Firmen Online – Allianz
Award Category
Innovation
Innovation
FirmenOnline was developed in order to serve the digital needs of our corporate customers.
It was decided that the predecessor customer portal had to be replaced in order to create a
best in class customer portal in terms of architecture, functionalities and services and, most
important, customer experience.
Besides offering best in class products for corporate pension schemes, we want to offer best
in class services for policy administration. FirmenOnline hast two portals. The employer
portal (launched in April 2018) offers intuitive, digital services that significantly simplify the
administration processes of corporate pension schemes. The administrative tasks for human
resources employees become more efficient and transparent. The employee portal
(launched in June 2018) is a great benefit to all employees, as the digital access to the
corporate pension scheme becomes a lot easier.
The conceptualization and set-up of FirmenOnline was driven by the goal to make this
platform the core of our ecosystem-offering to corporate customers.
FirmenOnline was completely developed by cross functional teams in an agile set-up, truly
following the principle of customer centricity. Since launching the platform, the number of
users and activity on the platform steadily increase. The improvement of the platform is
honored by customers and our sales force.
In 2014, Allianz Life started to systematically digitize existing products and services to
address changing customer needs by providing information and advisory, tools for fast
quotes as well as fully digital sales journeys. But change does not only affect the products
and services, but also the people involved: Employees as well as brokers or tied-agents
need to be supported when dealing with or developing the new digital products and services.
In so called "Agile Training Centers", which have been introduced in 2016, cross functional
teams are trained on the job using agile methods for product/service development. We also
created digital "Co-Location" workspaces to foster innovation and agile methods in everyday
work. We are currently transforming into an agile organization at scale.
With "Kaiser X", a digital agency by Allianz, the focus is put on customer centricity and user
experience when developing innovative products and services.
Uniqueness
There are only a few players (no insurance companies) that offer digital service platforms for
the administration of corporate pension schemes. So it is strategically important for us (and
for other insurance companies) to not depend on their pricing mechanisms.
FirmenOnline can be considered an incremental innovation as the platform replaces the
predecessor portal. However, the way it was developed, can be considered a milestone in
customer centric product/service development. For every feature and functionality user tests
were performed early on and were integral part of the development cycles.
Putting the platform at the core of a broader ecosystem it will be the basis for the future
product and service offering for corporate customers. It will secure the customer touchpoint
and does provide the possibility to scale business through the platform. FirmenOnline will
ensure the market leader position for Allianz Lifeinsurance also in the long run.
Implementation
FirmenOnline was developed in our agile training center. The MVP was developed by four
separate product teams. One of the main challenges was the great number of stakeholders
that had to be managed in the development process. It also was a challenge to synchronize
the agile development of the digital frontend with our backend systems.
Since the launch of the platform the performance is constantly monitored using Grafana. In
addition user behavior is being monitored in order to constantly improve the application.
The architecture of FirmenOnline is based on cloud foundry and amazon web services,
which enables an elastic infrastructure. Continuous Integration and Delivery is ensured by
the build pipeline through Jenkins and test automatization. The employee portal was build
using the OneMarketing Platform based on the Adobe Experience Manager. It is very user
friendly and intuitive. An employee portal can be set up within just five minutes. The portal
uses Adobe Analytics for further improvement.
The development of the platform was done using iMacs to provide developers with a modern
set of development tools such as IntelliJ, Eclipse, Netbeans, Oracle JDK for Java 8, XCode,
Apple Developer Account, Citrix for Virtual Client, Sketch, Axure, Adobe Creative Cloud,
Invision.
In 2019 we will develop the functionality for third party contract administration. Further
features will include interfaces to HR systems (SAP, Datev, HeavenHR) and the
implementation of backend services for automated workflow processing. On the employee
side we will use the customer touchpoint to scale through personalization and widening of
the product offering.
We will develop the FirmenOnline platform into an open insurance platform for corporate
pensions.
Project Organization
FirmenOnline was developed by four cross functional product teams in an agile setting.
Cross functional teams mean that we have one product owner with end2end responsibility
who prioritizes the MVP backlog. Part of the team are business analysts, frontend/backend
developers, IT architects as well as an agile master.
In order to orchestrate and synchronize the product teams the role of ”business product
owner“ was established. It is within the responsibility of the business product owner to
manage the various stakeholders involved. These include sales force channels, the
corporate business segment, operations and IT.
The agile setup involved using new methods of collaboration such as scrum and pair
programming. The communication within and amongst the product teams was managed
using Jira, confluence and hipchat.
Results
The new platform FirmenOnline is widely accepted with corporate customers and sales
partners.
Since launch of the employer portal in 2018, we get close to 5.000 users. of which 65% are
monthly active users. This results into a total of 42.000 logins in 2019. Through the
FirmenOnline platform already more than 8.200 new corporate pension contracts were
signed. In the first quarter of 2019, more than 2.000 agents already created more than 2.600
employee portals for their respective corporate clients.
In 2018 the platform was awarded the “Diamond Star Award” by the “Handelsblatt yearly
conference for corporate pensions”.