Developing portal for the Adriatic Slovenica insurance company

At the end of the year 2014, the Adriatic Slovenica insurance company (AS), together with CROZ, began developing a portal intended for natural persons – AS’s clients. Not so long ago, we used to dial the information center’s number just to ask them which river is the longest in the world. Today, I found the information I was looking for on the new go-to place for information retrieval, the Internet. However, I have to admit that whenever my insurance policy expires, I use the Internet only to find the customer service phone number. The AS decided to offer a better service to their customers, and that’s how „Moj AS Selfcare“ portal was created.

So how did we start and how far have we come?

At the end of 2014, the Adriatic Slovenica insurance company, together with CROZ, began developing a portal intended for natural persons – the AS’s clients. The „Moj AS Selfcare“ portal was created to fit the needs of the end-customers, so they could easily reach information about their policies, notified claims and payments, and to simplify and speed up the communication between the user and the insurance company, and by doing that, to take some „pressure“ off the call center.

Even though CROZ has been working with clients in Slovenia for quite some time, this was the first (but not the last 🙂 ) project done in collaboration with the the AS. Two teams have been formed, the AS’s team with experts in business domain, sales and user experience, and CROZ’s team that brought with it a know-how of Liferay portal, developers, analytics and their own UX and design expert.

An agile development method with sprints and functionality deliveries after each sprint were used on this project, which was also immediately followed by a (very detailed) user testing. CROZ’s designer team, cooperating with the AS’s UX expert, take the credit for the design. The key element in the development was the prototype of the portal, which served as a tool so that everyone involved (the developers, analysts and the business side) could see how the site was going to look like even before the design has been finished. The distance between the teams (Zagreb – Ljubljana) wasn’t an issue, most of the meetings were held over Skype. However, in the key moments of the project, when close cooperation was necessary for handling the difficulties, teams would meet face to face in Zagreb or Ljubljana.

The development itself did not go so smooth, as it was necessary to integrate with not less than 9 different systems, whereas ways of integration with some didn’t even exist when the project started. One of the mentioned systems was the „Pokojnine“ portal (a portal for overviewing pension insurance), which was already in the test phase when „Moj AS“ project started, and should have taken off at the same time as „Moj AS“. It was necessary to establish the switch from one portal to another in a way that’s transparent for the end user, which wasn’t technically easy, but, as it turned out, nothing is impossible for our team. All of the obstacles were successfully overcome, and in July 2015 the first phase of „Moj AS“ has been launched into pilot production, for a limited number of users – the AS insurance company’s employees. In the period of the next few months users’ feedback was gathered, and they, now that the product was finished, had a lot of comments and suggestions for improvement. The AS’s business team gathered all of the suggestions, which used as an input for the extensive second phase of the project. This year, the portal has been released to production work and now is available to all of the AS’s employees.

What does the AF Selfcare portal have to offer?

The selfcare portal is the outset for an AS user, a place in which he can see all the relevant information about his insurance. In order to log in to the portal, it is important to go through a registration procedure, which, despite being simple for the end user, offers a high level of security during the creation of the user account. The design of the portal was created to give the user all of the necessary information in an easy way, without the unnecessary clicking, and because of the responsive design it is adapted for use on mobile phones and tablets. Users can even change their personal information, send messages asking for help, ask for a visit from a representative or even report damage, using the communication module, which is connected to the AS CRM system. The AS can notify the user, in a visible, but not invasive way, about special offers and promotions, by sending them notifications and advertising articles.

Where to go next?

The portal is in production and the number of registered user keeps increasing daily. The AS’s business experts already have a lot of ideas on how to upgrade it, so we can expect the third phase of the „Moj AS“ portal to start soon. The collaboration between the AS and CROZ continues in other projects, so „Moj AS“ is just the first card in, what we hope, will be a winning hand.