ABS RED Assist.

RedAssist is a Colombian Company based in Bogotá, dedicated to the direct sale of assistance insurance.

It has more than 21 years of experience in home insurance, school assistance insurance, legal assistance, pet insurance, express assistance and assistance insurance for micro-businesses.

To carry out their sales processes, this Company uses a platform that is developed by drupal, one of the technologies in which our work team has more experience.

Updating, improving, and strengthening this platform to support the sales process with technology, identity verification, and data collection through reports that would allow to make more assertive decisions was the main challenge.

Red Assist needed a new technology development provider that mastered Drupal in its latest version, and we had the human and technical resources to shape the team with the skills, experience, and knowledge needed to execute this project successfully.

Under this scenario, our technology partnership started.

Five web application problems that affected the sales

In order to understand which improvements the platform required, we should identify the problems that were making the sales closing difficult for the sales team.

After several meetings, we identify five main problems:

1. The web application was difficult for the vendors to use.

2. They did not have the technological resource that would allow them to attach the necessary documentation to sell home assistance insurance.

3. There was no identity verification mechanism to prove the legitimacy of the requests made.

4. The hiring process was slow due to the lack of digital systems for document generation and digital signatures.

5. The quality of the results obtained was low and did not help in the decision-making.

The web application they had until then was not supporting the company’s business goals, by contrast, it was hindering the sales process.

Our improvement proposal for the web platform

Identifying first-hand the pain points was key to designing a solution that could bring greater security, performance, and agility to the processes.

• In first place, the proposal was to update Drupal’s nucleous to work on the latest version, which was Drupal 9 by then, and get a stronger software architecture.

The most important features would be divided into modules to facilitate the creation of new features and code maintenance. 

• Our proposal to solve the verification problems was to connect the identity verification and request validation mechanisms to the process via text message (SMS).
• To help reduce work overload, the reporting system was improved and integrated with Google Drive, so the commercial team would have online reports in real-time.
• In order to speed up the sales closing, a Telegram bot that allows receiving service requests was created. This is especially useful for strengthening field sales.

All these improvements were proposed as a definitive solution to the problems that the application presented. Developing and implementing each of them significantly improved the performance of the Company's commercial and legal teams.

Four developers with Drupal skills dedicated to this project

With the client's endorsement, we started to make development improvements to the web platform.

The first activities were developed by Diego, a senior full-stack developer with more than 8 years of experience in Drupal, who was dedicated to implementing the general and software architecture improvements that would solve the main problems of the platform.

Diego also distributed the features in separate modules to trace the line of work to be followed by the other 3 developers that would join the team (two junior back-end developers and a middle full-stack developer, all of them with knowledge about Drupal).

Once the roadmap was defined, the following activities were executed: 

✔ Drupal core and project libraries update

✔ Code division and features into modules.

✔ Adding to the sales flow:

• The feature of attaching the required supporting documents to the sale such as a utility bill, copy of ID, and the applicant’s photo.
• The validation of service request authenticity via SMS.
• The electronic signature.

✔ PDF document creation.

✔ Strengthening of sales and integration reports with Google Drive to export reports to this platform and obtain real-time data.

✔ Telegram bot to receive new service requests.

To keep a meticulous and transparent log of the different activities, we used a task manager that the developers team, the RedAssist project manager, and key staff members of the sales team had access to. 

By improving the platform, the sales increased

Progressively, in a period of eight months to a year and a half, we solved the main problems or limitations that the web application presented and that we previously mentioned in a few paragraphs.

This led to an increase in useful indicators for the sales team, who could perform their daily work with greater confidence after the improvements we made.

The sales volume and density increased considerably, and the web application became the primary sales means between the commercial advisor and the client.

Now, the sales team has at its disposal a functional, and easy-to-use web application with an electronic signature that allows them to speed up the sales closing.

In addition, the identity verification mechanisms we implemented were able to reduce fraud and the number of claims for unwanted services was reduced.

The legal team started to receive a greater number of necessary supports to validate contracts, which helped to perfectly meet the legal requirements for insurance sales in the national territory.

It is important to point out that the Colombian IT talent involved in this software factory project had the following:

• Skills, knowledge, and experience in Drupal technology.
• Technological equipment to seamlessly develop the proposed activities. 
• Adequate furniture to guarantee the welfare during the working day. 

Syllable IT's project management team ensured the fulfillment of these three aspects in order to deliver exceptional results to the client, and to the developers the right conditions to carry out their duties.

These exceptional results became tangible with RedAssist's turnover increased, which we consider being the greatest value we were able to deliver by improving the web application performance with Drupal technology.