Industry Overview - Insurance

Today's insurance industry is information-intensive, extremely competitive, and future success depends on controlling operating expenses, increasing efficiency and above all, retaining customers with a high level of service. Insurance companies are leveraging Microsoft SharePoint to enhance collaboration among employees, to migrate functionality of legacy applications, and to improve the quality of service provided to customers. Though extremely powerful as a platform, SharePoint's out-of-the-box capabilities do not deliver the functionality these organizations demand. Coupled with Bamboo's solutions library, it becomes possible to deliver the solutions to enhance their business processes and better serve their customers.

Solutions Brief - Insurance

A local health insurance firm was experiencing a large growth in demand for collaboration, and decided to implementation SharePoint to provide a higher level of service to their customers. Three key success factors of the solution were:

• the ability for users to respond to surveys within the SharePoint Portal and to view the results
• the ability for users to register for events sponsored by the firm
• the ability for customers to find key information without human intervention using the online Knowledge Base

With specific functionality in mind, the insurance firm proceeded with the planning and implementation to meet the initial requirements. They wanted a way to poll customers on certain subjects, provide an easy way for customers to register for local events, and offer a Knowledge Base repository that could provide answers to common questions for customers when firm's staff is not available.

Although these requirements could probably be implemented in SharePoint with some custom development effort, the firm wanted to minimize the development time and also the subsequent maintenance required for the solutions. They turned to the Bamboo Ultimate Library. Not only could it provide the components for the initial three requirements, it could also address future requirements the firm was anticipating. Use of the components from the Bamboo library accelerated development and also provided a consistent look and feel for end users, which minimized training requirements.

For the customer poll, the firm wanted to make sure that users had a smooth experience; that they could only answer once, and upon answering the poll, could view the results of all the respondents. They were also concerned about the presentation of the data for internal purposes. The insurance firm required a horizontal bar graph view of the resulting data as well as a means to store and maintain a history and results of all previous polls.

While SharePoint's survey list type does offer some of the functionality required, in order to fully satisfy the client's requirements using the out-of-the-box solution, development effort would have been required. Instead, the features within the Bamboo Poll Voting and Poll Administration Web Parts sped up time to delivery, using it was a matter of configuration rather than a customization/development effort.

For the event registration, the firm wanted to present a list of events on a calendar and allow customers to register for events that interest them. They needed the events on the calendar to be color-coded so customers could easily differentiate types of events. They also needed to proactively push reminders out of the system to their customers when registered events approached, or if space was left a few days before an event commenced. Finally, the firm wanted to display registration information on a dashboard so they can monitor registration activity and easily distinguish popular events that should be offered more frequently.

SharePoint cannot support an effective event registration solution with its out-of-the-box functionality. It would require a supplemental development effort. The firm turned to the components in the Bamboo library to accelerate the deployment of the solution. Because the solution is SharePoint-based with commercial components from Bamboo, they can tweak the solution as the needs of the firm change. They are not dependent on a developer writing and updating custom code.

For the Knowledge Base, the firm used the Bamboo Knowledge Base Solution Accelerator. This solution provides all the features of a complex knowledge base without any custom development effort. Because customers can rate and comment on the articles, the content of the knowledge base continuously improves. If a customer cannot find what they need, they submit a request which gets routed to the appropriate subject matter expert. Responses are monitored to ensure that customers don't wait too long for an answer.

SharePoint doesn't provide a Knowledge Base solution out-of-the-box. Configuring a solution like the one offered in the Bamboo library would take a considerable amount of time and effort, not to mention some custom development effort. Instead, the firm was creating knowledge base article content within 30 minutes of installation of the Bamboo product. The knowledge base will quickly grow to hundreds of articles that provide valuable information for the firm's customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.