A major insurance company has been serving the island of Puerto Rico for more than 30 years with products for insurance, investing, and policy financing. Situated in the infamous “Hurricane Alley,” Puerto Rico regularly deals with the threat of devastatingly bad weather. Wanting to be proactive, Universal Insurance used OutSystems to better serve their customers during the next big, natural disaster. Their timing was just right.

Low-Code Development Benefits – They’re Universal with this Low-Code Vendor

Challenge – The insurance company is well versed in disaster recovery. For more than 30 years, they’ve served the insurance needs of Puerto Rico, including losses to vehicles, property, and homes. But the methods of servicing those customers, and customer expectations for service, have changed considerably over the years.

Before the Low-Code Vendor, most of the company’s external-facing IT systems ran on WebSphere Portals, and any significant new development work, or updates to existing code, required heavy Java hand-coding and took anywhere from a year to 18 months to complete. While IT did often run concurrent projects, the length of the software development lifecycle and the in-depth knowledge required to work on existing code meant the team was consistently backlogged and mired in inefficiencies.

Some of the benefits the company sought to improve the IT team’s efficiency included:

• Reducing the “learning curve” for new projects.
• Speeding up iterative updates to existing apps and software.
• Significantly accelerating development of new customer-facing portals and applications.
• Leveraging citizen developer resources through a more user-friendly development front-end.

Having been previously exposed to the Low-Code Vendor at another company, the Assistant VP, IS&T at Customer Company, presented the Low-Code Vendor platform to the company. Soon after, several members of the IT team attended the Low-Code Vendor’s training in Atlanta where they built a demo product and decided to implement the Low-Code Vendor in their own environment.

Citizen Developer Bails Out a Call Center Under Water

Solution – Despite the company’s headquarters residing in Puerto Rico, their technology team was small and includedan IT manager and three developers. Most of the team’s development work before the Low-Code Vendor required heavy amounts of hand-coding in Java and more than a passing knowledge of relational databases. According to the team lead, “It took a couple of successful project implementations for our team to embrace that the Low-Code Vendor could do all of the things WebSphere does, and do it in a fraction of the time.”

For an insurance company, managing customer expectations is the lifeblood of the business. Using the Low-Code Vendor, the team designed a new interactive voice response (IVR) system to collect and manage inbound calls, completely replacing a manual process involving spreadsheets and back-and-forth email. The new automated system identifies caller needs, provides them with information directly, routes them to the appropriate agent, or manages callbacks during high call volume.

Disaster Strikes

Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, knocking out power and communication across the island. It was the worst natural disaster to befall the island in recorded history. To manage the immense load of inbound claims requests, the company partnered with external field adjusters for claims evaluation and remediation. Without power and communication, there was no way for field agents to get information from their mobile devices into the company’s claim center, and the disparate software used by some of the third-party adjusters was incompatible with Universal PR’s front end.

With no previous experience using the Low-Code Vendor’s platform, the IT manager built an entirely new interface that allowed field adjusters running disparate claims software to report to the company’s headquarters—running on auxiliary power—and upload claims information directly from their mobile device using a standard CSV formatted file. The new system extrapolated the information from the file and reformatted it for use with the Customer Company’s backend claims software.

“We were literally swamped with claims and just trying to keep up,” said the team lead.
“Kelvin had previously been certified on the Low-Code Vendor using the online courses, but he had no professional development experience. Working during his off-hours, he developed this new interface in less than 20 hours. Trying to do that with WebSphere would have taken our team at least a month, under ideal circumstances.”

Thanks to the Low-Code Vendor, the company:

• All but eliminated the learning curve required to create new applications that integrate into existing backend systems.
• Significantly accelerated the rate of development for new application delivery from weeks to just days.
• Leveraged citizen developers to supplement professional developer experience, effectively doubling the team’s available output.
• Integrated with Active Directly to securely manage third-party devices and software through roles management.

IVR Dashboards Keep Tabs on Call Volume

Results – With the new Low-Code Vendor-developed IVR in place, the company was better prepared to manage the influx of claims calls after the hurricane. The call center’s new dashboards provide heads-up details about inbound call volume, routing, and abandonment rates, helping them better manage staffing and training needs both during normal operating environments and in emergencies.

Now able to turn its attention to the future, the company has begun to address the challenges of servicing customers more directly.

According to the team lead, “Before the Low-Code Vendor, we were mostly focused on upkeep of our existing portals and systems. With the Low-Code Vendor in place now, we expect we’ll be able to divide our time 60/40 between new solution delivery and maintenance.”

Using the Low-Code Vendor, in less than 20 weeks, the IT team has already completed several new projects that will go live soon, including:

•  A single multi-function portal that customers can access via desktop or mobile, replacing multiple customer-facing portals
• A new CMS
• A new microservices API to assist with the Low-Code Vendor integration into the company’s backend.

Says the team lead, “Despite their earlier concerns over the capabilities of the Low-Code Vendor low-code platform, the team now sees that it can do everything we could do with WebSphere Portals. Instead of voicing concerns over building over existing legacy systems, they are instead asking when can we sunset WebSphere.”