Every successful company needs an extremely effective and efficient sales process for organic growth and customer retention, particularly in the highly competitive insurance industry. Oftentimes, the sales force is the customer’s first point of contact, and what better way to ensure higher sales volume than to make the process as seamless as possible for the prospective customer. We were able to provide our client, a multi-billion dollar insurance organization, with an automated method for providing customers a quote for insurance rates via a self-service web portal solution, while reducing company costs.
Background
Our client is a national property and casualty (P&C) insurance company that supports many lines of personal and commercial insurance. As with most P&C insurers in a mature market, our client is finding it increasingly difficult to attract new business and looks to improve sales performance through the upsell of new products to their existing customer base. For several insurance lines, the organization serves as an agent for their customers, providing sales support for select carriers.
Challenge
The real challenge for our client was that the quoting process was manually-intensive, without a real-time, self-service web quoting process for the customer. A prospective customer would place a call to one of the sales agents, providing all of the necessary information. The agent would then use that data as the basis for identifying the appropriate carrier, and subsequently, manually obtain a quote through a complex system. The time, resources and costs for this process were extensive. The organization needed a way to reduce costs, while improving customer service levels and sales closure rates.
Solution
Due to the wide breadth of personal and business solutions, our client needed to employ a method that would reduce the time, resources and costs associated with providing prospective clients with efficient feedback and quote data. It was clear that self-service would be the best approach for such a challenge. AIS built a solution with an web-based front end that would collect the information from the customer and determine which carriers would be applicable. The solution provided integration with associated carriers’ platforms to obtain quotes real-time and present that information in a comparative manner. Use of Microsoft.NET 4.5, Entity Framework and SQL Server 2008/2012 allowed us to create an online solution wherein the front-end could evolve over time to accommodate the evolution of user experience and accommodate a responsive design, available on mobile devices, tablets, etc.
Business and Technological Advances
The online self-service solution provided our client with several business benefits including:
- Clients could receive better, more efficient quote data.
- The organization could provide more quotes with less staff.
- Client closure rates significantly improved.
- Client volume increased.
- The company could obtain more policies and a higher degree of customer satisfaction for self-service.
The self-service solution provided the following technological advances:
- User-friendly interface
- Back-end customer-solution insight
- Responsive design
Technology
- .NET Framework 4.x
- Visual Studio 2012 / C#
- HTML 5 / CSS 3 / Javascript
- SQL Server 2012
- SSIS
- Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Services
- ACORD Data Standards