How Cognizant Built a Virtual Life Insurance Sales Environment on Unqork’s Codeless Platform

By Craig Weber, Head of Life and Annuity Strategy – Cognizant
By Chandresh Kothari, Head of Insurance – Unqork
By Santanu Goswami, Principal Architect – Cognizant
By Cheng Xu, Principal Solution Architect – AWS

Most life insurance and annuity policies are purchased with the help of an agent. Consumers benefit immensely from the insights and advice they receive during these face-to-face interactions.

Insurers also benefit because agents are experts at making and maintaining relationships. Even more tactically, they know how to convert prospects into buyers.

In the post-pandemic era, however, consumers are increasingly less likely to interact with agents in traditional ways. For example, the “kitchen table sale” is being replaced by virtual sales tools that do not replicate and reinforce human relationships. As a result, consumer satisfaction and sales are both at risk.

By following the creed of “intuition engineered” while partnering with Unqork and Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cognizant brings a new consumer interaction model to life. The result is a natural, dynamic way to facilitate the critical new business conversations between agents and consumers, where traditional interaction tools fall short.

In this post, we will explain how the Cognizant eApp Collaboration Solution, built on Unqork’s codeless development platform using AWS serverless architecture, brings increased engagement and productivity to the virtual new business experience.

With over 46,000 professionals and 270+ clients, Cognizant Insurance has a footprint across all major insurance lines of business. Clients include top insurers, reinsurers, and retirement benefits providers. The practice supports insurers in developing and executing IT and business strategies, focusing on core systems, data and analytics, ecosystems, consumer experience, and digital transformation.

Cognizant eApp Collaboration Solution

The Cognizant eApp Collaboration Solution gives insurance agents and customers a comfortable and productive workspace for working through an insurance application.

By bringing together Cognizant’s domain expertise, Unqork’s codeless architecture for the enterprise, and AWS’s automation, intelligence tools, and infrastructure, the solution offers a compelling alternative to a clunky video or phone call. It facilitates a natural conversation, which allows the agent to focus on traditional relationship building.

The solution is cloud-based to help reduce development time and maintenance, and combines next-generation tools resulting in a highly automated, seamless consumer experience.

The overall effect is the agent and consumer can have a natural conversation as if they were face to face. The technology behind the solution processes information from the conversation, determines its relevance, and populates the electronic application supporting the sale. Using a reflexive workflow and case management approach reduces the number of process steps required and generates results faster.

The Cognizant eApp Collaboration Solution provides a digital platform for data capture, thereby minimizing all paperwork. The application supports an interactive display where both parties can see the data being captured, plans being recommended with different quote values, quicker real-time decision making, and purchase completion, including digital signature, e-payment, and a soft copy of the final policy.

The transparency of the process makes the customer confident, resulting in a higher conversion ratio. In addition, the solution helps the agent complete the policy application via speech-to-text conversion.

The Cognizant eApp Collaboration Solution can ingest customers’ health and medical data through integration with Human API. Before the purchase, the customer can view the entire policy application, e-sign it through DocuSign, and pay the premiums online over a Stripe gateway.

Figure 1 – Solution flow diagram.

Architecture Considerations

The unique mix of serverless and codeless reduces the development timelines and pushes technology transformation faster. Serverless architecture frees customers from undifferentiated heavy lifting in infrastructure management such as server provisioning and maintenance. It also reduces the total cost of system ownership without spending on idle capacity, automatically scales nearly infinitely, and is automatically highly available.

As a result, many customers have decided to achieve such values through a “serverless-first” strategy.

Visibility into eApp’s AWS account activity is a key aspect of security and operational best practices. The eApp solution uses AWS CloudTrail to enable operational and risk auditing, governance, and compliance. To monitor AWS resources used in a customer’s AWS account, eApp uses Amazon CloudWatch to collect and track metrics, collect and monitor log files, and set alarms to improve operational excellence.

Provisioning cloud applications can be challenging, and Cognizant uses the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) to expedite the eApp solution deployment in a safe, repeatable manner.

Unqork abstracts code from the application development process, allowing clients to build applications via cloud-native development that are intuitive, modular, and secure. With Unqork, enterprise organizations can innovate faster, with greater agility, and at a lower cost.

The Unqork enterprise codeless-as-a-service platform is an essential component of the Cognizant eApp Collaboration Solution application, enabling:

• Seamless integrations to complex, disparate systems, and data. It visually integrates all of your systems, including legacy and third-party services like Human API, Stripe, and DocuSign to achieve a 360-view of your entire business.
• Automation of complex, high-stakes workflows. It uses role-based access control (RBAC) swim lanes to orchestrate workflows across internal and external stakeholders and boost productivity.
• Even faster application builds, via a fully loaded marketplace of pre-built, reusable snippets, templates, and integrations to accelerate and scale delivery.

Solution and Architecture Walkthrough

The following section details how the solution delivers business capabilities in each workflow step, the challenges it solves, and the implementation of the architecture.

Figure 2 – Architecture diagram.

Step 1: Interview

Each policy purchase starts with an interview/discussion between the agent and customer. The agent opens the Cognizant eApp Collaboration Solution application using a public-facing URL with the correct credentials and then opens the audio/video chat. The audio/video feature, which allows the customer to view and talk to the agent, improves their confidence.

The implementation is on Amazon Route 53, a highly available and scalable global domain name system (DNS) service. It routes user requests to Amazon CloudFront, which is used for faster, low-latency content distribution. The audio/video platform is custom-built using the Amazon Chime SDK and React, and deployed to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and CloudFront. Call recordings are stored in S3 buckets and protected using S3 server-side encryption.

Amazon API Gateway creates and deploys APIs that access eApp functionalities implemented on the Unqork platform, which is containerized and managed in an Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) cluster. Amazon API Gateway is a fully managed service that makes it easy to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs at any scale.

Unqork’s single-tenant architecture satisfies the most stringent security and reliability requirements. Being single-tenant allows for ultimate security, dependability, and customization for the customer.

AWS PrivateLink keeps the network traffic between Amazon Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) of Unqork’s AWS account and the customer’s AWS account within the AWS network, without using public IPs and without requiring traffic to traverse across the Internet.

Step 2: Needs Analysis

The agent captures customer data in different intake forms in the needs analysis step. Cognizant’s eApp uses AWS Lambda to trigger AWS pre-trained artificial intelligence (AI) services to reduce manual key-in and improve the quality of data capture.

The audio recorded is converted to text using Amazon Transcribe, which helps populate fields like name, email, and mobile number with a mouse click. In addition, Amazon Comprehend Medical extracts the health data in the audio to fill the health data capture sections.

Personal identifiable information (PII) like mobile number, occupation, and mailing address are available to the agent when filling out the form effortlessly. The agents also see the transcript of the call below the “call” area as they speak to the customer.

Step 3: Medical Inputs

The customer’s medical data is pulled in by integrating Human API interfaces with Unqork. Human API provides clinical/medical data from external sources, which Cognizant eApp Collaboration Solution uses to capture vitals like height, weight, body mass index (BMI), and health issues.

Users can store, transmit, and receive electronic protected health information (ePHI) in a HIPAA-compliant manner with Unqork, whose platform is inherently transparent and auditable. This makes it easy to achieve certification for a wide variety of compliance frameworks.

All data captured in the application are stored in Amazon DynamoDB, which is a fast, flexible, NoSQL database service for single-digit millisecond performance at any scale. PII like name, mailing address, email, occupation, mobile number, height, weight, BMI, and social security number in DynamoDB is fully encrypted at rest using encryption keys stored in AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS).

Step 4: Recommendations

The eApp solution has built-in analytics for near real-time recommendations to agents, including product suggestions.

This feature is named “Cogenie” and provides the agent a considerable advantage through engaging and contextual conversation with the customer while also improving the deal closing rate. In addition, it allows the agent to pick words displayed to them by converting the customer’s speech to text.

Step 5: Finalization

Before the policy finalization, customers can choose between Individual or Trust as beneficiary type and add beneficiary details along with the allocation percentage. They can view and update beneficiary details of all existing policies with the insurer.

For identity verification, customers must add the last two years of residence and usage of controlled substances in the past 10 years. As an optional feature offering, Cognizant can leverage Unqork’s integration with LexisNexis Risk Solution to implement advanced analytics for better identity management, authentication, and verification capabilities to fight fraud.

Step 6: Sales

To complete the policy sales process, the customer e-signs the document and pays the charges. These are available in Cognizant eApp Collaboration Solution using DocuSign API integration for the e-signature and Stripe payment gateway API integration for e-payment, respectively.

Unqork enables seamless integrations with external services such as DocuSign, Stripe, Salesforce, LexisNexis, Human API, TransUnion, and more without changing any underlying infrastructure.

Step 7: Closure

Once the application is in good order, the agent may review it with the client or submit it to underwriting. A more pleasant customer experience has been seamlessly facilitated, with great efficiency for the agent, and improved data quality to kick off the underwriting process.

Cognizant, Unqork, and AWS Collaboration

Cognizant, Unqork, and AWS collaborated to create a business ecosystem with a human-centric focus on the hyper-scale partner platform, resulting in the swift delivery of the Cognizant eApp Collaboration Solution.

Cognizant is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and leading professional services company transforming clients’ business, operating, and technology models for the digital era. Its unique industry-based, consultative approach helps clients envision, build, and run more innovative and efficient businesses.

Unqork is an AWS Partner whose enterprise codeless-as-a-service platform helps leading organizations build, deploy, and manage complex software without having to think about code. Unqork created the Codeless Architecture standard, which frees the world’s largest enterprises from the pitfalls of legacy code and allows them to focus on innovation to drive business and maintain a competitive edge.

Driven by the vast capabilities of no-code platforms and their ability to accelerate rapid digital transformation, Cognizant established a partnership with Unqork’s leading enterprise codeless development platform. This partnership has resulted in 15+ engagements, 360 relationships, and 180+ trained professionals, growing through the train-the-trainer program, collaborations and hackathons, and joint-marketplace offerings like the Cognizant eApp Collaboration Solution.

“We are thrilled to partner with AWS and Unqork in developing this solution,” says Mahesh Natarajan, Head of Strategy at Cognizant Insurance. “We believe this partnership demonstrates the art of the possible in emerging insurance ecosystems, where domain knowledge and emerging capabilities come together in new and powerful ways.”

Business Benefits to Cognizant

• Reduced development time using Unqork’s enterprise codeless development platform on AWS.
• Insurance domain and technical knowledge make it easier to refine and enhance the eApps.
• Ready to deploy CDK automation scripts speed up any insurance company to be market-ready faster.
• Insurance client network to demo the solution and gain mind share/market share.

Business Benefits to Unqork

• Launch new products faster and with a 70% reduction maintenance costs with 100% visual development.
• Enterprise customers have saved 188 million lines of code, avoided $679 million in technical debt, and reduced bugs by 600x.
• Access deep industry expertise—over one-third of Unqork’s customers are Fortune 500, including six of the top 10 life and annuities carriers.
• Minimize risks with enterprise-grade security, ensuring SDLC governance and that security, roles, and permissions meet enterprise standards with SOC 2 Type II and Privacy Shield.

Conclusion

Cognizant’s eApp Collaboration Solution is ready to install an omnichannel digital experience solution for insurers to take the policies and plans to the end customer and secure a sale virtually.

Since it’s built on Unqork’s codeless development platform, including AI/ML capabilities and managed services from AWS, development and feature enhancement are faster with the almost negligible hassle of maintenance.

This solution was conceived by Cognizant’s domain leaders and delivered in partnership with Unqork and AWS to bring to life a human-centric and digitally driven channel to sell life insurance products.