Hartford, Conn. - A new, automated system introduced by The Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. significantly hastens the creation and modification of personal lines insurance policies.
Dubbed the Personal Lines Policy Changes Center, it enables agents and customer service representatives to manage auto policy changes in real-time. It will also enable agents to quote different scenarios and to determine how changes, such as adding a vehicle, impact premiums. More than 90% of the auto policy changes made through the Policy Change Center can be completed within minutes, the company says.
"We were looking for greater capabilities for our agents to service our policyholders, and we wanted to do it in an intuitive, front-end manner," says Andrew MacDonald, CIO of Hartford's personal lines division. "We decided to leverage portal technology, which is our stated technology direction going forward."
Launching the Policy Change Center was no small undertaking, taking 14 months from its inception to its completion. "This is one of our first major projects for our IT shop that is leveraging portal technology on a large scale," MacDonald noted.
MacDonald says that one of the primary challenges faced in launching the center was ensuring connectivity between the front-end portal and back-end policy administration systems, which are mainframe based. Early on, the Hartford Conn.-based insurer decided to use ACORD XML messages between the front-end and mainframes to provide an industry-standard approach to connectivity.
The Policy Change Center went live the first week of July and users are praising it.
"This system is everything we hoped other companies had done. The easy access and smooth process will make our work much easier," says Johanna Soto of the Esser-Hayes Insurance Group in Naperville, Ill. "The billing feature is one of my favorites. No need to wait a day or two until the endorsement hits the billing to let the client know what the payment difference will be."
Source: The Hartford
