Industry: Insurance

Overview

The client sold surety bonds to a variety of customer categories (professionals such as contractors, nurses, etc.) via a national network of commissioned agents. A typical bond sale required an in-person meeting between the customer and the agent. During the meeting, the customer would provide answers to a variety of questions related to bond configuration. Once the agent had all the information needed, the request for the bond was sent to the client’s offices.  The client’s team would then configure the bond, bill the customer, share a commission with the agent. 3-4 weeks later, the customer would receive a notification to stop by the agent’s office to pick up the bond in paper format.

The client wanted to digitize this process by empowering the customer to configure and pay for the bond online, receive the bond at the end of the transaction in PDF format, while saving on agent commissions.

Business Challenge

The business goal was to reduce process costs while speeding up the customer transaction and making it more efficient. The goals also included revenue growth – to be achieved by deploying the new technology more widely to a variety of customer groups. While the need for modernization and the accompanying advantages were clear, the scope of this project crossed technology and business process boundaries and departments, as well as potentially impacting relationships with external agents. Hence there was significant business complexity as well technological complexity. New technology would need to integrate with legacy systems. Existing processes would need to be modified to support the modernization. Agent relationships would need to be managed by the business team and evolved in a manner which did not impact the business which agents brought to the client.

How we helped

We were brought in to manage the program which consisted of all technology projects under this initiative, budget management and working with cross-org teams to facilitate changes to impacted business processes. We built and deployed an eCommerce system to manage the use cases identified in collaboration with client executives. We integrated the new system with backend legacy systems (example: the direct bill system which ran on mainframes).

Results

The completed eCommerce system reduced fulfillment and billing cycles from weeks to minutes and facilitated the addition of new users through affinity groups & agents, while reducing call center traffic. It enabled the client to grow their capacity for servicing more bond requests, which in turn, enabled the marketing team to pursue a larger volume of transactions via business development with affinity groups for various categories of customers.