Customer Solution Case Study
/ / Online Policy Manager Empowers Business Users to More Effectively Meet Customer Needs
Overview
Country or Region:India
Industry:Banking and Financial Services
Customer Profile
Kotak Mahindra Old Mutual Life Insurance, a fast growing insurance company in India, is a joint venture between Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd. and Old Mutual plc. For customers, this joint venture translates into a company that combines international expertise with the understanding of the local market.
Business Situation
As Kotak Mahindra Old Mutual Life Insurance grew, so did the challenge to ensure customer satisfaction.The company needed a way to better serve its customers and expand customer service activities.
Solution
Kotak Mahindra Old Mutual Life Insurancecreated a Web based, customer self help application using Microsoft® Visual Studio®2008 and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.
Benefits
Response time cut by minimum two days
Increased convenience for customers
Highly customized and interactive experience
Increased developer productivity
Development time reduced by 20percent / “Using Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 to develop the Web application has enabled us to take advantage of some of the latest technology to enhance our solutions for the benefit of our customers.”
Dhiresh Rustogi, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, Kotak Mahindra Old Mutual Life Insurance
To better serve its customers, Kotak Mahindra Old Mutual Life Insurance (Kotak Life Insurance)decided to expand its customer service activities by way of offering Web based interface for its Life Insurance customers. It built a Web application using Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 and Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. The application is available round the clock and offers self help services and facilitates customer access to its life insurance services from anywhere and anytime. Additionally, new features of the technology are contributing to high developer productivity and an improved user experience.
Situation
Kotak Mahindra Old Mutual Life Insurance (Kotak Life Insurance) is a joint venture between Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd., its affiliates and Old Mutual plc. Kotak Life Insurance combines its international strengths and local advantages to offer its customers a wide range of innovative life insurance products, helping them take important financial decisions at every stage in life and stay financially independent.
The Kotak Mahindra group is one of India’s leading banking and financial services organizations, with offerings across personal financial services; commercial banking; corporate and investment banking and markets; stock broking; asset management and life insurance.
Old Mutual plc. is an international savings and wealth management company based in the UK. The group has a balanced portfolio of businesses offering Asset Management, Life Assurance, Banking and General Insurance Services in over 40 countries, with a focus on South Africa, Europe and the United States, and a growing presence in Asia Pacific. Old Mutual plc employs approximately 53,000 employees worldwide and is listed on the London and Johannesburg stock exchanges.
In the life insurance industry, Kotak Life Insurance registered a total growth adjusted premium (Regular = Single premium @ 1/10) of over 88 percent from financial year 2006-07 to financial year 2007-08. The company has 188 branches in over 134 cities, and a work force of over 5,900employees. It aspires to spiraling growth with a strong focus on the customer, products, mapping of geographic distribution channels and fund performance.
With success comes challenges—particularly the challenges inherent in ensuring customer satisfaction. Kotak Life Insurancedecided to expand their customer service activities by way of offering Web based application to its Life Insurance customers. The company identified the following as key drivers in putting together the customer portal:
Increase online user base
Provide means to transact online, stay competitive in the market
Provide a self-service application that solves time consuming, customer policy related operational issues that lead to delayed response to customers
Position a customer facing portal that provides an opportunity for customers to manage and track insurance policies
Solution
Following an in-depth evaluation alongwith Fulcrum Logic (Global Solution Provider and Microsoft Partner), Kotak Life Insurance decided to adopt the Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 with the Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 development system, both of which are fully integrated with the Windows Vista® desktop operating system. “The biggest advantage of the solution is that it addresses the primary goals which are performance, maintainability, usability, security and ease of deployment,” explains Dhiresh Rustogi, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, Kotak Life Insurance.
Kotak Life Insurance selected two partners to deploy this new solution. Fulcrum Logic was the selected SI partner responsible for architecting, developing and implementing the solution while Vedam was engaged to assist with scalability and performance testing.
“As a customer we had minimal footprint of Microsoft Technologies prior to this engagement,” says Dhiresh Rustogi, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, Kotak Life Insurance. “This opportunity marks the beginning of usage of Microsoft technologies for all Internet and Intranet Web sites.” He adds, “Leveraging the Metro Enterprise program (anearly adopter program for enterprise customers) has yielded maximum benefits in scaling up skill set of our resources and standardizing on various aspects of software development be it design guidelines, coding standards and most importantly; the reusable repository.”
“Though Fulcrum Logic had implemented multiple solutions, this was relatively challenging in-terms of delivering the benefits to the customer in rapid phase, with seamless integrationof many underlying systems to feed data into the Portal, without compromising scalability and performance,” says Kunal Mehta, Technical Project Manager, Fulcrum Logic.
The new application built usingMicrosoft® .NET Framework 3.5 SP1and Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2008 development systemprovidesWeb based authorized access to customers to a portal application that enables customer to register and submit policy related service requests online. The application also interacts with multiple external systems such as:
IBM Tivoli LDAP or Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
HEAT(Helpdesk Expert Automation Tool) call log system using SQL Server for raising service requests
HEAT ODS (Offline Data Source) using Oracle database for tracing service requests status
Life-Asia ODS (Life Insurance end-end back offline system database)
IBM Websphere Content Manager (Policy repository)
Kotak Payment Gateway and Kotak SMS Gateway to pull/push the customer portal data
Key Business Logic
Customer Registration Process: The customer can register to the portal by providing basic personal information such as first name, last name, date of birth, and e-mail address
Policy Registration Process: After successful customer registration, the customer has the option of registering a Policy. The view/transaction rights would be given to the customer depending upon the details provided during Policy Registration and auto view business rule.
Servicing Request: All service requests put in by the customer need to flow through HEATfor call resolution. A customer enters the details of the ‘Service Request’ and submits to the portal. The request is logged into HEAT system and the complete request data is captured. A request ID is generated in the HEAT systemand provided to customer for future reference
Online Payments:Option for online paymentis made available to customer for top-up, revival, renewal premium, and sum assured increase and addition of riders.
Logical Architecture
The customer portalapplication architecture is primarily based on Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model thatconsists of three tiers. The application usesMicrosoft .NET Framework class library for basedevelopment.The key point of using three tier architecture is to separate components into three different unitsi.e. the presentation layer, the business layer and the data layer for scalability.
Presentation Layer
Presentation layer is light weight and AJAX(Asynchronous JavaScript and XML)enabled Web application whichis loosely coupled with the business layer and layered in such a manner to utilize the UI(User Interface) capabilities. This layer is developed using HTML, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a stylesheet language used to present a document (font, style, colours, layout etc.) written in a markup language such as HTML. XML is used extensively in the application for mapping roles and storing service request related information.
This layer serves as a mechanism for end users to communicate with the application.It comprises of pages such as the Registration Page, Policy registration Page, Service Request page etc.
This layer communicates with the Business layer to fetch data to display to customers. Userstypically send request data through GUI. This layer obtains data in the form of response. The data is then styled andpresented to the user through the Presentation layer.
Business Layer
Business layer has all the logic of interacting with the business objects, businessworkflow and database for any retrieval and manipulation operation. It uses components such as configuration, security, error handling, database access components andintegration services to perform data retrieval or manipulation specific to the businessfunctionality.This layer is responsible for processing data based on user inputs. Business rules implemented based on customer requirements are encapsulated in this layer. Preparation of data to be persisted isalso encapsulated here.
This layer communicates with the Data layer to fetch data; and obtains data in the form ofresponse send back to the Presentation layer or external solutions such as HEAT (insert service request and return HEAT Id),HEAT ODS (pull service request status and update the CustomerPortaldatabase),LifeAsia ODS (pull policy details as per policy),IBM Websphere, Content Manager (insert documents and get documents),Kotak Payment Gateway (accept payment online), and KotakSMS Gateway (insert the SMS information).
Data Layer
Data layer of the application has all database objects (tables, packages, storedprocedures, views and functions) specific to the business functionality. It performs data retrieval/manipulation in tables through store procedure.This layer is responsible for data storage based on user inputs. Data is stored in the tables in theform of rows and columns. It obtains data in the form of response send back to Businesslayer.
Primary Design Goals
Integrity: The application is designed in such a way that there shall be minimal effect on the customer portal integrity due to configuration changes. It would apply the configuration changes without restarting application. Configuration would be maintained in separate database configuration similar to application related configuration in web.config and app.config.
Performance: The architecture supports the application performance by implementation of caching and usage complied store procedure. For high availability of the application to the end users, production environment must support load balancing and clustering environment.
Maintainability: The application is easy to maintain in terms of code maintenance, configuration setting and database related scripts. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach is being followed for core Business layer by implementing Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). This supports loosely coupled services to enable business process.
Usability: The application core components are designed in such a way that other applications can directly use component assembly.
Security: It incorporates Membership Provider, Role Provider and Site Provider (Microsoft .NET Framework) for authentication and authorization on the application using IBM Tivoli LDAP and Oracle database.
Deployment: The architecture supports application deployment on different Windows environments, Customer Portal on Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1.
The logical view presents the conceptual framework for the customer portal application,identifying the components and their collaboration in order to provide the required functionality.
Benefits
Using the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 with Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008 development system, Kotak Life Insurancehas implemented a feature-rich solution that provides richer customer experience.
“Visual Studio® 2008 has given several advantages by providing a state-of-the-art application,” says Dhiresh Rustogi, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, Kotak Life Insurance. “The new development environment, paired with the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, offers tools and functionality to convert code, add new features to the product, and maintain the critical separation between business logic and the UI.”
Response Time Cut by Minimum Two Days
“Our customers should be able to meet their own needs immediately instead of having to submit a request and wait anywhere from two days to several weeks,” says Dhiresh Rustogi, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, Kotak Life Insurance.
Earlier, to initiate any change to a policy, a client would need to visit the branch, complete the requisite form, which then had to be sent to CPC via post/fax. This request would subsequently be affected by the concerned team in three working days from receipt of the document.
With the advent of the Online Policy Manager, the delay previously caused in transit has been completely cut down and transactional access is provided to the client within 24 hours.Thus, the response time has now been cut down by a minimum of two working days.
The Customer Portal allows customer to access everything they need to know about their policies from anywhere, whether they are at home, in-flight or in office, anywhere in the world. This helps in faster communication and increased productivity.
Increased Conveniencefor Customers
The Web application grants customers the freedomfrom repeated phone requests and endless amount of paperwork. The Customer Portal acts as a self-service application. It allows customers to conduct transactions online. They are able to view policy details, switch funds, make renewal payments, redirect premiums, add top-ups, and change nominees from the comfort of their homes.
Highly Customized and Interactive Experience
Fast, cost-effective development was crucial to the success of the implementation—and so was the ability to deliver a user experience that was richer, more interactive, and more customized than consumers could find anywhere else. “The Microsoft technologies helped us to meet our user experience goals, too,” says Dhiresh Rustogi, Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President, Kotak Life Insurance.
ASP.NET AJAX also boosts the user experience by minimizing the amount of data that has to travel through the Internet to present new information to customers.The application speed and scalability increased by processing different user service request asynchronously.
Increased Developer Productivity
Developers are more productive, thanks to new and improved features such as JavaScript-compatible IntelliSense and debugging,AJAX support, and new designers. “Developer productivity has significantly increased by30 percent,” saysSolution Implementer, Fulcrum Logic.“We now spend less time doing product support and more time producing new code because the application is more reliable.”
Development Time Reduced by 20 Percent
With the implementation of Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008, the company has discovered some amazing technologies in the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, which significantly reduced the required code base. Integrated designers and language features in Visual Studio® 2008 allowed developers to build the connected applications demanded by businesses while taking advantage of the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 such as WCF and WorkFlow to reduce development time.
“With Microsoft Visual Studio® 2008, we can write streamlined code,” says Rohit Acharya, Chief Manager – Information Technology, Kotak Life Insurance. “This helps us reduce coding time by 20 percent. And, we spend less time writing and have more time to think about solving business problems for our customers.”
Microsoft Visual Studio
Microsoft Visual Studio is the world’s most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. With Visual Studio, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.
For more informationabout Visual Studio, go to:
msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio