt autonomous operations, through the ability to automatically identify, diagnose, and remediate commonly occurring problems in user journeys, in real-time. This reduces the need for IT teams and developers to manually triage and resolve the root cause of performance problems, so they are free to focus on driving innovation and creating more business value.

“The work we’re doing with Dynatrace is critical in helping us to meet the expectations of our members and deliver brilliant customer experiences,” added Priestley. “Speed to market is increasingly important, so the confidence we get from Dynatrace’s AI insights is invaluable, allowing us to accelerate innovation and integrate with new partners in much shorter timeframes. Being able to proactively reach out and rectify issues for our customers before they’ve even realized they’ve had a problem has also created a phenomenal impact in customer retention. Ultimately, Dynatrace helps us to improve customer loyalty and protect the bottom line of our business.”