Good news: Thanks to mobile technology and other recent innovations, insurance customers can find instant customer service and real-time policy information and updates at the touch of a button.
Bad news: This technology can be expensive to develop, and the cost can create an “app gap” — making it harder for smaller, locally-based companies to compete with giants like Geico.
Our client, a midsized insurance carrier, came to us with this problem last year. The small firm prided itself on its customer service, offering personalized attention to each policyholder. But they couldn’t afford to match the experience offered by a competitor, a huge national agency who’d created a mobile phone app to allow customers to check their policies and get updates and quotes on demand, on the go. Island Insurance embraced the Open Gambit philosophy when, instead of throwing up their hands and giving up, they came to us to ask if we could make a mobile app for them, that could provide the same functionality as the big company’s app for a fraction of the development cost.
It was a challenge — a new and exciting one for a team who hadn’t yet taken on the world of mobile software. Luckily for us, Google’s Android phone had recently had a successful release, boasting a software platform that would allow developers to create and sell open-source applications. We were eager to try out the Android development process, which had been the biggest news to hit the open source community for quite some time. And with some tweaking and repurposing of code, we managed to fulfill our client’s request — we created an elegant, user-friendly app that any policyholder who had an Android phone could use to access instant information and customer service.
The carrier’s customers were happy to get such convenient service, the company itself was relieved to have one less thing to worry about in the struggle to compete with bigger providers… and our team at Open Gambit was excited for the future. Android’s app market is a huge new frontier for open source developers, and we’d just taken one giant leap into this new world. After our success with our first mobile app project, who knows what kind of high-tech challenge we’ll be asked to take on next? With great clients like this one, who are always willing to ask “why not?” we know we’ll be ready for whatever the next big thing turns out to be.