The Allstate Life Sales Central project was a year-long agile project aimed at designing a modern version of a tool used by field agents to model life insurance policies, offering them a vastly improved experience that is efficient, modern, and easier to use alongside customers.
The application marked a significant change in how field agents could run accurate quotes for customers in the field. Previously, they had only a desktop application available to them that lacked Internet connectivity, and often based quotes on out-of-date monetary values (such as interest rates). The new application was web-based and responsive.
To chart future release schedules, we evaluated the variety of improvements and features our business analysts had in the roadmap, then organized them around Allstate's enterprise-wide release schedule windows.
User journeys were used at the outset to help analyze the relationship lifecycle between agent and customer, helping us identify pain points in the process. Ultimately, our focus centered on the quote portion of the journey.
Users flows were created and used extensively to evaluate the variety of ways agents can navigate the application and individual quotes, helping us reduce complexity and provide logical pathways to key tasks they must complete.
The original application was built several years ago on a .net platform. It was a standalone application with no web connectivity, and was plagued with inaccurate data when used in the field. Throughout our research and interviews with users, we uncovered an endless amount of pain points in how they interacted with the application. While the future application wasn't intended to be shared directly with customers, the old application made it nearly impossible to make any sense of quote options to customers as users modified them. In cases where agents would show the new interface to customers, making it easy for them to understand everything was one of our main goals.