DIY Means Design It Yourself

When most people think about designing something — a car, a software program, a rocket, the perfect in-laws, an insurance product — they usually think about something difficult and pretty messy. It doesn’t have to be that way, at least not always.

Our customers were asking us for a toolset to give them maximal flexibility and maximal independence with minimal complexity. As we listened to their requests and took them to heart, we decided we had two options:

1. We could make them completely dependent on us to do all of the things they wanted to do by themselves.
2. We could give them access to exactly the same toolset our designers and developers use, which would enable them to do all the things they wanted to do by themselves.

After careful deliberation, a few sleepless nights, and a seance or two, we chose Option 2.

How Do We Define Success?

“What do our customers want us to do?” We could answer that question in a multitude of ways: They want us to process their insurance transactions. They want us to manage their claims. They want us to bill their policyholders. They want us to give them the best software we can develop to do those things. The list of answers goes on. All of them are only partly correct. What our customers really want us to do is to enable them to do more business more easily, more efficiently, more accurately, and less laboriously. That’s just what our Design Studio does.

We gave our Design Studio an intuitive user interface. We created pre-built line of business templates. We provided drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG fields and process aspects. We enabled real-time collaboration. We included report wizards. We developed automated regression testing. And we made sure users could administer security administration down to the level of individual fields.

It gives our customers exactly as much self-sufficiency as they want. We meet them online in our Design Lab. In joint design sessions, we work with them to establish functional objectives. We teach them how to configure the Suite, their products, their states, and their lines of business. We show them how to do those things simply and efficiently. We tell them they can have all the autonomy they want, but we’ll always be there to help them out and to back them up. That’s why we define our success by the success of our customers.

But help with your in-laws? Not so much.