Driving Digital Transformation: Enhancing Operational Efficiency and User Experience

At Runninghill, we turn complexities into clarity by forming specialised and tailored solutions that promote and support business objectives, propelling insurers to reach new heights of success in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape. With a keen focus on innovation, through collaboration and teamwork, we thrive and excel whilst navigating through multifaceted challenges with agility and expertise, ensuring we provide dynamic solutions that drive digital transformation and create operational efficiencies.

Challenges:

1. WhatsApp Bot Challenges: Severe code quality issues plaguing the existing WhatsApp bot codebase, necessitating an extensive overhaul. Additionally, grappling with state management for a substantial user base posed a formidable obstacle. Setting up a local testing environment further compounded the already daunting challenges.
2. Microservice Monitoring: Improving monitoring across all microservices to swiftly detect any issues and streamline production debugging.
3. Database Challenges: The database posed challenges due to its cost fluctuations and varying opinions on its necessity. Deciding on its usage became a topic of debate.
4. UI Change Requests Impact: Frequent change requests for UI alterations as designers frequently revised their designs. The team had to swiftly adapt to these changes to meet evolving requirements, often leading to delays as they awaited resolution of critical issues.
5. Mobile Performance Challenges: Significant difficulties in improving the mobile performance of the online buying website. Persistent issues required a prolonged period of trial and error to effectively address performance bottlenecks.
6. Ambiguous Data Source Naming Challenges: Frequently, services needed data from sources with ambiguous names, leading to challenges in understanding the intended data sources.
7. Expertise Gap: Lack of expertise in troubleshooting related issues.
8. Access Issues: Accessing essential resources for software development proved to be time-consuming. Developers frequently lacked access to necessary tools and resources.
9. Unclear Requirements: The team frequently faced situations where the client requested feature implementations without clear or well-defined requirements.

Implementation:

1. WhatsApp Bot Enhancements: The team enhanced the Quick Quote functionality, allowing customers to obtain quotes with minimal required information. They implemented validation, an opt-out feature for communications, and enabled users to download policy documents through WhatsApp. Robust message tracking and Azure CLU for client sentiment analysis were added.
2. Online Buying Enhancements: The team refined the UI, updated visual packages, improved front-end components, and updated all site copy. The angular app was updated to the latest version.
3. Financial Education Integration: The team integrated with a third-party provider offering financial education courses for clients.
4. Quick Quotes Website: The team integrated the website with a rates backend service, improved the user experience, and changed the flow to allow users to give their phone number at the end of the process.
5. New OTP Service: Developed a new OTP service aligned with the updated architecture, transitioning from stored procedures to a new query package.
6. Email OTP: Introduced an option to email OTPs, catering specifically to international clients.
7. VDN Tracking: Implemented a feature to track incoming VDNs for comprehensive campaign statistics.
8. PowerBI Reporting: Demonstrated a solution using PowerBI for comprehensive reporting on user behaviour and website usage.
9. Standards and Code Quality: Enforced standards and good coding practices by integrating code quality tools and conducting performance evaluations.
10. Documentation: Enhanced documentation by providing project explanations and diagrams to illustrate workflows.
11. System Maintenance and Updates: Improved Docker templates, migrated secrets to a centralised management system, and ensured consistent naming conventions.
12. Existing Policy Check: Implemented functionality to verify if a user has already purchased a policy, preventing duplicate purchases.
13. Health Checks: Developed a private health check package to test dependencies of all microservices, streamlining production debugging.
14. Client Communications: Implemented a process to save leads during third-party service outages, preventing lead loss.
15. Value-Added Product Integration: Added a value-added product, allowing the creation of messages and digital photo albums, with integrations made with the legacy app.
16. SMS Portal Changes: Revised the SMS portal to enable the delivery of OTPs to clients with blacklisted phone numbers.
17. Policyholder Portal Enhancements: Reviewed and corrected risk descriptions and policyholder information.

Results:

1. Enhanced Code Quality: Implemented code quality checks and refactored code for better maintainability, using SOLID principles.
2. Improved Documentation: Improved documentation practices for the WhatsApp bot and microservices.
3. Standardised Infrastructure: Standardised resource naming conventions for better organisation and implemented endpoint versioning.
4. Improved Security: Secured microservices by using repositories and API calls instead of direct database access and encrypting data.
5. Scalability: Leveraged external APIs to enable infrastructure scaling based on demand.
6. Better Reporting: Implemented PowerBI for comprehensive reporting on user behaviour and website usage.
7. Faster Debugging: Developed a health check package to streamline the identification of issues within microservices.
8. Enhanced User Experience: Implemented various features across different platforms to improve user experience.
9. Lead Capture: Implemented a system to capture leads even during third-party service outages.
10. Improved Policyholder Portal: Reviewed and corrected risk descriptions and policyholder information.
11. Increased Client Value: Integrated with a third-party provider to offer financial education courses, adding value to client services.
12. Improved OTP Delivery: Enabled OTP delivery via email for international clients and for blacklisted phone numbers.
13. Value-Added Product Integration: Integrated value-added products within primary offerings.