Magnolia CMS Helps Policy Expert Redefine Insurance Market with Focus on Customer Experience

Policy Expert is the first broker to offer the full insurance journey for customers, from comparison right through to claim and renewal. Policy Expert offers business and personal insurance to customers throughout the UK using an innovative online sales model. Although the market is highly competitive, Policy Expert believes that its unique end-to-end customer service model is a key differentiating factor and has set itself ambitious goals for its first year of operation.

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Policy Expert

To make inroads into a highly competitive market and meet this goal, it was important for Policy Expert to choose a CMS solution that offered best-in-class features and would also scale to support its customer base.

After a detailed evaluation of competing options, Policy Expert selected Magnolia CMS as the platform for its customer-facing Website, which today serves more than 100,000 unique visitors per month after launching their first product, home insurance. With Magnolia CMS as its foundation, Policy Expert is well on its way to meeting its goals.

The insurance market is well-known to be an extremely competitive one. However, a lot of insurance websites are merely computer algorithms, churning out quotations in response to user input and care very little about ensuring that end-users receive an optimal insurance policy for their needs. There is therefore a very distinct lack of focus on end-to-end customer management, satisfaction and service.

Policy Expert was created in 2010 to shake up the stagnant insurance marketplace by focusing on customer service and helping customers select the best value policy for their needs. Policy Expert's key differentiating factor is that, unlike any other company on the market, it provides and manages the entire insurance lifecycle, from comparison and purchase through to claim and renewal. It is also unique in that its services are not tied to any single specific insurer, but span multiple insurers, thus ensuring that customers have the widest possible choice yet pay the lowest possible premium.

Policy Expert's technical and managerial team resolved to adopt best-in-class technology platforms from day one. This decision would drive Policy Expert's evaluation and eventual selection of Magnolia CMS as the primary CMS solution for its Website.

Policy Expert had a key advantage in deciding its technology platform. As a start-up, it had no legacy data or software holding it back and so it was able to evaluate available options and take decisions based solely on technical and business suitability for the task at hand. Although Magnolia CMS was always a front-runner, Policy Expert considered various other enterprise class solutions such as before finally deciding that Magnolia CMS was the best fit for its needs.

It was extremely important that we have a scalable solution, one that would support the rapid growth plans that we have for Policy Expert. We also wanted a solution that would be familiar to our development team and based on a Java technology stack. Open source and licensing fees were also a consideration: Magnolia fees seemed on a par with other enterprise-level solutions, but the other benefits it offered put it far ahead. In short, it was a no-brainer. Magnolia ticked all the right boxes for us.

Adam Powell, Head of Operations and Marketing, Policy Expert

CMS features that Policy Expert wanted the best solution for

•  Built-in workflows, versioning, authoring and sign-off processes
• Clear audit histories on changes
• Ability to optimize page structures and templates for SEO purposes
• Rapid page load times

In addition to these, Policy Expert also had other considerations in making their CMS choice:

Familiarity

It was important that the chosen solution be based on a technology stack that Policy Expert's developers were already familiar with to save time and costs. Magnolia CMS was based on the familiar Java/Tomcat stack and also allowed complete customization of templates.

Scalability

Policy Expert fully expected that it would meet its ambitious goal of winning over 100,000 customers in its first year of operation. Scalability was therefore a mandatory attribute for the CMS solution. Magnolia CMS ticked this box via its cluster support, and there are many examples of Magnolia CMS being used on high-traffic enterprise sites.

Integration

As an end-to-end insurance service provider, there are many processes and consumer touch points. Magnolia CMS was able to seamlessly integrate product and pricing data from external insurance vendors, as well as Policy Experts’ own ecommerce, CRM and social media. . This created a unified customer experience and provided Policy Expert with a powerful marketing tool to optimize its products and services.

Cost saving and ROI

As a startup, Policy Expert is highly conscious of costs. It realized the importance of technical support, but it needed to ensure that support costs were reasonable. Magnolia's open source roots and community support were, therefore important factors in convincing Policy Expert that Magnolia CMS was the correct choice

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Policy Expert

Within its first three months of operation, more than 100,000 unique users per month visited the Policy Expert Web site and projections show that within a year these numbers will continue to rise quickly. The company has also grown in size: from 3 employees in March 2010, it shot up to 55 employees in 2011, and is expected to continue expanding rapidly within the next six months to meet the growing demand for its services.

Having selected Magnolia as their CMS, Policy Expert was able to quickly implement and launch the site. Implementation went exceptionally smoothly and the overall project was completed on schedule and on budget.

Magnolia is truly a best-in-class CMS, and we fully expect that it will be the backbone of our site infrastructure and our ability to scale rapidly over the coming months and years. Overall, we're extremely happy with Magnolia - if fact, we have already recommended it as a solution to a number of other businesses.

Adam Powell, Head of Operations & Marketing, Policy Expert.

www.policyexpert.co.uk allows users to compare insurance quotes from carefully-selected vendors, save and retrieve quotes, and complete insurance purchases online. Unlike competing price-comparison sites or third-party insurance brokers, Policy Expert also gives customers a range of self-service tools to manage and renew their policies online, and even make a claim online.