Celerity enables the digital agenda of a major US retail bank

Challenge: Over the last several years, our client has pursued a strategy to migrate the majority of sales, marketing and servicing capabilities to the online channel. In order to prepare for this growth in the online channel, our client needed to fundamentally change the manner in which they managed their online presence. The desired result was an adaptable, scalable online delivery model that ensured responsive support with the highest levels of quality. Furthermore, the client desired an outsourced solution to design, implement and operate the new online delivery model.

Solution: Celerity designed a new online delivery model, based on a flexible organizational structure. The initial team provided flexible capacity to support design, development and content changes to the client’s web properties. Over the course of the engagement, Celerity’s team and delivery model have grown and matured in line with the client’s online strategy. Utilizing adaptable, agile-based methodologies as well as web portal and content management technologies, Celerity has continued to effectively and efficiently support the client’s increased web presence.

Results: Celerity’s teams have grown and adapted alongside the client as their sales, marketing and servicing efforts continue to expand on the Web and mobile platforms. Today, Celerity operates a 60+ person managed service engagement within the client’s eCommerce organization and manages all design, content and development activities for the client’s public facing web properties. Our ability to work within the client’s environment, handle large amounts of change, and provide flexible management and delivery models has allowed the client to focus on strategic growth related initiatives and expand their digital presence.

 

Celerity Innovation Center launches state-of-the-art Small Group Sales platform for top US Healthcare provider.

Challenge: Our client’s existing process for the marketing and enrollment of Small Groups, containing 2 to 50 employees, was a paper-based process requiring extensive manual steps. This time-consuming process produced a very high rate of errors and omissions, requiring rework on over 90% of the enrollment applications.

Celerity’s client desired to create a product selection experience for its customers to increase direct sales, migrate towards a self-service model, empower consumers in their health care decisions, reinforce the company’s brand and help educate its customers in making choices in the era of Healthcare reform. The client also wanted a workflow system for a plan selection tool and an electronic form submission tool to enable producers and subscribers.

Background: Located in downtown Pittsburgh, the Celerity Innovation Center delivers user-centered digital solutions for diverse platforms (web, mobile devices, iPad) and is a key value proposition for our clients, as it provides the processes, techniques and tools to create business changing user experiences.

Solution: Initially, Celerity was selected to develop a roadmap for this new vision and to gather the business and technical requirements for creating the online product selection experience. Based on our success in developing the roadmap and the introduction of user-centric design techniques to conceptualize the user experience and capture requirements, Celerity was awarded the business for the design, development and deployment of the online solutions encompassing product selection experience, small group sales, HHIC pre-reform policy migrations, and the Medicare/Medicaid market.

The rapid delivery approach created by the Celerity Innovation Center utilizes strong communication between Celerity teams and the client, allowing parallel efforts across all facets of a project: requirements, design, development and testing.

With a strong focus on user centered design, the Celerity Innovation Center team worked closely with underwriters and independent insurance brokers to determine the optimal user experience. The User Experience and Business Analytics teams led over 20 broker meetings, iteratively defining and validating user needs to ensure the final product exceeded end user expectations.

Engaging early with our client’s IT organization, Celerity’s Architecture team identified over 40 interfaces to back-end systems and developed the integration architecture concurrent with business requirement definition.

Development followed a modified SCRUM process, delivering frequent, incremental releases allowing rapid identification of issues, early test visibility and better requirements management.

Using Java-based technologies with extensions to enable Android and iPad/iPhone platform capabilities, the solution provides a rich, multimedia web experience, where the client’s members are guided through the product selection process by an interactive video/audio host.

Results: Just seven months after the start of the engagement, Celerity delivered the production-ready application. The Plan Advisor implements new workflows for brokers, employers, employees and internal users. The richly interactive experience contains specialized interfaces for each user group designed to maximize productivity and minimize errors.