Case Study

Amentra Enables Fortune 500 Insurance Provider to Improve Motorcycle Insurance Sales

Service:
Systems Development
Industry:
Insurance
Engagement:
Full Lifecycle & Mentoring
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Improved efficiency & significantly reduced call times, training time

Before Amentra

A successful auto insurance provider suffered from long call times and steep learning curves for call center associates due to non-intuitive mainframe "green screen" applications used to sell motorcycle insurance. Sales representatives were required to lookup complex alphanumeric codes and often had to perform duplicate data entry to complete a single customer quote. Limited presentation and data validation capabilities hindered the effectiveness of the system. In addition, the insurance provider lacked a standardized technology platform for its call center desktop applications, which required all associates to learn many different applications to do their jobs. The high turnover rate among sales associates made long training periods a losing proposition for the company.

After Amentra

  • Call times for motorcycle insurance sales were significantly reduced.
  • Training time for new sales associates was reduced due to the use of industry standard user interface guidelines.
  • More efficient call centers lessen growth costs for the motorcycle line of business.
  • IT development staff share a common technology platform for both desktop and middleware applications, enabling resource reuse between development projects.

Evolution of the business process

Due to significantly reduced call times, the Fortune 500 auto insurance provider was able to expand the motorcycle line of business through heavy marketing. Prior to application rollout, call times were too long and data entry too error prone to support the load generated from a nationwide marketing campaign and sales were usually seasonal. The new technology platform enabled motorcycle policies to be rated using a modern rating engine, allowing the legacy platform to be retired.

Applied technologies and expertise

Amentra leveraged the insurance provider's service-oriented architecture to reuse existing logic for the motorcycle line of business. Amentra's robust middleware design simplified the process of introducing support for motorcycle insurance, even with differing business rules. Amentra was responsible for the original design and development of the insurance provider's service-oriented architecture, which was effectively reused across the board in this effort.

In creating the new motorcycle insurance sales client, Amentra developed a reusable UI framework based on Java Swing that supported pluggable, reusable views within a desktop application. The framework cleanly and consistently separated platform-specific presentation technology from the business-specific domain model. Implemented within the reusable framework, the application asynchronously sends updates to the domain model to the middleware for data persistence ensuring that no data is lost if a system failure occurs. This framework was later reused for several of the large insurance provider's desktop applications.

Technologies used

  • Java 2 Standard Edition 1.4
  • Java Swing
  • Web Services
  • Apache Axis
  • Java Web Start