Case Study: Esurance

Duck Creek delivers as promised…Esurance business analysts create and maintain their own rates and underwriting rules. Solution scales to handle volume and response time in real-time environment.

Duck Creek Product(s) Used:

EXAMPLE Platform® Product Suite:

• EXAMPLE Author®
• EXAMPLE Server®

Esurance Overview:

Esurance is a direct-to-consumer auto insurance company, offering its quality products and services online through the company’s Web site, www.esurance.com. With its proprietary technology, Esurance takes the inconvenience out of shopping for, buying, and managing auto insurance by automating and streamlining traditional processes. This innovation enables Esurance to operate at reduced overhead when compared to traditional insurance companies, while still performing the key functions of an insurance provider (pricing, underwriting, customer service, and claims handling).

Esurance is a member of the White Mountains Insurance Group, a publicly traded financial services holding company specializing in property and casualty insurance.

Esurance Business Challenge:

Because of the real-time nature of their business, delivering insurance products and services directly to consumers via the Internet, Esurance needed the ability to easily and quickly handle the inevitable and never-ending changes to rates and underwriting rules, while also supporting large volumes of traffic on their Web site with a quick response time.

Other rating systems did not offer the desired rating flexibility and seemed to have scalability issues in terms of the volume anticipated by the company, all of which would result in less-than-acceptable response times. Esurance needed a solution that would enable their business analysts to update rates and underwriting rules, without being dependent on its IT programming staff. By empowering the business analysts with the right tools, Esurance felt they would achieve multiple benefits, including reduced miscommunication, cycle time, and costs.

Esurance is committed to consumers and was not willing to compromise on response times. So, whatever solution Esurance selected, it had to be able to consistently provide response times of less than two seconds, preferably one second – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Also, whatever solution they selected had to integrate well with the Esurance back office environment, which is comprised of a variety of highly customized solutions from multiple vendors.

The Solution:

Esurance began their search for available solutions that would meet all of their specifications. After evaluating numerous third party vendor solutions, they selected two components of Duck Creek’s EXAMPLE Platform (EXAMPLE Author®, EXAMPLE Server®). In addition to the technology, functionality, and flexibility offered with the Duck Creek solution, Esurance felt very comfortable with the Duck Creek team, their insurance and technical knowledge, enthusiasm about their products, and their ability to effectively work with the Esurance IT staff and operations team.

Built on Microsoft technologies and utilizing XML, Duck Creek’s EXAMPLE Platform integrates well with Esurance’s complex back office environment which includes Optio for document generation and SIS for billing.

Benefits to Esurance:

The Duck Creek decision was first made in January 2003. In just two months, Esurance was already in production with two states. As of January 2004, they are now in production with 10 of their 15 states.

To put it simply, Duck Creek did what they promised they would do: Esurance business analysts were totally self-reliant and able to create and update rates and underwriting rules, and they met the required quick-response time. In fact, business analysts were maintaining their own rates and underwriting rules on day one of production. And, the Duck Creek solution easily handles the current volume and is expected to meet Esurance’s growing volume needs.

“’Delivering as promised’ sounds like a basic that every firm should meet, but not many firms deliver on this basic business principle like Duck Creek. From my viewpoint, it was a great experience. Duck Creek is a firm I can gladly provide an unqualified reference for.”

Chris Henn
Managing Director, Insurance Operations
Esurance

Not only did Duck Creek deliver the promised functionality and technology, but the Duck Creek costs met Esurance expectations with no hidden expenses.

“We did not have to buy any unanticipated hardware or software, and Duck Creek has been very helpful when we had questions or the inevitable glitch. So, the support we were promised has also been there.”

Chris Henn

In addition to satisfying business analysts, the Duck Creek solution has also allowed the IT staff to focus on other mission critical activities, with the confidence that the business analysts have the tools and capabilities in place to manage their own rating and underwriting environment.

“Duck Creek software has performed as advertised and has definitely reduced the workload of the programming department. The Duck Creek support team has been very responsive.”

Phil Swift
Managing Director and CIO
Esurance

With their innovative approach to high quality and efficient product delivery and service, Esurance is well recognized by the industry and continually receives awards from both analyst and consumer publications. Approximately 90% of visitors to the Esurance site also rate their online car insurance experience as “Excellent” or “Good.”

Esurance was named one of Forbes Magazine’s “Best of the Web” picks for the convenience of online car insurance quotes, great customer service, and special auto insurance discounts. Esurance is also proud to have been recognized by Change Sciences as the “#1 Auto Insurance Web Site for Ease of Use,” and has consistently received high marks from a leading consumer product evaluation publication.