Online Insurance Company Claims the Mobile Space with New ...



|Overview | | |“Software-plus-services is about offering customers a choice on how to use your products. Moving to |

|Country or Region: United States | | |mobile devices, we are making good on our anywhere, anytime value proposition.” |

|Industry: Insurance | | |Deepak Srinivasan, Director, Systems Engineering, Esurance |

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|Customer Profile | | | |

|In San Francisco, California, Esurance | | | |

|pioneered the online auto insurance business.| | | |

|Now, it is one of the main consumer brands | | | |

|for online auto insurance in the United | | | |

|States. | | | |

| | | | |

|Business Situation | | | |

|Esurance wanted to expand its service | | | |

|delivery options and deliver its Web-based | | | |

|products to mobile devices, offering | | | |

|customers the option of consuming other | | | |

|integrated services. | | | |

| | | | |

|Solution | | | |

|Esurance chose the software-plus-services | | | |

|approach to offer its products in the mobile | | | |

|environment. It used the Microsoft® .NET | | | |

|Framework to integrate and deliver services | | | |

|on mobile devices. | | | |

| | | | |

|Benefits | | | |

|Reduce time-to-market | | | |

|Enhance customer experience | | | |

|Reduce operating costs | | | |

|Drive a competitive advantage | | | |

| | | |Esurance has been offering auto insurance policies online since 1999. Today, the majority of its |

| | | |customers purchase their policies from the company’s user-friendly Web site. Many of those customers |

| | | |carry mobile devices, so Esurance decided to migrate some of its applications to run in the mobile |

| | | |environment. The company chose the software-plus-services strategy to offer this new option for using|

| | | |its products. In just six weeks, Esurance used the Microsoft® NET Framework 3.5 to migrate its |

| | | |applications to the Windows Mobile® 6.1 operating system. It also integrated two services: a |

| | | |text-messaging gateway and AutoWatch, which customers use to view photos of their car being repaired |

| | | |at an auto body shop. Esurance is poised to capture the mobile market with more claims-related |

| | | |features than the competition and expects to boost customer retention, cut costs, and drive revenue. |

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| | | |[pic] |

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Situation

It was 1999 when Esurance launched its first online auto insurance product at the height of the dot-com era. Today, it is one of the most well-known consumer brands in the highly competitive online auto insurance category. Esurance now offers auto insurance to nearly 90 percent of the U.S. population in 30 states.

The company also offers homeowners, renters, health, life, and motorcycle insurance policies over the Internet. Given the company’s electronic business model, it’s not surprising that Esurance is committed to “green,” or environmentally friendly, initiatives. The company saves millions of sheets of paper each year by offering online policy documents and communicating with policyholders by e-mail, in addition to virtually paperless back-end processes, such as claims management.

Esurance is well known for its affordable rates, but it’s the convenience of its online services that really sets the company apart. Esurance built its reputation around its user-friendly Web site, which offers customers a straightforward method of buying and managing insurance, along with simplified claims reporting. Though the vast majority of Esurance customers purchase and manage their policies online, customers can also phone one of the company’s customer service representatives (CSRs) 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Customers with existing policies can use the company’s interactive voice response (IVR) system to pay bills, update accounts, and retrieve summary information. Esurance hosts its policy data as well as its proprietary Web applications for customers and CSRs at two data centers: one in San Francisco, California, and one in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Expanding to a New Platform

“We define ourselves in terms of the convenience of real-time, on-demand customer service,” says Deepak Srinivasan, Director of Systems Engineering at Esurance. “Part of that is offering customers a choice about how and when they access our products—anywhere they have an Internet connection or a phone, for example. We wanted to expand that service flexibility and build on Esurance’s strong online presence by establishing our brand on the mobile platform.”

Esurance had other reasons for opening up a new service delivery channel. The company’s Web site had generated a dedicated fan base of computer-savvy customers most of whom carry mobile devices. “We have seen the rise of mobile devices used to access the Internet. We want to be available to our customers however they want to reach us,” says Paul Sykes, Development Manager at Esurance. “In addition to customer benefits, providing more ways to access our self-service features helps reduce operating costs. We can pass those savings on to our customers.”

Esurance reasoned that some of its applications—auto claims, for example—were eminently suited to the mobile platform. IT management began thinking about ways of including third-party services that might also be pertinent to a customer’s experience while on the road. “We wanted to empower our customers by offering a choice of integrated services that add up to a helpful, user-friendly Esurance mobile experience,” says Srinivasan.

Looking for the Right Strategy

Esurance needed to find a way to quickly migrate its Web-based applications to a mobile platform and to integrate third-party services that would add value. And it needed to do so ahead of its competitors. Fortunately, over the years, the IT department had evolved a robust, service-oriented architecture (SOA) upon which to develop its Microsoft® .NET–connected Web applications.

“From the beginning, we needed a platform that would allow us flexibility in system design and we have achieved success working with the .NET programming model,” recalls Sykes. “It allows for modular development so that we can build applications in parallel and reduce time-to-market. We wanted to take advantage of the infrastructure that we had put together, and bring in an additional Web service and a third-party text-messaging service to deliver additional capabilities on the mobile platform. So we began looking for the right technologies and the right software delivery approach to execute on our ideas.”

Solution

Esurance turned to the software-plus-services delivery strategy to introduce two of its Web applications to the mobile environment. First, it will introduce claims-related functionality, and then, in a later stage, it will deploy quote, policy management, and billing services. This approach maps to the evolving Esurance business model: to build, deploy, and manage solutions that span the Web, the PC, the phone, and the mobile device. (See Figure 1.)

“We wanted to be there with a solution for our customers who are moving to mobile access of the Web,” says Srinivasan. “The software-plus-services approach is perfect for Esurance on the mobile platform because it underscores the message we want to send to customers: Here’s another convenient way for you to access our services. And based on our previous success, we wanted to use the latest Microsoft technologies to get to market with our mobile platform as quickly as possible.”

Rapid Development Environment

Esurance is using the Microsoft .NET Framework version 3.5 and Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System 2008 Team Suite, including Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Foundation Server, to develop its applications to run on the Windows Mobile® 6.1 operating system. The company is also taking advantage of the Mobile Controls that is tightly integrated into the Visual Studio design environment to quickly build new Esurance mobile Web applications.

“With Visual Studio 2008, the ease with which we can develop Web services is unbeatable,” says Sykes. “It’s the most complete development environment available in the market. The debugging tools and the emulator saved time. We used the emulator to complete development and integration testing without having to wait for the network infrastructure to support device testing. This shaved several weeks off the integration test cycle.”

So by taking advantage of its existing SOA development environment and its experience building Web applications, Esurance quickly migrated its claims Web applications to the mobile environment. (See Figure 2.)

Then it chose two external services from vendors to augment the mobile solution. “The services we are incorporating are text messaging and AutoWatch,” explains Sykes. “We are integrating with an SMS text-messaging gateway so we’ll be able to provide customers with information on their mobile devices. And AutoWatch is a service that customers use to view photos of their car as it is being repaired in an auto body shop. That functionality is a Web service, so customers can see how the repair is progressing with photos displayed directly on our interface, regardless of which device they’re using to access it.”

A Platform for the Future

Esurance has been working with Microsoft to test its new mobile applications on the Windows Server® 2008 operating system and Microsoft SQL Server® 2008 data management software because the company is planning to upgrade to this back-end environment. It is interested in the high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities of Windows® HPC Server 2008, which runs on x64-based hardware.

“During this entire project, our Microsoft representative provided us with resources and motivated us to look at different ways of using Microsoft technologies,” says Sykes. “We are evaluating HPC for our actuarial models and our online-processing applications. HPC offers a great way of managing these services across a cluster, so we’ll be able to reduce the amount of hardware we use. This also supports our company’s environmental commitment.”

Because insurance companies generate a lot of temporal data, the new date and time data types in SQL Server 2008 make that data management software ideal for Esurance. And the company can take advantage of built-in compression, which allows database administrators to compress the database and transaction log files for a scalable database solution. “SQL Server 2008 has the temporal data types and scalability we need,” says Sykes. “It also has great service broker functionality, which maps exactly to our business model. Esurance systems are set up as loosely coupled services connected by Web services, and the service broker will enhance the interface between our policy-management and policy-accounting applications.”

Esurance plans to add rich interactivity to its policy-management and claims applications available on a mobile device, as well as to its Web-based applications in use by CSRs and customers at their computers. For these reasons, it is participating in the beta program for the Microsoft Silverlight™ Mobile software. “Silverlight is a great fit for us because we don’t have to change our deployment model to offer an even richer, more interactive interface to our customers,” says Sykes.

Benefits

Using the software-plus-services strategy, Esurance has added to its already strong strategic advantage—offering expedient online insurance services—and raised the level of quick, convenient service even higher. “Software-plus-services is about offering customers a choice on how to use your products. Moving to mobile devices, we are making good on our anywhere, anytime value proposition,” says Srinivasan.

Esurance is already benefiting from a fast time-to-market, and when the services are deployed to the mobile platform in the second quarter of 2009, it expects to improve customer retention, reduce operating costs, and stimulate long-term business.

Reduce Time-to-Market

In a very short period of time, Esurance migrated two Web applications to a new platform and added two new Web services to handle AutoWatch and text messaging. “The Visual Studio 2008 environment targeting Windows Mobile 6.1 allowed us to build a mobile application rich in claims functionality in just six weeks,” says Sykes. “The advantage for us is that it’s straightforward to take the functionality that we are already exposing through the Web site, repackage it, and make it available through the mobile device.”

With its agile development environment and SOA architecture already in place, Esurance can enjoy the same advantage when making any future enhancements to the new platform. As a result, Esurance can keep one step ahead in meeting market demands and offering new services.

Enhance Customer Experience

In the insurance industry, there is a relatively high cost to acquiring a customer, so keeping that customer is an important factor in long-term profitability. Esurance’s new mobile platform opens up new opportunities to drive loyalty by serving its customers even more immediately at potentially stressful times. For example, the mobile platform will make it possible for customers to get an insurance quote while negotiating for a new car, or even initiate the claims process at the roadside after a fender-bender. The Internet-based services such as text messaging and AutoWatch add to the quality of a customer’s experience, as information is vital to a customer’s peace of mind during a claim experience.

“Continually innovating our claims service is an important way to keep customers happy and also, to attract new customers through positive word-of-mouth,” says Sykes. “In today’s day and age, it’s not enough to be there for customers in one channel only, or to adopt a new channel after consumer behavior has changed. You have to anticipate how your customers will be interacting with you in the future, and be there for them when they are.”

Reduce Operating Costs

Delivering insurance services on a mobile device adds another venue through which Esurance customers can take advantage of the self-service business model. Every customer who can quickly and efficiently answer his or her own question or manage a policy without having to call the service center is a more satisfied customer. In addition to improved customer satisfaction with self-service features, fewer calls also translate to lower operating costs. These savings can be passed on to customers in the form of lower auto insurance rates.

“By providing customers a way to get information whenever they want through their mobile device, we’re removing an extra step or two in the claims process for our customers,” says Sykes. “In addition to a convenient experience for our customers, we anticipate an appreciable reduction in calls over the next 12 months.”

Drive a Competitive Advantage to Stimulate Business

In the long run, Esurance is expecting to stimulate business by offering a new set of rich services on the mobile device platform. As the company evaluates how customers are attracted to the mobile platform, it can extend the functionality that’s pertinent for the mobile environment and drive its competitive advantage. The company is already experimenting with Silverlight to enrich the user experience, and it’s looking at adding other Internet-based services—for example a GPS service that customers can use to locate the nearest towing service.

“The bottom line is this: The more ways we can do business with our customers, the more likely we are to attract and to keep them,” Sykes. “With software-plus-services, we’re better satisfying our customers. As people get more comfortable using their mobile device for Internet usage, Esurance will already have a presence on that platform. That’s a great position to be in.”

Software + Services

Software-plus-services is an industry shift driven by the fast-growing recognition that combining Internet services with client and server software can deliver exciting new opportunities. Microsoft is dedicated to helping individuals and businesses take advantage of these opportunities. By bringing together the best of both software and services, we maximize capabilities, choice, and flexibility for our customers. The broad software-plus-services approach unites multiple industry phenomena including software as a service, service-oriented development, and the Web 2.0 user experience under a common umbrella.

For more information about software-plus-services, go to:

softwareplusservices

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“The bottom line is this: The more ways we can do business with our customers, the more likely we are to attract and to keep them. With software-plus-services, we’re better satisfying our customers.”

Paul Sykes, Development Manager, Esurance

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[pic]

Figure 1. Esurance is using the software-plus-services strategy to deliver its online insurance policy products and third-party services to mobile devices.

[pic]

Figure 2. Now Esurance customers can access the same user-friendly claims application available on the Web with true anytime, anywhere convenience.

“The Visual Studio 2008 environment targeting Windows Mobile 6.1 allowed us to build a mobile application rich in claims functionality in just six weeks.”

Paul Sykes, Development Manager, Esurance | |

| |Software and Services

Microsoft Visual Studio

Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Team Suite

Microsoft Silverlight

Microsoft Server Product Portfolio

Windows Server 2008

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 |Windows Mobile 6.1

Technologies

Microsoft 3.5

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5

Solutions

Software-plus-Services | |

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published April 2009 | | |

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For more information about Esurance products and services, visit the Web site at:



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