FEATURED CASE STUDY

Building a scalable and optimized lead generation system for an online insurance service provider.

Insurance Quote gives millions of consumers an effective and free way to compare and purchase insurance policies online. From auto insurance, business insurance and life insurance to home insurance, group health insurance and even dental insurance,InsuranceQuotes.com makes the process really easy and effortless.

However, Insurance Quote needed help in acquiring leads from various affiliates and selling them to various insurance companies at maximum bid rate per lead. For this, they needed a technology partner to build and continuously optimize a scalable platform. That’s where we came in.

“Perennial is like a cloud for resource management.”

Sudheer Bandharu, Director of Engg., Bank Rate/TrouveMedia.

 Watch Sudheer talk about his experience working with us.

The Problem

Need for a cost effective integrated lead generation machine.

What Insurance Quote was looking for was an end-to-end engineering team to build and maintain a platform would address their business requirements. The team would also need to continuously support their marketing functions with quick platform adaptations, as required by their business during their time zone. The demands on the team were no mean task.

The three main areas we looked into were as follows:

TECHNOLOGY

CHALLENGE

  • Acquiring best bid rates from the insurance companies was extremely time consuming especially when customers used to login to sites to get instant insurance quotes.

  • Systematically segregating and managing of unsold leads (improving top line).

  • Managing lead generation via affiliates was highly time consuming.

  • Adapting the business based on changing consumer behavior.

  • Keeping the engineering costs down while adapting to consumer changes.

DOMAIN

CHALLENGE

  • Building an automated method of acquiring best bid rates and providing better ‘through put per lead’ without human intervention.

  • Building an automated platform to ensure lead genuineness for better business reputation with the insurance companies who bought those leads.

  • Having the ability to dynamically add or update insurance verticals like Health, Auto and Home Insurance.

  • Reducing the time & cost of adding/managing affiliates as the process of adding and managing affiliates and setting up affiliates to direct leads on the Insurance Quote site was taking several days.

  • Strengthening the backend infrastructure so that it scales up/down depending on traffic without affecting business continuity.

DESIGN

CHALLENGE

  • Desiging a consumer-facing platform to ensure simple smooth user experience for the prospect and track its behavior and to ensure optimum lead generation.

The Solution

Building a scalable end-to-end lead generation system integrating analytics and social media.

As the project was complex, teams at both at Bankrate and Perennial worked closely and seamlessly to create a robust solution.

1. We deployed an end-to-end, dedicated engineering team comprising analysts, technical managers, developers and QA. The team ensured an overlap of time zone and built self-service automated tools for the marketing team, wherever possible.

2. We developed a single customizable framework for all the insurance verticals, to adjust to the dynamic customer behaviour feedback we received through analytics and from the business team. This framework allowed a dynamic configuration of the site and reduced the engineering effort drastically – from weeks to mere hours.

3. Our team also developed a strong analytical framework to provide feedback to measure user behaviours and segments through coherent analytics.

4. We included A/B testing and optimization to ensure a continuous improvement in user experience.

5. We built easy-to-use, customizable user interfaces to make sure there was a seamless user experience for the leads from the affiliates.

6. We developed a lead management system to allow quick affiliate enrollments as well as an auto-initiated affiliate setup wizard to setup an affiliate branded site. This reduced the affiliate enrolment effort from several days to just a few hours.

7. We set up a lead validation engine that integrates various 3rd party platforms, validating leads using mobile, SMS, social media and other means to intelligently detect genuine leads.

8. We even built a lead submission engine that is intelligently integrated to different insurance backend systems. These systems have configurable algorithms for getting the maximum ROI for a lead. The engine also manages unsold leads by further data verification and validation to sell legitimate leads.

9. We tuned and tested the system architecture to support millions of users.

Technology Stack:
Apache HTTP, Apache Tomcat, Struts 2.0, J2EE, Hibernate, MySQL

The Result

Seamless work flow solution with next generation capability.Enter your text here...

1. All information, paper-based as well as previous system-based are now accessible at one place.

2. The work flow and resolutions are at a level of snapshot visibility.

3. The team can proactively address issues, and assess department functionality and citizen service in a much better manner.

4. The team is now able to measure and report requests and incidents.

5. They are able to exceed the established service targets and department goals over 90% of the time.