CASE STUDY | 12 MINUTE READ

Multinational Insurer Improves Client Experience with a Self-Service Portal 

HDI Assicurazioni builds a new self-service customer portal to streamline client experiences and improve internal operations. 
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Logo
50,000
New users registered in first 6 months
13% 
registered through self-service
220,000+
total users
Outline
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Key Takeaways

  • Self-service streamlines and simplifies the customer experience.
    With digitalized processes through a self-service customer portal, HDI Assicurazioni clients are now able to handle much more on their own, more quickly and efficiently.
  • Providing an open communication channel improves the relationship with clients.
    Clients love using and appreciate the new self-service customer portal. In just the first 6 months the portal went live, there were 50,000 new registrants, and 13% of them registered entirely through self-service.
  • Self-service is also extremely beneficial for internal teams.
    In addition, self-service and automation bring many benefits to HDI Assicurazioni’s internal operations. The workload of the IT team has been significantly lightened, client data is better collected and managed for greater personalization, and increased internal communication.

Background

In 1881, a group of railway workers established a mutual insurance association that would become the foundation for HDI Assicurazioni. Now, the company has expanded and merged with several international insurance organizations to be a leader of auto, home, and life insurance for individuals and businesses. 

Their growth has been fueled by the same vision they established centuries ago: to be by their customers’ side, putting their needs first. 

To fulfill this vision, the company set out to create a self-service customer portal that would allow their policyholders to easily and quickly access their personal data, policies, and respective claims on a single platform. 
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Challenges

However, in order for HDI Assicurazioni to bring this vision to life, they would first need to:
  1. Digitalize the customer experience. 
    Customers did not have the ability to interact with the company in real-time yet. 
  2. Redesign the existing website.  
    In order to deliver a modern customer experience, HDI would need to revamp their existing digital solutions and create a selection of reusable services that would be aimed at expansion and standardization.
  3. Encourage customers to then adopt these tools.
    The goal ultimately was to provide customers with tools that would simplify processes and make their experience more enjoyable. 
Clients now have a communication channel with the company available to them which is always open for monitoring their position, autonomously managing operations, and immediately requesting support. The content is customized and interaction has become much more fluid and intense.
Stefano Fini
Chief Information Officer, HDI Assicurazioni

Implementation

To execute this project, HDI Assicurazioni relied on the expertise of everis, global consultancy firm, outsourcer, and system integrator, part of NTT DATA company and Liferay Platinum Service Partner.

Thanks to everis’s in-depth market knowledge and professionalism, they were able to analyze the options available and chose to build their customer portal with Liferay DXP. 

“We chose Liferay because it is an open, interoperable, and protected platform. Its adherence to standards allowed us to create modular services, which can also be reused for new solutions in view of four investment optimizations,” adds Alessandro Testa, Head Of Business Operations & Transformation, HDI Assicurazioni.
 
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The implementation plan was divided into four distinct steps, each interconnected with the others:
  • Design: An “agile room” was created, made up of a team of people with a wide range of skills, who oversaw the design phase, collected requirements, and created the application. 
  • Implementation: The team then designed a graphic prototype for PCs and mobile devices before initiating the implementation of the new customer portal. With everis’s expertise and help, HDI Assicurazioni was able to use Liferay to implement the new portal within just 18 weeks. 
  • Support: Additionally, a support center was created to help provide immediate assistance to clients.This was also integrated into the portal in order to handle eventual spikes in operations and requests in a timely manner. 
  • Monitoring: Before the portal went live, the team monitored and evaluated the system based on user feedback of overall features. 
“We are very proud of having supported HDI Assicurazioni in a project that is so significant to both the company and its clients,” emphasizes Mimmo Chirico, Manager of Everis Italian insurance practice. “Making new digital services available is a delicate operation, one that must be innovative while also able to accompany users in their discovery of new agile, intuitive, and simple services and processes.”
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Results

By placing the user experience at the center of the project, HDI policyholders now are able to use a more user-friendly, reliable, and secure customer portal.

Clients now have access to: 
  • Streamlined digital processes to submit payments, file claims, manage their accounts autonomously on the portal. They can even sign up for accounts on their own, with 13% of new clients registering autonomously. 
  • Constant and ongoing communication through a channel that is easy to use and always available.
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“Clients now have a communication channel with the company available to them which is always open, for monitoring their position, autonomously managing operations, and immediately and simply requesting support. The content is customized and interaction has become much more fluid and intense,” explains Stefano Fini, Chief Information Officer, HDI Assicurazioni. 

In just the first six months that the new customer portal became operational, the website saw 50,000 new registrations.

But leveraging self-service is not only beneficial for improving customer experience, but also boosting internal operational efficiency. With the new customer portal, the internal team has been able to: 
  • Streamline process management and communications within the company to be more agile and flexible. 
  • Free up IT resources so that the team can handle more complex and strategic tasks. 
  • Collect and manage data with the utmost transparency and in full respect of the law. Profiling is more in-depth and makes it possible to better customize communication aimed at clients so that it is always relevant and timely. 
“Automation and digitalization of processes have introduced significant benefits, such as lightening the workload of the IT team which can now dedicate itself to assisting in the creation of new business services, without having to manage the complexity of the infrastructure, which is now truly high performance as well as very stable,” concludes Alessandro Testa.

As HDI continues to move forward and looks to make more investments to improve customer experience, their guiding light from a century ago will still always be the same: to be by their customers’ sides, putting their needs first.