MIP, one of South Africa's leading software companies, has added dynamic forms to its line of financial services administration applications, based on the Progress Software environment, to give customers greater flexibility and speed of product and service delivery.
The dynamic forms enable a rapid and accurate system for generating questionnaires used across MIP's range of applications that serve contributions and benefits payments needs in healthcare, employee benefits, life assurance, and vehicle warranty and maintenance businesses.
"Many customer-facing forms contain similar questions, common questions or exactly the same questions but in different combinations," says Patrick O'Reilly, group Internet development manager at MIP.
"The forms component that we've developed, now included in all of our applications, collects questions from across the organisation and makes them available through a simple selection process to users who create questionnaires. It means that they can rapidly create, change or update questionnaires and that organisations enjoy a standardised approach across all divisions, products and services.
"And the fact that a question is defined only once, and reused across any number of questionnaires, means that answer sheet data becomes meaningful for statistical analysis even beyond the scope for which the questionnaire was originally intended.
"For example, this approach is invaluable in managed healthcare environments where every interaction with a patient can now provide an opportunity to learn more about the wellbeing of the individual, rather than being focused on just a specific chronic condition."
The dynamic forms questionnaires can, if desired, also pre-select answers to questions based on customers' historical data. The system means that company agents can prompt customers in specifically suitable scenarios to help improve the speed at which information is captured, which leads to a better customer experience, and the same applies to Web-facing forms.
This development builds on MIP's application development platform that already contains call centre and workflow components that were developed, tested and established in recent years.
"The call centre component has very strong call logging services that have been integrated with telephony to link calls with customer data," says O'Reilly.
The workflow component enables applications to define activities and string them together into processes. The workflows contain embedded rules and provide integration into applications.
"The workflow can drive activities in the application," says O'Reilly. "In a typical scenario, users select activities from menus, but with the workflow driving activities it sends a user an activity update with a prompt the user can click to open the activity. The workflow prioritises action items based entirely on defined service levels, so the system is geared toward meeting, or even exceeding, the customer's service expectations. From a management perspective, this provides transparency into identifying process bottlenecks so that the business can address these immediately."
MIP has extensive experience in the industries in which it operates and its systems touch the lives of nearly four million South Africans every day.
"Constant changes in the market, in regulations and legislation contribute to the dynamic nature of the industries we serve," says O'Reilly, "which is why we develop software that incorporates all of the latest changes and keeps our clients current. Investing in technology enables us to future-proof our solutions and we strictly adhere to industry standards."
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