LEVERAGING DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

to modernise the insurance purchasing process and elevate the customer experience.

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THEIR STORY

Laferla is a leading insurance provider in Malta, with over 35 years of proven experience. The group offers a wide range of insurance products to personal and commercial clients.

Over the years, Laferla has established itself as a market leader in the Maltese insurance industry and has earned an excellent reputation for prompt and fair claim settlements.

As a forward-thinking company, Laferla approached ICON to embark on a digital transformation journey that would modernise their insurance processes and make them the first company, amongst their competitors, to introduce instant online quotes and break away from traditional insurance purchasing processes.

THEIR SUCCESS

Shortly after implementing the new solution, Laferla started reaping the benefits of a digitised insurance purchasing process. Today, the new customer-oriented design allows individuals to easily purchase any insurance policy at their own convenience, in less than five minutes.

The solution has even been recognised on a national scale with Laferla and ICON having won the 2014 eBiz Awards under the category Best eCommerce Website. ICON’s bespoke software solution was not only the first of its kind for Insurance companies in Malta but also increased the online velocity and conversions.

THEIR GOAL

As innovation, increasing customer expectations and disruptive entrants redefine the marketplace, nearly 70% of insurance buyers expect to conduct insurance transactions online.

For this reason, Laferla realised that it needed to embark on a digital transformation journey to enhance its customer experience, convert more business online and meet its customers’ digital needs. Laferla reached out to ICON to find a digital solution and attend to its two critical business needs:

  • Revolutionise the insurance industry:
    The vast number of customers and their requests for insurance quotes impacted the company’s efficiency levels and presented several commercial risks to the business. Laferla wanted to improve this process and ensure consistency and speed across its customer onboarding process to guarantee a first-class customer service.
  • Increase Online Sales:
    Laferla knew that to achieve higher conversions, they needed to achieve a digital presence which went beyond the online purchasing process and truly focused on eliminating the customer pain points.

Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out. Laferla Insurance has worked day in day out with ICON to create its new website. With more than small efforts put in to create this innovative website, we definitely have achieved success for Laferla Insurance agencies’ online future.

We are very pleased with the way that ICON approached this project and how easily our teams managed to work together to create the results that we have achieved.

KEITH LAFERLA

Assistant General Manager at Laferla Insurance

ICON'S SOLUTION

Laferla approached ICON in 2013 when online purchasing in Malta was still a novelty and very few, if any, insurance companies dared to display their prices online. At most, customers would have the ability to submit a quote online, however, the pricing, Know Your Customer (KYC) and payment process happened entirely offline.

Laferla wanted to take a leap forward and be one of the first insurance companies to digitise the online purchasing process. This entailed the design and development of a new web portal which would be integrated to their insurance management system via an API to retrieve/push the relevant data.

Due to its vast portfolio of insurance products, each with their own benefits and eligibility criteria, ICON’s main focus was to make the user experience as simple and user friendly as possible, so as not to discourage users from utilising the online tool.

Traditionally, insurance application processes started by selecting the insurance product, submitting personal details and then receiving a quote.

Together with ICON, Laferla aspired to completely re-engineer and modernise this process by introducing an instant quotation for the most common insurance products, before asking for any personal data or committing to a quote. This presented Laferla with a huge competitive advantage and it was seen very favourably by its customers.

Beyond re-engineering the purchasing process itself, ICON developed the website using the latest techniques of that time (AngularJS.) to reduce page refreshing and empower users to complete the quotation process on one-screen. This presented significant time-saving for the end users, which resulted in more conversions online.

The solution featured a number of constituent elements including:

  • An educational marketing campaign to present the benefits of purchasing online,
  • Design and development of a custom web application which aims to appeal to a wide target audience (targeting both personal and business),
  • Re-engineering of the traditional purchasing process, to instil confidence and offer a fast experience for users to buy online,
  • a centralised customer and service database with multiple layers of business intelligence and automated processing of tasks,
  • a middleware layer connecting to third-party software to obtain the latest data on services, premiums, terms and rates,
  • Cloud hosting solution which can scale to meet peaks in business demand,
  • Robust technical support and maintenance plan to ensure high performance and stability of the system,
  • Digital marketing campaign to drive online insurance sales.

ICON continued to work with Laferla over the years, striving to improve its insurance solution with innovative technology, functionality and a competitive digital strategy.

Learn more about our bespoke insurance software solutions and transform your business today.