Mobility, a major trend in 21st century organizations is enabling employees to use their smart phones to do a lot more than just communicate. This article emphasizes on a customer case study for Impetus where the mobility extension solution brought a host of benefits to brokers, enabling them to tap more business.

1. Providing mobile extension solutions to insurers<br />Impetus develops mobile application and SMS-based solution to improve RoI and QoS of insurance brokers. <br />Increasingly, organizations are relying on their road warriors—sales people on the move—to improve their reach in the market, capture customer interactions and sign up deals with them. Typically, this new age sales force is armed with smartphones and laptops and uses both devices for keeping in touch with the workplace. <br />Mobility, a major trend in 21st century organizations is enabling employees to use their smartphones to do a lot more than just communicate. Companies within almost every key industry vertical are using mobility as a tool for catalyzing staff efficiency and productivity and uplift the client experience. <br />The insurance segment too, where insurers bank actively on their network of agents to engage customers, retain existing ones and draw new ones, is also harnessing the power of mobility to stay ahead.<br />In today’s environment, there are a few business operations that insurance brokers wish they could do, even when they are away from their office desktops and not carrying their laptops. After all, they are unlikely to know when they will find a prospect interested in buying insurance. Brokers really wish they had mobile phones that could quote premium figures instantly or send e-mails to prospects right away with a proposal. They would be happy if they could instantly initiate a health Insurance application with an interested prospect on the portals of their carriers, before someone else picked up the business.<br />Recognizing these emerging mobility requirements of insurance organizations, Impetus Technologies, a leading outsourced product engineering company, has developed a small J2ME mobile application—M-biz for an insurer, that integrates with an existing J2EE-based Web Insurance product and performs all the tasks that the company’s agents need, at the click of a few keys. The company has also integrated an SMS feature into the existing product to leverage more unforeseen business benefits.<br />Impetus arrived at this solution after first examining all available mobile technologies and selecting the most relevant one. Therefore, it put through the scanner the Blackberry OS, Windows ME, the iPhone OS, Android, Brew, the .Net Framework, Adobe Flashlite and J2ME. Impetus finally picked the J2ME approach, which provided significant advantages over other options, including the fact that it was supported on a variety of mobile platforms including Symbian, WindowsME and most of the Java-enabled models of Nokia, LG, Motorola, HTC, Samsung, Sony etc. Additionally, it could be economically ported on the BlackBerry and Android and provided a rich set of APIs to interact with the mobile devices, Web services and payment gateways. Open source, powerful J2ME Frameworks were its pluses. <br />The Impetus team recommended a Mobility extension solution to the customer team, and set to work to build a J2ME-based, fully-functional mobile application as Proof of Concept (POC).<br />In order to develop the M-biz application, Impetus used a Java-enabled mobile device with GPRS, and WIFI (for Internet connectivity). It leveraged the company’s existing product deployments with no infrastructure changes. Impetus provided a light-weight Webwork Action Interface, integrated as part of the existing product implementation, that responded to mobile requests. A light weight client, that resided on the mobile devices and talked to the back-end interface over HTTP, was provided. The solution was crafted to run on virtually all smartphone devices in the US market including those from Motorola, LG, Samsung, Nokia and RIM.<br />Providing a bouquet of benefits <br />The mobility extension solution brought a host of benefits to brokers, enabling them to tap more business. It helped them reduce call center calls to the carrier and made it possible to send instant application status updates through the SMS to consumers on their mobile phones. This reduced call center queries, and hence the bill on the phone calls made to the center. The solution led to an overall improvement in the Broker’s Quality of Service (QoS) as instant SMSes could be sent to the broker when a consumer needed assistance for completing an online application. At the same time, underwriters could post SMSes to the consumer instantly, asking them to review the modified application to approve a rate change or plan change or seek any missing information. New prospects: meanwhile only needed to send a SMS to know about an insurance product.<br />Clearly, by adding the power of mobility, Impetus enabled the insurance company to improve its RoI, QoS, customer satisfaction and retention. <br />About ImpetusImpetus Technologies offers Product Engineering and Technology R&D services for software product development. With ongoing investments in research and application of emerging technology areas, innovative business models, and an agile approach, we partner with our client base comprising large scale ISVs and technology innovators to deliver cutting-edge software products. Our expertise spans the domains of Data Analytics, Large Data Management, SaaS, Cloud Computing, Mobility Solutions, Testing, Performance Engineering, and Social Media among others.Impetus Technologies Inc.5300 Stevens Creek Boulevard, Suite 450, San Jose, CA 95129, USATel: 408.252.7111 | Email: inquiry@impetus.com Regional Development Centers - INDIA: • New Delhi • Indore • Hyderabad To know more visit: http://www.impetus.com DisclaimersThe information contained in this document is the proprietary and exclusive property of Impetus Technologies Inc. except as otherwise indicated. No part of this document, in whole or in part, may be reproduced, stored, transmitted, or used for design purposes without the prior written permission of Impetus Technologies Inc.The information contained in this document is subject to change without notice.<br />