A major investment and insurance company headquartered in Connecticut, US, our client is one of the largest property and casualty company that through its subsidiaries, provides insurance and financial services to individual and business customers. The client sells their products primarily through a huge network of agents and brokers. They operate through segments such as commercial lines, personal lines, group benefits, mutual funds. Some of the many insurance products that customer sells, include auto and homeowners’ insurance, business insurance, mutual funds, etc.
The client strives to deliver industry leading property and casualty insurance, group benefits and mutual funds to their customers, create diverse culture for employees, excellent financial performance for their patrons, and foster healthy community engagement.
Need for a platform that enables seamless data integration from different sources
Insurance industry is vast and full of information and data. There was huge amount of information available but what irked the client was the complexity of the information and its sources which threatened their ability to manage it. To let a large sales workforce, effortlessly access business critical data without letting important information slip through the corners, soon became a daunting task.
The client walked in with their need for a dynamic solution that could help their workforce capture information from multiple data sources and present it to their respective sales team so that sales team can schedule everyday activities, track their sales against goals, forecast sales trends, monitor claim activity and profitability.
Data stored in multiple applications: The client wanted a complete, modern, and easy to use solution that could process and present information such as day-to-day quotes, profitability calculations, claims data, sales data, organizational data, sales pipeline data on single platform to be accessed by their sales team. The source data resides in multiple databases and is used across several applications. To consolidate, correlate and present unified view of data from different sources was challenging and time consuming. The integration process was manual and error prone. The solution needed to be focused around assisting sales team improve their operational efficiency and empower them with robust self-service data delivery BI platform.
Inadequate reporting: The company aimed at delivering instant, elaborate, and responsive reports to give quick and smart data insights to the sales workforce. The legacy system delivered reports that were not visually modern and processing time of such reports varied from a few minutes to hours.
Single platform to enable integrated view of all systems with smart analytics capabilities
The client’s vision for the integrated platform was simple: Deliver complete solution for the sales workforce that could enable business transformation. The client witnessed other successful data modeling and solution implementations performed by Persistent for other leading insurance companies. Hence, they trusted us to deliver a comprehensive, fully integrated platform that addressed their various business intelligence and reporting needs.
Sales workforce remains on the hook for their top line growth—but increasing information complexity and buyer sophistication are changing the what, who, and how of selling insurance products. To maximize sales performance and tap into changing customer needs, we devised a solution that could smoothly integrate with third party or custom developed applications. The solution reduces total cost of ownership, is built on insurance technology standards, and facilitates overall business agility. With efficient reporting, the solution framework has been helping them meet their short-term and long-term business goals.
High scalability: The platform easily handles approximately 200,000 reporting requests every day. The platform is scalable and would not require any major investment to bring in additional users. The solution helps the organization save approximately 1000 person hours every day. Moreover, the final available data was always accurate and within SLA limits.
Better data management: The data from approximately 15 source systems is integrated, reconciled, validated, and published in a Star Schema based (Dimensional/Kimball model) data-mart in timely manner. The solution integrates data from different sources to the one central data-warehouse and publish it to a data-mart for reporting.
Smart Reporting: The solution processed data to generate multiple reports and smart insights on different areas of sales operations. Our team re-designed the report layouts in a user-friendly interface and added appropriate charts and graphs, which now helps user to quickly make sense of the data. The reporting application delivers reports online and helps clients to self-serve their various canned reports, hence saving time and manual effort involved in generating and distributing reports. The analytics tool helps sales workforce instantly create powerful insights for better decision making and plan their sales activities every day.
The client appreciated the agile development methodology and our commitment to deliver the solution in record 120 days. We developed a platform that gives integrated view of all systems, that is, where data is pulled from multiple sources, integrated into a central data warehouse, and ultimately presented through elegant reports. The solution has been helping sales leaders focus on their teams and their pipelines and get the most out of the biggest investment they have—their people. The solution has not only enhanced their sales performance but has also helped their support team to assist the clients more efficiently.
The solution helps sales reps:
- Empower sales reps to grow their own pipeline
- Act on business opportunities—and threats—faster
- Maximize revenue and optimize sales performance
- Know what to sell to customers
- Keep check on renewal retention & new business growth.
