Quote and Buy
Overview
The app contains an intuitive Quote & Buy Journey; including a quotation engine, a customer portal to revisit old quotes and policies, and an admin portal. The application is set up for both speciality insurance, high net worth items such as jewellery, collectables and paintings, and vehicle insurance. It also includes links to Google Maps, Google Vision for OCR and a VIN lookup API. The rating model for these products is built into the application but could easily call out to the Mendix Rating Engine or 3rd Party Rating provider.
Documentation
Quote & Buy
The app contains an intuitive Quote & Buy Journey; including a quotation engine, a customer portal to revisit old quotes and policies, and an admin portal. The application is set up for both speciality insurance, high net worth items such as jewellery, collectables and paintings, and vehicle insurance. It also includes links to Google Maps, Google Vision for OCR, and a VIN lookup API. There is also a simple example of Workflow for managing referred applications.
The rating model for these products is built into the application but could easily call out to the Mendix Rating Engine or 3rd Party Rating provider.
How to setup
The application is available both as a demo environment and as a starter app. You can find the demo environment here: https://mendixinsurancequoteandbuy.mendixcloud.com/
To create your own version, the Quote and Buy application is available via the create new app flow on the Marketplace. The Model is built using Mendix 9 and we will try to ensure it's on the latest version of the product.
Feel free to customize this application to suit your needs. The following steps will help you provision the Quote and Buy app.
- Find the app via the create new app flow
- Edit in Studio or Studio Pro
- Follow the onboarding process on the first run to setup sample data and API keys
Roles
The application has four roles
- Anonymous
Used for generating quotes before an account is created
- User
At the end of creating a quote, an anonymous user is prompted to enter a password which will create a user account. This account can be used to access the Customer Portal
- Underwriter
This role is used by the workflow for validating applications that have been referred
- Administrator
The administrator has an overview of all quotes, policies and customers, and various configuration options
Explaining the quotation process
The Quote & Buy workflow process has several steps to capture the information required for an insurance quote. There are some built-in Underwriting rules in the form of Referrals and Appraisals.
Referral and appraisal rules
A quote can get referred if an item is entered with a value greater than a specified referral threshold amount per category (The default is $100,000). If the value of an item is above a specified appraisal threshold then a conditional step is shown to upload an appraisal document (the default is$10,000).
The referral and appraisal threshold amounts can be configured per category (i.e. Jewellery etc) on the Configuration page in Studio (and Pro) or by logging in as an Administrator and clicking on Configuration from the menu on the top right.
Qualifying questions
There are also configurable Qualifying questions for both vehicles and valuables included in the process which are answerable as Yes or No. Some questions can be configured to trigger a Referral if they are answered No.
Customer journey
The steps involved in the main process are in the QuoteAndBuy Module -> Customer Folder -> Pages.
Step 1: Personal details
Name, address and contact details
Step 1b: Additional information
In the case of a vehicle quote we ask for some additional information about your age and driving history
Step 2: Choose categories
For valuables, you can choose the type of valuables you want to insure and for vehicles the type of vehicle
Step 3: Enter values
Valuables
In the case of valuable policies multiple items can be added to each selected category with a brief description and an estimated value
Vehicles
If you are getting a quote for a vehicle you are able to either manually enter a VIN number or upload an image of the number and use the Google Vision API to read it automatically. You can then look up the VIN number to automatically populate the vehicle details.
Alternatively, you can manually drill through a fully configurable hierarchy of make, model and variant for vehicles. This will come prefilled with some sample data.
Finally, there are a few questions about vehicle usage.
Step 4: Qualifying questions
Answer Yes or No to configured qualifying questions, some of which could trigger a referral.
Step 5: Appraisal
If the appraisal criteria have been triggered you will be prompted to upload appraisal documents for the relevant items; otherwise, this stage is skipped.
Step 6: Quote summary
A final summary of the provided information is shown and at this point, an anonymous user will be prompted for a password. Once a password is provided, or if you are logged in already, you can then:
- Save the quote for later
- Submit it for approval if it’s been referred
- Proceed to pay for the policy
Step 7: Payment
The payment options at this point are purely illustrative but show how you could be offered the option to pay via bank transfer, card, or PayPal.
Step 8: Confirmation
A final confirmation is then shown with the policy number and the option to download the policy. You are also offered the option of going straight to your portal.
Premium calculation
The premium is calculated using this microflow: CAL_UpdatePremium. Inside the flow, it uses a lookup table to find a rate based on the category of an asset or the ratio assigned to the vehicle variant (this value is randomly generated following a successful API lookup). In the case of vehicles further calculations are carried out in SUB_VehiclePremiumModifiers based on:
- The age of the driver
- The home address
- The expected mileage
- Their claims history
- Their driving record
Every time an assets price is changed this flow is triggered and the Quote Premium price is updated by summing the price of the asset with all the other assets added to the quote.
Inside the flow CAL_QuoteStatus, the app will work out whether a quote needs to be referred if the value of an item is over the referral threshold (default $100,000) or has triggered a referral question. You can then review the referred quotes using the admin view.
Customer portal
The Customer portal allows a registered User to revisit their existing quotes (to update and purchase), view and download active policies, upload a profile image, send messages to the Administrators, and start a new quote.
Underwriter portal
The Underwriter portal provides a view of outstanding Underwriter tasks and tasks assigned to the currently logged on Underwriter. It also enables them to progress these tasks through workflow. There’s also a view of all quotes and policies, some configuration options for underwriting rules, and any tasks currently under the remit of the underwriter team.
Admin portal
The Admin portal has the same functions as the Underwriter portal (although focused around Administrator workflow tasks) as well as a view of all the Customers registered in the system and some more advanced configuration options.
Workflow
The Quote & Buy application contains a simple example of workflow that allows for the assessment of referred quotes/applications. The first task sits with an underwriter who can either Accept or Reject the application straight away, which will end the workflow, or request more information from the customer which will trigger a “Call back” task for an Administrator. Once the “Call back” task has been completed the case can either be terminated, if the customer is no longer interested, or referred back to the Underwriter for re-assessment.
The domain model
The domain model is predominantly located in the “QuoteAndBuy” module with supporting configuration tables in the “Rating” module. It focuses on three key areas:
- Customers
- Personal information
- Quotes
- Quote details
- Categories
- Assets
- Appraisal information
- Configuration
- Vehicles
- Category ratings
- Zip code ratios
Something to note is the generalization of the “Quote” entity to create “Quote_Vehicle” which allows the capture of additional information for the vehicle-based policies and also the generalization of the “Asset” entity to allow for “Vehicle” information.
OData
Many of the core entities have been exposed as OData (QuoteAndBuy -> OData -> OData_Customers) to allow for access via DataHub. This data will be used in other applications under the “Insure” umbrella.
