Insurance Premium Breakdown for Concept for Aviva Plc.

The most frequent question asked of insurance call centres is “why has my premium gone up so much?” This is often a hard question to answer, with multiple factors possibly pushing the premium in different directions. The insurance company may not want to disclose some factors, and others, such as the effect of age thresholds,  may be sensitive. Written information such as website guidance therefore tends to be very generic and doesn’t really answer the question.

While working on a project to provide better information to call centre staff, I posed the idea that it might be possible to analyse the customer’s actual premium change graphically on a web page, with the various factors, in both directions, clearly visible, in such a way that it would answer the question adequately for many customers, as well as providing more detail to support call centre staff.

This would potentially allow a significant subset of customers to “self serve” their answer and remove call centre volume. I was given a budget of a few days to explore the concept.

Aviva have an existing SOAP web service which delivers key premium information, which I mimicked, and I then developed a simple set of web pages using JSF & Prime Faces to present the change between two periods via a couple of different graphical representations, both allowing the user to “drill down” to progressively more detailed explanatory text on significant factors.

The working prototype was welcomed by both IT and business people involved in the work, as providing useful input into the debate. Aviva are still considering how to resolve the overall problem, but my concept is now “in the mix”.