Designing winning mobile apps with the end-user in mind.
How Word & Brown significantly increased end-user adoption with Technossus’ Mobile-first Approach
The Client
The Word & Brown® General Agency is the leader in developing and distributing health benefit products, programs, and services for individuals, families, and employer groups of all sizes in California and Nevada.
The Challenge:
Word & Brown has a reputation for having one of the best health insurance quoting engines in the market. The company partners closely with brokers providing them with extensive health insurance quoting and sales support products. These products however lacked good user experience design and were cumbersome for the brokers to use.
Brokers always need to perform insurance coverage research for their clients prior to meeting with them based on information previously provided by the client. It took the brokers over twenty minutes to enter the data from their research and generate a quote report. These reports took anywhere from six to ten minutes to generate due to the large amount of data that gets processed. Brokers also wanted to provide a quote to their clients real time and lacked the ability to provide ‘what if’ scenarios for the various products. They did not have a way to generate a “leave-behind” document that would provide sufficient details of coverage plans and that addresses questions related to costs, savings, status, etc.
The Technossus Solution
Technossus always focuses on an ‘Outcome-driven’ approach to solving problems, so the Technossus team worked with Word & Brown’s product and IT teams to quickly create a proof-of-concept (POC) that demonstrated a completely revamped user experience for the Health Insurance Quote Builder product. This POC also included a new, more scalable, and customizable Quote Generation Engine.
The proof-of-concept was very well received by the Word & Brown product team and Technossus received the formal green light to develop the next-generation application. This POC-driven approach helped Word & Brown to visually see and interact with the application that their end-customer would eventually use and helped Technossus validate their understanding of the business and the solution’s relevance to current industry trends.
One tactical challenge that Technossus had to deal with was that the application had to be delivered on a compressed timeline – before the open enrolment period.
The Technossus team worked on the first phase of the new Quote Builder application (codenamed ‘Rockstar’) in close collaboration with the Word & Brown Product and IT teams. As a first step, Technossus deployed a senior Business Analyst and a User Experience specialist to facilitate workshops to gather and validate requirements from product and IT team stakeholders, including Enterprise Architecture and Operations teams. This process led to the team developing a formal requirements specification document that was signed off by the sponsors.
The Technossus team then designed and developed the application with a ‘mobile-first’ approach, working closely with the Word & Brown team throughout the project, participating in application architecture through application deployment. The first phase of the application provided the following advantages to the end customers/brokers:
- Intuitive and Streamlined User Experience
- Interactive charts and graphics for easier comparison
- Native Mobile Support
- Real-time Customizable Output
- Time to set up and build a Quote reduced by 80% (~10mins to 2mins)
- Quote Output Generation time reduced by 97% (~4mins to 5secs)
- Newer more-supportable Technology Stack
The Results:
The development of a new generation of natively mobile-compatible web applications has now elevated Word & Brown as an industry leader in the health benefit plan solutions industry. Brokers feel more empowered and in control using the new Quote Builder application and can complete their work faster while saving valuable time in serving their customers. The new application was also delivered for full access to all brokers before the 2018 open enrolment period, thereby having a direct impact on the time to market for Word & Brown – a critical factor in this very competitive marketplace.
Furthermore, most of the high-performing brokers were using the Word & Brown back office staff to perform a lot of the initial data-entry and quote-building processes, as this process took them a lot of time. These brokers and their offices are now directly using the new application because the application is simpler to use, and it is easier to generate a quoted output. This has saved Word & Brown both time and money by repurposing their back-office staff to work on more critical issues.
The Technossus team has already started engaging with the Word & Brown team on the forthcoming phases of the Quote Builder application and a big list of features is in the works. Another directly-associated initiative that the Technossus team is helping Word & Brown with involves developing a more lightweight, native mobile application that brokers would use to engage directly with their customers while in the customer offices. All the new products and services identified in the new mobile-first product roadmap ultimately leveraged the services and data that Word & Brown was uniquely positioned to supply, so all future apps will similarly increase the value of the Word & Brown brand.
Sales Impact:
Why Reference this Case Study:
Reference for clients who:
- Are looking to transform the consumer experience
- Need a mobile-first approach to developing applications
- Need new mobile applications
- Do any work with healthcare exchanges, insurance, third-party administrators
- Have any highly complex projects, mainly that involve interfacing with multiple other systems
- Projects that involve highly regulated industries
- Any company that needs help with ideation or project development strategy
Additional stats:
Data Sources:
How Mobile Apps Are Changing Healthcare
Mobile Healthcare Technology Statistics
Global Mobile Health Market Analysis Trends 2016
Gobal Mhealth Market Expected To Grow At 34 Cagr During 2016—2022 By Ps-market Research 2016-03-14
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WP Deffining Mobile App Intelligence
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