Chubb Launches Personal Lines Site

Building on existing personal lines Web pages within its public Web site, Chubb (Warren, NJ) has collaborated with IBM Global Services to provide an interactive personal insurance Web site to serve customers and agents.

The site, www.chubb.com/personal, enables customers to register and log-on to pay bills and view billing information, check the status of claims, access policy information and view recent home appraisal reports, according to Chubb. Agents are able to access client policy claim billing and appraisal information and download current information from Masterpiece Manager, the carrier's valuable articles coverage documentation system. Agents are also given the opportunity to co-brand content through importing of their own logo and contact information on customers' main policy information screens, as well as other policy information, billing, appraisal and claim screens.

Chubb redeployed the enhanced personal lines online portal to address needs largely held in common by customer and agent, according to Alan Davies, senior tech consultant, application architecture. "Part of it was to allow agents to be able to get to the same functionality as their customers, on the customers' behalf," Davies explains. As an added benefit, he adds, "the agents, have found the site to be useful for their own purposes, beyond simply assisting customers in using the site or interpreting it."

Davies characterizes the creation of the site as a co-development effort with IBM Global Services (Armonk, NY). "They played a large role in terms of the project management and supplying some skilled resources," Davies says. "Chubb also partnered, essentially, in architecture and in development with some skilled resources we had."

The site is a Java servlet application using JFP technology, according to Davies, which runs on IBM WebSphere application servers. "It's essentially a Java thin client," he says. "Integration with our legacy systems was done through IBM's MQ series."

Among the objectives of the site, Davies says, are to establish a foundation for delivering more Web-based functionality and reducing call center load. "Self-service isn't really the direction, but for those things that we might want to enable the end customer to do or request, we now have a channel," he says.

Even though the site wasn't developed with the agents in mind specifically, their reaction has been positive, according to Davies. "We've gotten tremendous response from agents giving us a clear message that this is a great way for us to deliver some more functionality to them," he says. "So, as we start to build things that are tailored to them, we think that will be very successful."

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio