Web based survey system for commercial risk assessment of policies
The Customer
The client is one of the oldest players in the US Insurance market. Its Property And Casualty Insurance Subsidiary provides full lines of personal, commercial and farm insurance to customers across several states on the East Coast of US.
It conducts business through a network of approximately 1,200 independent insurance agents. In recent years, the client has devoted much attention to the expansion of its Commercial insurance product offerings, by developing additional products and coverage’s in this rapidly expanding segment. By offering a complete line of commercial property and casualty products designed for the small, medium, and large businesses, the client has become recognized as a leading regional provider of Commercial Insurance.
The Business Challenge
The client had a Survey System for reviewing commercial risks of policies underwritten by them. Every 3 years, either an External Consultant, or a Loss Control Field Representative or a Telephone company conducted this survey. Once the survey was performed, recommendation letters were sent in order to bring the risk assessment and management methodologies in line with the current underwriting guidelines, safety standards, and/or the policy was referred to the underwriter for further review.
The old process of conducting risk assessment surveys was a semi-automated process where each survey was manually sent to the External Consultant by entering a policy number, assigning the consultant, and then issuing the survey. The issues with this process were:
- Except for the latest survey, no survey history was maintained. One of the major limitations of the earlier system was that it did not support multiple locations of the insured party.
- The old system was a mainframe-based system and the actual policy detail was stored in a proprietary database. The policy information required by the External Consultants for conducting the survey was also not available for printing. This caused operational issues at Donegal as the information was not seamlessly available.
Hence, client wanted to web-enable its existing process of conducting surveys to make the process comprehensive and cost-effective. The online system would facilitate issue of surveys, assigning of surveys to external consultants and receiving completed surveys, either periodically or on a need basis. Along with this they required comprehensive Information Reporting capabilities for both internal as well as external (fee company) use. The client was keen on leveraging its existing technical strengths while deploying the system on a more robust and contemporary platform. © Zensar Technologies 2009 www.zensar.com
The Solution
A solution was designed, which enabled Underwriters and Loss Control Department (LCD) staff to perform and review online surveys in a way that they could now:
- Issue surveys on Policies covering multiple properties.
- Assign surveys to external consultants based on various parameters.
- Print or e-mail the survey and any corresponding forms in batch format
- Allow the Loss Control Department to receive and verify survey responses including online documents.
- Calculate payment due and penalty amounts, if any, against each external consultant.
- Track performance of external consultants.
- Administer external consultants’ database, payment & penalty rates, user groups, etc.
- Track overdue surveys and generate emails/reports for all overdue surveys.
- Generate monthly reports for external consultants.
- Retain all surveys in a logical manner for future reference.
Business Benefits
The new web-enabled survey system offers significant business benefits to the client viz.:
- Convenient and cost-effective management of surveys.
- Reduced time to complete surveys.
- Better control on information flow leading to faster decision making.
- Review premium terms based on the survey results.
- Low cost of application development and deployment thereby reducing overall solution cost for the client.
