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Summary
Genisys helps an insurance company arm its sales team with a mobile tool that instantly calculates how much insurance premium customers must pay for various kinds of coverage.
The Customer
London General Holdings Ltd. is a part of the Aon Corporation - a global risk management, insurance broking, reinsurance and human capital consulting services. The company employs a large mobile workforce that requires anytime, anywhere access to corporate resources.
The Challenge
Because of the somewhat impromptu nature of their customer interactions, sales staff were unable to ensure that their laptops were always available during the sales process. This made it difficult to provide customers with accurate, up-to-date information about the eligibility criteria and cost of the company's range of insurance products. LGH wanted to empower them with a tool that could plug this gap, making it easier for field workers to close sales quickly.
Genisys Solution
We developed a calculator application for use with the convenient-to-carry Compaq iPAQ Pocket PC model 3850. This allowed sales staff to input relevant customer information into an always-available, "smart" device to generate a list of eligible insurance products with relevant details and pricing information.
To make the device even easier to use, we designed an extremely user-interactive GUI that eliminated the need for sales staff to use a keyboard to enter text. The user interface was further optimised to achieve a small memory footprint and efficient power consumption.
The standalone application is also available in a desktop version, and can be self-installed through a CAB file created using INF files. It can interface with any database for data and calculation rules.
The solution was built on the Microsoft .NET® Framework 1.0 using Visual Studio .NET® 2002 - Visual Basic® .NET, MS Smart Device Extensions for Visual Studio .NET® v 7.0, and Microsoft's Active Sync® 3.5. Its 2-tier architecture was designed to support a large number of iPAQ Pocket PCs as well as laptops, providing speed and efficient usage of the limited resources of the iPAQ Pocket PC device. We utilised an object-oriented methodology in order to enhance the re-usability factor so that the application could be made 3-tier in future.
Benefits
LGH reported higher levels of sales team productivity. The calculator minimised quoting errors, increased customer response time and helped add substance to the sales process.
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