March 29, 2010 at 13:52Insurance Part I: DIY Insurance Calculators
To attract customers of the insurance company, it is important not only to come up with “beautiful” insurance products, but also to convey information about them to customers, as well as to do everything possible to simplify the design of the product. The most effective way for these purposes today is the Internet. A company with facilities for remote product clearance has an advantage. Such a tool is most effectively a website on which anyone can arrange the insurance of interest to him without any intermediaries.
The insurance products market is notable for its complexity: data matrices, intricate logical relationships, ratios, risks, etc. It takes a lot of time to create each insurance product; at least, to implement an “electronic” calculator.
Is it realistic to create mechanisms for selling insurance products over the Internet without involving contractors, a team of programmers and without spending a lot of time? Yes, we made it possible.
Imagine a situation. The underwriter (in fact, the person creating the insurance product as a service) came up with a new product. The management approved it and it is necessary to immediately make it possible to purchase it on the company's website. The underwriter goes to the developer and he calls him the deadline for the implementation of the calculator form in a week. A week passes, the developer programs the form, using complex twists from various web technologies to implement everything requested by the underwriter. A week later, an underwriter arrives and reports on an inaccuracy found in his product, which entails, if not alteration of half the form, then certainly a lot of work to rewrite the business logic code. An implementation error, changed management plans, etc. may be found. There can be many such iterations; each edit more and more confuses and complicates the life of the developer, as well as the product they create. But in the end, it may turn out that during the time that the form for the site was programmed, the insurance product is already outdated. Do not forget about documentation here, so that in case of loss of a key developer, the company does not lose the ability to quickly make changes to its website.
Insurance products can appear often, as well as changes in them can be made every week: somewhere the coefficient has changed, somewhere a new field has been added that interacts with others, etc. How much effort will web developers need to create functionality for each new unique form of costing of an insurance product?
Among ADV understood the situation and tried to organize a center for the creation of insurance products, which does not require special software (as well as expensive specialists) to implement a wide range of required tasks. ADV has developed the Insurance product for insurance companies. Insurance- This is a system that allows you to create an online agency for the sale of insurance policies with a minimum of personnel.
Since an insurance calculator is a set of data, presentation forms, and interactions of these entities, the natural MVC (Model-View-Controller) was chosen as the architecture, and a special XML format was used as a way to describe calculators. Everything is obvious, simple and documented.
In the process of creating a universal calculator programming mechanism, a lot of existing insurance products were analyzed (not limited to such popular ones as CASCO and CTP), in order to put the most complete and universal set of functions into the possibilities. In fact, a product was obtained, with the help of which it is possible to implement new underwriter ideas in a few days and in a few minutes or hours to make corrections to an existing product without any programming, only changing the structure of the XML description.
In addition, the center for the creation of insurance products provided such important features as versioning and previewing. After all, one often doesn’t want to work “live”, but just in case, you don’t want to lose old versions either. Therefore, the programmer can simply copy the current active calculator, thereby creating a new version, make any changes to it, check the operation directly in the site’s interface and after that activate the new version, automatically turning off the old one.
Of course, we have not forgotten about the convenience of working with an insurance product for a client. Since most often forms are quite massive amounts of data, it was decided to actively use AJAX technology along with a thoughtful and beautiful interface. In the process of creating a new calculator, the programmer does not need to think about how the functionality on the site will look, because under all cases, a beautiful and convenient output of information to the client is already provided. Customization tools allow you to customize the appearance of the functionality to the needs of the company, corporate identity, the overall style of the website.
So Insurance is:
Main functions:
All the information received still needs to be processed; for this, a back office with several modules was implemented. The insurance back office allows you to control the entire chain of orders, print out policies on letterheads, and process notifications from electronic payment systems. In addition, the back office provides detailed reporting on the dynamics of sales for all insurance products for the entire duration of the online store. In addition, the system allows you to make a cross-sales report for each product, as well as a detailed report on which stages of filling out calculators people most often leave the site.
A client registered and authorized in the system can easily not only view information on ordered / purchased insurance products, but also extend those whose terms expire. The system will most effectively help him do this by filling out new product design forms with the data entered earlier.
Insurance product is flexible enough to integrate with corporate information systems: SAP, Oracle, Navision, 1C and any others.
Means of interaction with partners help to organize cooperation not only by the type of affiliate partnership, but also by the principle of organizing cooperation with other companies, for example, banking or tourism, which also requires insurance for credit or travel abroad. If your company delegates the delivery of policies to customers and the collection of money to a contractor company, for example, a courier service, then you can automate the order processing section with Insurance even on the side of this contractor. To do this, the Insurance back office has a section for contractors, which includes only those contracts that are marked with the status “for delivery”. Courier employees can change the status of an order as it is processed.
If your company has a call center, then for efficient work it needs operational information. For the convenience of automating the call center, the Insurance back office has special sections in which all the necessary information for work is immediately displayed on one page.
Online chat will help resolve issues promptly if your company has a consultant position whose responsibilities will include correspondence with clients.
Needless to say, all the features discussed above are available through a web browser and do not require the installation of any special software on users' computers.
In conclusion, I would like to note that the Insurance product has a very universal set of tools, therefore it can be used in related markets. For example, a car dealer can post on his website a form for calculating the cost of a loan for a car. The banking sector can use Insurance to provide visitors to their sites quickly calculate and send applications for personal loans for any purpose.
What's next? Perhaps someone will be interested, and I will tell you how the creation of the insurance registration form takes place without much effort. In the meantime, a few screenshots and additional information can be seen on the Insurance product page .
The insurance products market is notable for its complexity: data matrices, intricate logical relationships, ratios, risks, etc. It takes a lot of time to create each insurance product; at least, to implement an “electronic” calculator.
Is it realistic to create mechanisms for selling insurance products over the Internet without involving contractors, a team of programmers and without spending a lot of time? Yes, we made it possible.
Imagine a situation. The underwriter (in fact, the person creating the insurance product as a service) came up with a new product. The management approved it and it is necessary to immediately make it possible to purchase it on the company's website. The underwriter goes to the developer and he calls him the deadline for the implementation of the calculator form in a week. A week passes, the developer programs the form, using complex twists from various web technologies to implement everything requested by the underwriter. A week later, an underwriter arrives and reports on an inaccuracy found in his product, which entails, if not alteration of half the form, then certainly a lot of work to rewrite the business logic code. An implementation error, changed management plans, etc. may be found. There can be many such iterations; each edit more and more confuses and complicates the life of the developer, as well as the product they create. But in the end, it may turn out that during the time that the form for the site was programmed, the insurance product is already outdated. Do not forget about documentation here, so that in case of loss of a key developer, the company does not lose the ability to quickly make changes to its website.
Insurance products can appear often, as well as changes in them can be made every week: somewhere the coefficient has changed, somewhere a new field has been added that interacts with others, etc. How much effort will web developers need to create functionality for each new unique form of costing of an insurance product?
Among ADV understood the situation and tried to organize a center for the creation of insurance products, which does not require special software (as well as expensive specialists) to implement a wide range of required tasks. ADV has developed the Insurance product for insurance companies. Insurance- This is a system that allows you to create an online agency for the sale of insurance policies with a minimum of personnel.
Since an insurance calculator is a set of data, presentation forms, and interactions of these entities, the natural MVC (Model-View-Controller) was chosen as the architecture, and a special XML format was used as a way to describe calculators. Everything is obvious, simple and documented.
In the process of creating a universal calculator programming mechanism, a lot of existing insurance products were analyzed (not limited to such popular ones as CASCO and CTP), in order to put the most complete and universal set of functions into the possibilities. In fact, a product was obtained, with the help of which it is possible to implement new underwriter ideas in a few days and in a few minutes or hours to make corrections to an existing product without any programming, only changing the structure of the XML description.
In addition, the center for the creation of insurance products provided such important features as versioning and previewing. After all, one often doesn’t want to work “live”, but just in case, you don’t want to lose old versions either. Therefore, the programmer can simply copy the current active calculator, thereby creating a new version, make any changes to it, check the operation directly in the site’s interface and after that activate the new version, automatically turning off the old one.
Of course, we have not forgotten about the convenience of working with an insurance product for a client. Since most often forms are quite massive amounts of data, it was decided to actively use AJAX technology along with a thoughtful and beautiful interface. In the process of creating a new calculator, the programmer does not need to think about how the functionality on the site will look, because under all cases, a beautiful and convenient output of information to the client is already provided. Customization tools allow you to customize the appearance of the functionality to the needs of the company, corporate identity, the overall style of the website.
So Insurance is:
- an online store created on modern technologies with a friendly user interface;
- Back Office - a multifunctional interface for working with orders, users, various statistics and other features;
- universal designer of insurance calculators.
Main functions:
- Back office automation:
- insurance product description center;
- control of the process of filling out the policy from application to payment;
- the ability to customize letterhead policies;
- detailed sales statistics.
- The ability to integrate with any internal information systems of the company.
- Online Store:
- acceptance of electronic payments using VISA, MasterCard, Yandex.Money, Webmoney;
- flexible adjustment of the insurance product calculation system;
- flexible customization of the catalog of insurance products;
- live chat with an insurance agent;
- feedback collection forms.
- Access to working materials from anywhere in the world:
- no software installation is required, the system works through a regular browser.
All the information received still needs to be processed; for this, a back office with several modules was implemented. The insurance back office allows you to control the entire chain of orders, print out policies on letterheads, and process notifications from electronic payment systems. In addition, the back office provides detailed reporting on the dynamics of sales for all insurance products for the entire duration of the online store. In addition, the system allows you to make a cross-sales report for each product, as well as a detailed report on which stages of filling out calculators people most often leave the site.
A client registered and authorized in the system can easily not only view information on ordered / purchased insurance products, but also extend those whose terms expire. The system will most effectively help him do this by filling out new product design forms with the data entered earlier.
Insurance product is flexible enough to integrate with corporate information systems: SAP, Oracle, Navision, 1C and any others.
Means of interaction with partners help to organize cooperation not only by the type of affiliate partnership, but also by the principle of organizing cooperation with other companies, for example, banking or tourism, which also requires insurance for credit or travel abroad. If your company delegates the delivery of policies to customers and the collection of money to a contractor company, for example, a courier service, then you can automate the order processing section with Insurance even on the side of this contractor. To do this, the Insurance back office has a section for contractors, which includes only those contracts that are marked with the status “for delivery”. Courier employees can change the status of an order as it is processed.
If your company has a call center, then for efficient work it needs operational information. For the convenience of automating the call center, the Insurance back office has special sections in which all the necessary information for work is immediately displayed on one page.
Online chat will help resolve issues promptly if your company has a consultant position whose responsibilities will include correspondence with clients.
Needless to say, all the features discussed above are available through a web browser and do not require the installation of any special software on users' computers.
In conclusion, I would like to note that the Insurance product has a very universal set of tools, therefore it can be used in related markets. For example, a car dealer can post on his website a form for calculating the cost of a loan for a car. The banking sector can use Insurance to provide visitors to their sites quickly calculate and send applications for personal loans for any purpose.
What's next? Perhaps someone will be interested, and I will tell you how the creation of the insurance registration form takes place without much effort. In the meantime, a few screenshots and additional information can be seen on the Insurance product page .