Case Study

Insurance Company Improves Customer Service with New Web-Enabled Quoting System

Service:
Systems Development
Industry:
Insurance
Engagement:
Full Lifecycle & Mentoring
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Improved staff efficiencies and simplified maintenance.

Before Amentra

An insurance company, specializing in motorcycle and ATV insurance, required customers to telephone sales counselors to generate insurance quotes for their personal property. Sales counselors used a legacy, thick-client application to create quotes for the customer's vehicles. The existing rating system required outmoded technologies and was expensive to maintain. In order to sustain their position as a leader in the motorcycle and ATV insurance industry, the client needed a modernized web-enabled rating engine.

After Amentra

  • Customers visit an easy-to-use website to self-generate property insurance quotes.
  • Fewer sales counselors are required enabling reallocation of employees to other lines of business.
  • Modern development platform simplifies maintenance tasks and reduces logic flaws in application releases.

Evolution of the business process

Web-enabling the insurance rating process created a more effective user experience by providing 24x7 rating capabilities and by enabling the user to easily change their coverage options with immediate feedback regarding their quote. After the marketing campaign, the bike-line.com and atv-line.com websites generated new sales and reduced the sales counselors required to receive the new business. The insurance company was able to shift these resources to other lines of business within the company.

Applied technologies and expertise

The client's technology standards required the use of COM+ on the Windows platform for the new rating engine and web application. Amentra's partnership with the insurance provider involved day-to-day mentoring and the delivery of a structured, seven-day course on COM+ and XML to the developers at the insurance company. Amentra's design for the system specified the rating engine's external interfaces early in the process before implementation. This enabled a more effective division of labor, allowing web design and client development to be worked on independently of the new rating engine.

With sparsely documented requirements, the rating engine was designed by analyzing the existing client-server system and using the information gained to implement the new system in Visual Basic as a COM+ application. COM+ enabled the new rating engine to take advantage of component-based design methodologies, security, transaction management, and performance improvements native to the platform. The rating engine used these new features in a service-oriented architecture where XML documents simplify external communication with the engine.

Technologies used

  • Visual Basic
  • COM+
  • Oracle 8i
  • PL/SQL
  • XML
  • Active Server Pages (ASP)
  • VB Script and JavaScript
  • Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ)
  • Internet Information Server 5.0