Overview: Moving from ‘nice-to-have’ to ‘must-have’ self-service approach 

Today, the need for any business to enable a cohesive omnichannel self-service experience is a given, and it’s predominantly driven by the fast-evolving expectations of new-age customers who are prioritizing digital interactions with businesses in seamless digital environments over physical ones. This is even truer for insurance organizations where the demand for digital self-service capabilities with well-integrated personalized products and services is significantly higher.  

While a robust self-service portal can offer the much-desired ease, convenience, and yet rich, personalized experience to modern insurance customers, it is also a vital part of a solution for another problem faced by insurers – to run lean operations, grow with a competitive edge and scale efficiently. 

Our client is a leading insurer in Australia and South Africa, known for consistently emphasizing an optimal experience for its customers with many trendsetting insurance offerings and innovations to its credit. The company sought to take its journey of creating customer-first capabilities to the next level with Bitwise by deploying a self-service portal. 

Challenges: Building a user-friendly, web-based self-service platform integrated with complex functionalities 

The existing operational model of the insurance company extensively relied on manual interventions by policy agents with major limitations for customers to go beyond rudimentary self-service capabilities such as paying the premiums and accessing their accounts for information. Over time, it also resulted in high operational costs with piling visibility and efficiency challenges.  

The company envisioned a web-based complete self-service portal that solved the following challenges:  

• Inability to offer intuitive & user-friendly self-service capabilities for customers 
• Lack of integrated systems for efficient self-serve features 
• High manual dependency and operational costs 
• Lack of self-service functionalities for internal users 

• Slower time-to-market 
• Limited cross-sell & up-sell opportunities 

Bitwise proposed a well-designed two-part solution to the insurance client that would successfully serve both internal and external users with high flexibility, ease, and efficiency. 

The client’s perspective: Why Bitwise 

The insurance company envisioned a self-service system that incorporated complex functionalities with flexibility & user-friendliness and was robust enough to handle high volumes of transactions & processes on a daily basis. Bitwise, with its extensive experience in building a wide range of technology solutions for diverse domains, offered the following key capabilities: 

• 25+ years of experience in delivering cutting edge technology solutions 
• Extensive experience in the financial services domain 

• A wide array of data, digital & cloud services 
• Agile methodology & robust implementation frameworks 

The Solution: A layered and well-integrated solution architecture 

Bitwise designed and developed a web-based application that would not only be highly user-friendly for non-technical users but would also be robust enough to handle ever-growing complexity. The Bitwise solution consisted of two physical sites – public & private. These sites leverage a Routing Protocol for Low-Power & Lossy Networks (RPL) layer as the core component of the solution architecture, which interacts with the Common Business Layer (CBS) and offers seamless integration with multiple policy applications.  

The two physical sites – public & private – offered various integrated functionalities for both internal and external users. 

Public Site

The public site offered diverse self-service capabilities for customers, along with providing an array of useful information as part of the following key functionalities:  

• Manage personal information & policy endorsements 
• Access useful information about the company, its product/services, sponsors, news & updates 
• Pay premiums, apply for claims & access various policy applications 
• Self-generating policy quotes 
• Access personalized and curated content 

Private Site 

The private site catered to various needs of business & internal non-technical users and offered the following key functionalities: 

• Enable account access 
• Deploy targeted marketing campaigns 

• Enable online customer service 
• Enable payment processing 
• Promote personalized product/service offerings 
• Manage policies & claims  
• Enable quoter & payment getaways 

• Check credits, claims history, policy-related information & other eligibility criteria 
• Validate addresses and other details 
• Deploy notifications through email & SMS  
• Assess insurance risk & determine amount of coverage 

The well-designed and well-implemented solution by Bitwise ensured the following key advantages: 

• Layered flexible architecture for improved scalability, component reusability, fault-tolerance, and performance 
• Services-based integration to reduce overall complexity in usage and development of services 
• Improved configurability for easier data discovery, integration, and governance with international regulatory standards 
• Superior user experience with central data broker and easy-to-integrate interfaces complying with industry standards to increase consumer adoption 

• Facilitating cross-selling/up-selling by business analysts with insights using advanced data analytics 
• Collaboration within internal stakeholders facilitating content data management 

The solution leveraged a robust Microservice based rule engine which offered the flexibility to configure different business rules without coding to meet the evolving needs of the business in the future. 

The Result: Effectively scale with a robust self-service foundation  

With the latest innovations in AI and machine learning, advanced digital self-service capabilities as part of a seamless omnichannel customer experience have become the need of the hour. A robust self-service platform with well-integrated and efficient human-led interactions can go a long way in scaling growth in the digital-first era.  

The insurance company leveraged the self-service solution built by Bitwise to successfully scale its  services for rapid growth. The solution offered a consistent, unified, and easy-to-use self-service experience for both business users and customers while enabling a foundation for the client’s digital transformation vision for the future.  

With the new self-service platform, the Bitwise client achieved: 

• Transformed customer experience 
• Greater personalization 

• Reduced operational costs 
• Faster time-to-market  
• Increased cross-selling & up-selling 
• High visibility for key stakeholders 
• Higher customer retention 

Technology 

• .Net Core 
• ReactJS 
• RedHat Decision Manager 

• Google Kubernetes Engine 
• Google PubSub 
• SQL SERVER 
• Notification Service (Encapsulating 3^rd party SMS and email provider) 
• Google ML API