No matter the language, knowing where your customers are is essential – whether you’re writing their policy or handling their claim. When you know where they are you can direct them to the right services and the right services to them, you can perform a proper investigation and you can aggregate data and analyze collective risk.
The benefits are pretty clear, so why does it seem so hard to do? If one were to look at auto claims for instance, about 75% of the time it is not possible for a computer to identify the location to a point, a block or an intersection. Think about that, if you wrote the loss location (stored in the claim file) into an internet mapping tool, three quarters of the time it would shrug and say, “don’t know”.
It’s pretty understandable in many respects – who really knows the street name, let alone the longitude and latitude of their local supermarket or exit from the highway? Nor would it be reasonable for underwriters to wander off to the far corners of a farm with a sextant or theodolite to triangulate the exact location of a barn or a wind pump. But, it’s that grammatically correct yet equally vague location information like “Walmart parking lot, New Brunswick” or “NE corner of lot” that ends up in your core system.
We know a lot of end users open Google Maps in another window and use it as an aid when talking to their customers – already recognizing the usefulness of amazing technologies like Google’s StreetView and 3D imagery. The problem is that this use is outside of their workflow, and once the conversation ends, the context they've gained is lost or gets translated into prose.
What you’d need is some way to easily and quickly pinpoint locations directly inside the workflow of a claim or policy submission; we recognized that problem and came up with a new class of Live apps as a solution – data augmentation apps. Apps that not only deliver functional value, by bringing the latest technology directly inside your core system to improve data quality whilst maintaining business context, but that also take care of third party integrations, updates and vendor relationships.
Because these apps, hosted by Guidewire, are embedded within your core system you’ll naturally care about all those nonfunctional requirements - availability, scalability, upgradability, maintainability, usability, security, accessibility and alike. We address those issues by delivering the apps via a technology stack, that we call, Live Inside.
Guidewire Live ViewPoint is the first of the data augmentation apps to be delivered via Live Inside and is available for ClaimCenter 5,6, and 7 and PolicyCenter 7. We officially released ViewPoint in May.
If you’re a Guidewire customer you can log onto the Live University (http://uni.guidewire.com ) and download datasheets, value propositions, watch webinars and get training on the Live ViewPoint app, or just email us at live guidewire.com if you want to know more.