Business Benefits
- 12 weeks to the first MVP—instead of months or nearly a year
- Of 2 million pieces of incoming paper per year, roughly half are now digital
The Story
As an independent trust agency that administers workers’ compensation and no-fault insurance for Ontario workplaces, the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) has no real competition in its delivery of wage loss benefits, medical coverage, and help getting back to work. Nevertheless, this 103-year-old organization is committed to delivering what matters most to Ontario’s workers and employers: the best possible outcome following an injury on the job via fast, accessible service and fair benefits at a fair price.
This philosophy spurred WSIB to replace its internally built systems with Guidewire InsuranceSuite to gain flexibility and enable a faster response to business changes, including meeting the demands of a distributed mobile environment.
Its technology initiative is propelling WSIB far into a digital future with the establishment of a Digital Factory, which is described as a “way of working” by Samantha Liscio, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer. The Digital Factory combines:
- A service design approach that looks at how customers consume products and services
- A product ownership component that ensures that the individual who owns the product manages its lifecycle and performance
- An IT dev ops component—an agile way to use tech to address customer needs
“All three things come together to produce production-ready minimum viable products that are iterative and collaborative,” said Liscio.
Deploying additional Guidewire Core and Digital applications to further modernize its infrastructure, WSIB is set to boost operational efficiencies and enhance its users’ experience.
For example, WSIB recognized a customer pain point—injured claimants who had to fill out a paper form and fax it back to the company. Using its Digital Factory approach, the insurer identified a digital quick win. It would develop a digital document upload tool so that claimants could snap a quick picture with their phone or send a digital document directly to the company. Once received, the documents would be uploaded directly to InsuranceSuite, which already runs all of WSIB’s claims business.
“In fact, we were able to capture those documents and they went directly into the back-end systems and were ingested right into Guidewire,” said Liscio. “And that happened almost instantaneously. It’s been hugely successful for us.”
Regardless of an insurer’s size, Liscio says, employing customer focus groups, establishing customer journey maps, and identifying customer personas is the way forward. “The entire service design practice needs to be effective so that you can truly understand customer needs and pain points, and then be able to fix those. But you also need to check that what you’re doing is actually addressing those customer needs.”
