Project OVERVIEW
Mobile iOS Application for Health Insurance Agents.
For the sales cycle to be complete, agents need to explain product features and payment options to the customers in detail. What is required is up-to-date information regarding a new product, product comparisons, and promotional offers.
The insurance industry is composed of three types of entities:
- Carriers: Companies providing insurance products.
- Broker Agencies: Agencies that sell products of different carriers.
- Agents: Sales representatives working for a broker.
Amongst the three entities, the human angle comes into play via agents to ensure growth and profitability. In fact, agents are the face of the company for customers and prospects.
TECHNICAL FEASIBILITY
Most broker agencies have a web-based software solution that agents use. Agents usually carry laptops and use the agency’s web portal to demonstrate products to customers. Recent developments in the smartphone/ tablet arena, have made the way for mobile applications. Tablets today are equipped with processing power, memory, storage, and other features that are comparable to that laptops.
Tablets also offer internet connectivity over the network, thus making any-time, anywhere connectivity a reality. As a result, more and more field personnel are expected to migrate to tablets and companies are looking for tablet-ready applications to cater to their needs.
THE SOLUTION
- Tablet application for agents, built for iPad: This serves as the agents’ interface and provides different workflows that an agent usually carries out as a part of his interactions with prospects/customers. Some key tasks that he can carry out using this interface are:
1.1 Create/edit/review a quote for a prospect, which includes:
- Recording relevant prospect details, performing a search of various product options based on different criteria like the premium rate, deductible amount, types of plans, and carriers.
- Arrive at the premium amounts that a prospect would have to pay for the basket of product options of their choice.
1.2 Download quotes to iPad (pdf format)
1.3 E-mail quotes with attachments
1.4 Receive broadcast messages that are published by the agency for agents. These could be general announcements and sales promotion information such as discounts.
- Server-Side Infrastructure: A server-side infrastructure for the iPad application that is responsible for providing services like:
2.1 Security: authentication and authorization
2.2 Business Logic: An interface exposed to the iPad, uses for carrying out various activities like quote creation/ premium calculation, and product searches.
2.3 Data Storage
MQS (Mobile Quotes System) is a tablet solution developed by Emorphis for one of our esteemed customers. It is designed to assist insurance agents who are always on the move.
The application provides its user with an easy-to-use, intuitive interface for quickly gathering prospect information, searching for products that match various criteria, and arriving at a quote for the prospect. The solution comprises two applications: 1. Tablet application for agents and 2. Sever side infrastructure (iPad application).
Technology
- The client application has been written for iPad running iOS 4.3 or later.
- The server-side services have been implemented using PHP, with MySQL 5.5 as the data store.
- The server-device interaction has been implemented as a set of RESTful web services. This communication is made secure using SSL.
- Server-side infrastructure is deployed on Amazon EC2.
APPLICATION BENEFITS
The most significant benefit of the system, of course, is that it would help agents make informed decisions while on the go, in turn increasing agents’ effectiveness and efficiency. This would help agents deliver a better experience for prospects, and quicker closure of deals, ultimately leading to more satisfied customers. From a technical standpoint, the application offers several benefits:
Scalability: The application has been architected as a set of collaborating stateless components, conducive to adaptive load-balancing mechanisms.
Availability: The data storage and retrieval mechanisms have been carefully designed to facilitate replication/distribution in order to make the system more fault resistant.
Multi-tenancy: The server side of the application has been designed to support multi-tenancy in a SaaS scenario, where one instance of the application would be able to serve agents of multiple broker agencies. Necessary data isolation strategies have been put in place to prevent the data of one agency from becoming visible to others.
Cloud readiness: More and more companies are becoming conscious of the money they are spending on the maintenance of their computing infrastructure. With the advent of different cloud-based services, they are moving to the less expensive and more convenient option for pay-per-use.
About Emorphis
Emorphis Technologies is a world-class software development and solutions company that truly believes in “Innovation in motion”. Delivery innovation on the go at an accelerated pace has been our success mantra to date. Over the years we have provided value to our clients in the field of enterprise mobility, cloud, IoT, backend development, Big Data Analytics, and BlockChain.
We serve industries ranging from unicorns, and startups to large multinationals in the healthcare, telecommunications, fintech, retail, and publishing industry. Our go-to-market software products – iStatement, iPublisher, and iBuggy have proved our metal with positive beneficial customer testimonials. We help our clients with successful product development, consulting services, and testing (manual & automated).
We have profound experience & expertise in various technologies like .Net, J2EE, PHP, iOS, Android, and Cloud Computing viz. Amazon Web services (AWS), Software QA & testing (Manual & Automation). Our designed products are cloud-ready and can be readily deployed on AWS/Azure cloud infrastructure.
Our pivot on engineering innovation and R&D helps quicken time-to-market, ensuring high quality at economies of scale, delivering cult competency for the global marketplace. We ensure that your ideas, concepts, and requirements are backed by brilliant execution at our end. Having said that we extend end-to-end ownership of product/application design, development, and deployment.
