A Leading Healthcare Insurance Company Streamlines Underwriting Process and Increases Underwriting Capacity
The Client
The client is one of the leading commercial lines, providing insurance products and services for individuals and SMBs through independent agent channels in the USA. After a merger with one of the largest and most diversified insurance companies in the country, the client became one of the top 10 independent agent companies.
The client is well known for financial soundness, establishing long-lasting relationships with independent agents and policyholders and providing superior customer service, especially in claims handling.
Overview
The client offers a large number of commercial insurance policies. Applications for policies are received through independent agents across the country. The underwriting department reviews each application, evaluating the risks associated for policy issuance or rejection, and the terms for policy issuance.
Project Scope
In the absence of an integrated underwriting system, the underwriters had to access multiple tools, utilities and websites for each policy decision. This led to an inefficient process that led to:
- Dissatisfied Agents – Delay in underwriting response time on each policy
- Loss of Prospects – Underwriters usually maintained diaries to follow-up with other parties to make a decision, with no defined diary-closing process
- No Performance Tracking – No mechanism for tracking underwriting performance
Solution
Avant-Garde designed an underwriting system for the client that provided a single-point access to all the tools required to make a policy decision. We employed a collaborative development process with offshore and onsite teams, working closely with the client IT team.
We have implemented the following to streamline the process:
- Complex requirements divided in multiple phases, developed in Agile methodology
- Early ‘drop’ for users to ‘touch-and-feel’ for client’s early feedback
- Daily stand-ups involving Business, Developers & QA
- Usability Lab Reviews for Prototype & Application
- Integrate ‘Help’ documents, Videos, Release notes within application
- New reports to track underwriter performance
Value Delivered
- Increased Underwriting Capacity
- Improved Quality
- Process Uniformity
- Improved Onboarding/Training
- Improved Underwriter Responsiveness & Agent Satisfaction