Innovative conveniences make for great digital experiences, but your policyholders aren’t just users. They also expect white-glove, in-person service from agents, whether they’re setting up an account for the first time or trying to process a claim. These days, holistic insurance customer service means being in multiple places at the same time. That’s why modern insurtech solutions include process automation, AI, and other technologies that can make development smarter while also freeing up your team to do what they do best.
With the Mendix Platform, insurance enterprises can build native mobile apps that incorporate cutting-edge innovations earlier than they can with other technologies–and with less of a learning curve. In addition, Mendix makes it easier to leverage your business-user knowledge base while automating claims to expedite turnaround time.
Using a tool like Mendix means your enterprise won’t have to compete with Silicon Valley for talent, either. Erie Insurance has created high-ranking and powerful native mobile apps with no on-staff mobile development experience. With Mendix, insurtech enterprises realize digital transformations. With Mendix, they exceed policyholder expectations in less time and with less overhead.
The easy way to build native mobile apps
Mendix is the only low-code platform that allows you to build truly native apps. “Traditional per-platform development is really slow,” said Danny Roest, senior product manager, Mendix. “With cross-platform technologies you can build from a single stack, but it’s still not super fast.”
Mendix removes much of the complexity, set-up, updating, and version management hassle with traditional and cross-platform technologies by building a single visual model on a unified platform. It doesn’t take design or development expertise to mold great user experiences with pluggable widgets, react libraries, and other tools available through Mendix Studio.
With low-code, native mobile architecture, a traditionally paper-driven industry can impact an increasingly paperless world. Offline capabilities become essential for field agents, especially in poor service or low internet connectivity areas. Native mobile builds on Mendix also create more secure apps, so customers can feel safe updating and sending sensitive policy information.
From offline functionality to augmented reality, leveraging native mobile architecture can lead to marketing opportunities, sales growth, and increased retention. With Mendix, complex builds are manageable for you and your IT team, including customer-facing native mobile applications. “With the right makers and mindset,” said Roest. “Anyone can build a native mobile app with Mendix.”
[Want to learn more? Watch Danny’s entire session at Mendix World 2021 session: Everyone Can Build a Native Mobile App with Mendix]
Mendix Simplifies Your Journey to the App Store
Erie Insurance offers auto, home, commercial, and life insurance products through a network of 12,000 independent agents servicing 12 states and the District of Columbia. Erie set forth to build a native mobile application because they knew their web-responsive product was not meeting their policyholders’ needs.
Erie’s IT team comes from software and not application development. No one on the project had built a native mobile application. As a result, they were cautious not to overlook essential features that users value. Some of the other requirements for the new app included:
- Increasing tap areas
- Reducing scrolling
- Increasing focus on important actions
- Leveraging device-based technologies
“Making the transition to a native application gave us the opportunity to reassess and see if there are any changes that need to be made,” said Mike Grimes, senior software engineer, Erie Insurance. “We wanted to bring the primary actions that our users cared about to the forefront.”
Erie Insurance also wanted to support native functionality, from biometric authorization–a current feature in their new app–to future use cases involving the gyroscope, camera, or other device tools and accessories. Grimes says Erie used a combination of available resources, tools, libraries, and widgets, as well as a combination of third-party and custom-built solutions to accomplish their goal of creating a great user experience that solved problems for insurance customers.
“All the data here, including the list of policies, the agency data, and any active claims that they may have, those are all retrieved through services back to Erie’s data center,” Grimes said. “We were able to accomplish this using the nano-flow to micro-flow interactions. This did not exist when we started using Mendix 8, but was added in a later version and was key to accomplishing our goals of security and reusability.”
[Erie Insurance Senior Software Developer Mike Grimes detail each step of the enterprise’s move from responsive to native mobile in his Mendix World 2021 session: How Erie Insurance created a mobile app with no mobile developers]
The Promise of Insurtech Automation
Customers are loyal to the companies that are there when they need them. The insurance industry knows this perhaps better than any. If you are in an accident or suffer damage to your property, you want your insurance claim to be processed and settled as soon as possible. Low-code, with the help of artificial intelligence, can help your enterprise redefine claims processing.
During a typical claims procedure, a customer may take photographs, describe the incident, and enumerate instances of damage but not convey the necessary information to the claims adjuster. As a result, the adjuster still has to come out and assess the damage, significantly delaying the process. With AI, however, the customer can upload a photo into the app that can be validated and processed quickly and efficiently.
The process of building a custom AI model to determine property damage through a REST API call begins like this:
- Build a native mobile app to create claims and upload photos of the property damage
- Sync data to server, send to the trained model via REST API
- Trained model interprets the image and returns the location of the damage
- Sync back data to the device, display damage on a pluggable widget, notify the customer
- Close the claim
In his lightning-fast Mendix World 2021 session, community manager Jan De Vries shows users how to consume existing third-party artificial intelligence services or even create their own to build better customer user experiences. With Low-code application development, your customers can take a picture and collect on their claim and forget about the processing headaches and delays.
[Watch Jan de Vries Mendix World 2021 session: Build an automated claims process with artificial intelligence]
Mendix Helps Your Team Reach and Retain Customers
Digital transformation comes in stages. Whether you need to incorporate business expertise into your engineering process with citizen development or provide your high-level IT team with ambitious AI intelligent automation goals, Mendix’s Low Code Application Development platform can help you achieve your enterprise’s customer service vision.