Innovative U.S. Insurer Leverages Next-Generation NETSCOUT Solution to Assure Digital Transformation Success

Customer Profile

This prominent U.S. Insurer offers innovative policy options to its 500,000+ personal and commercial insurance customers, also earning recognition for its regional philanthropic activities.

While numerous Insurance businesses today contemplate expanding business and customer support services to include digital platforms, this Insurer has already earned industry awards acknowledging its successful rollout of next-generation sales and customer service technologies that help better process claims, payments, and policy queries. Beyond industry recognition, these collective initiatives have saved the company millions of dollars, while increasing business satisfaction for customers and contracted Sales Agents alike. One such service is the mobile claims photo application that allowed the Insurer to complete and pay the majority of insurance estimates within 3 days of receiving downloaded images substantiating the claim, which is a great benefit for customers and a selling point for the agents.

Business Challenge

Disruptions in the prompt, efficient responsiveness of the Insurer’s new services are a reflection on the quality of the Insurer’s customer experience, so the IT staff leverages every resource to ensure their availability. Network Operations identified needs associated with addressing slow performance of the new digital insurance applications rolled out to support policy holders and Sales Agents. These performance issues troubled the Insurer on several fronts: business processing of claims was adversely impacted, public perception of these new digital applications was potentially lessened, and the internal Network Operations team shouldered the blame when there was no easy path to absolve network performance from server and application performance root causes.

Along with these new digital applications, the Insurer was experiencing strategic and tactical IT service delivery concerns, with associated service assurance requirements that were frustrating the Network Operations and Telecom teams.

A strategic business priority involved migrating existing Data Center operations from HQ to separate facilities, which translated to overarching Network Operations needs for visibility into, and service assurance coverage of this new network operations environment. Like any IT team undertaking data center transitions, Network Operations required before, during, and after visibility into network and application performance; otherwise, any undetected service delivery issues generated during the data center move could delay sales or customer support functions.

One tactical challenge consuming IT cycles concerned troubleshooting intermittent voice performance anomalies experienced at the Insurer’s Contact Center in processing customer and Sales Agent calls. The Insurer had recently transitioned to a centralized SIP Trunking architecture, and after implementation the Contact Center had suffered from intermittent call quality and call set-up performance issues. Recreating the troubles and trying to pinpoint the original cause of the problems had been unsuccessful, time-consuming, and frustrating for the Telecom team. Unfamiliar with the wider capabilities of nGeniusONE solution, the Telecom team needed a solution to take them beyond simply reacting to the problems to being proactive. Real-time, pervasive voice monitoring would enhance their UC visibility, and granular performance analytics would enable them to better assess voice performance issues.

NETSCOUT Solution

As part of the NETSCOUT solution enhancement, the Insurer expanded its nGeniusONE deployment to include next-generation InfiniStreamNG packet capture appliances and nGenius 5000 Series packet flow switches at its new Data Center locations. These configurations allow the Insurer to operate earlier-purchased InfiniStream® and packet flow switch solutions along-side newly deployed next-generation NETSCOUT packet capture and packet broker solutions.

With NETSCOUT’s recommended practices guidance, the Insurer will tap rather than span to begin to deliver more complete traffic to their existing InfiniStreams in order to capture more relevant data.

NETSCOUT Solution in Action

The expanded NETSCOUT solution provides deep-level visibility into network traffic generated in the Insurer’s new Data Center environment and service assurance coverage for mission-critical workflows. Critical Insurance applications configured in nGeniusONE Service Dashboard views enable the real-time visibility into the end-user experience of both customers and Sales Agents, with the Service Dashboard also providing service alerts when there are any degradations in application, network, and UC service quality, with contextual drill-downs into Service Monitors and packet forensics for granular analysis.

In improving Contact Center efficiency for Sales Agent and customer calls, the Telecom team is now equipped with an nGeniusONE solution designed to resolve problems quickly and reduce mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR), while identifying underlying root causes of Unified Communications service performance problems in both the network and voice service applications. Leveraging NETSCOUT’s smart data, nGeniusONE will enable the Telecom team to view performance data according to a range of keys that include location (community of Insurer users, customers, or Sales Agents), Quality of Service level, codec, VLAN, servers, and applications. Of particular relevance to this Insurer, nGeniusONE provides proactive, continuous monitoring and visibility into registration, call setup, teardown latencies, and response times in its voice environment, as well as for SIP Trunk interoperability issues.

The NETSCOUT nGenius Packet Flow Switch solution enables multiple Insurer IT groups to aggregate, replicate, and manage network traffic flows to enhance application and voice performance monitoring.

Business Value

The expanded nGeniusONE solution addresses the Insurer’s latest digital platform and UC technology performance challenges, while also extending the return on investment offered by the current NETSCOUT deployment.

With nGeniusONE, the Insurer benefits by offering improved quality of experience for both customers and Sales Agents, with the collective IT organization now equipped with next-generation smart data and smart performance analytics necessary for identifying and responding to potential performance degradations before users are impacted.

The NETSCOUT solution also promotes new Network and Telecom teams’ synergies, furthering the Insurer’s goals for operational efficiencies and improved productivity for IT staff. NETSCOUT makes the Insurer’s IT teams more effective in getting to root cause of issues before they impact mission-critical applications and affect revenue.