The choice of microservices and APIs is an important, but often less understood part of platform design. Let’s look at one of the areas that made this a good decision for our customers.
The need to improve customer experience in Insurance is well documented, e.g. https://www.ibm.com/thought-leadership/institute-business-value/report/insurance-cx.
Designing great CX is hard. It requires knowledge of your customer, recognising that they are not all the same. It requires flexibility and responsiveness, it needs to be easy to use, but not oversimplified. It needs to reflect the expectations or the customer, whatever they may be – an 18 year old will expect something very different from a 60 year old.
There may be a chatbot, phone call, web page, mobile app – or all of these involved, it may even happen as part of a 3rd party transaction “just add insurance”.
Too often these customer experiences will be dictated by the insurance platform. The forms and journeys are a result of decisions made by the developers and analysts and can follow their logic, because they know about insurance and what makes sense. Unfortunately, customers don’t have their insight and don’t share the same assumptions.
The design of our APIs assumes no knowledge of insurance products and is built on the basis of making it easy for your customers to buy insurance.
Using whatever “form” or channel is appropriate to collect the facts about the proposer and the risk and present then to the Quote API, which will return the premium, and away you go (obviously there is a lot that can happen to determine the best premium).
In doing so, our customers are able to design and create the best customer experiences for their customers, and update, amend, enhance all without making changes behind the scenes.
Or you can use the ones we have already developed.
Best of both worlds.