Case Study

European Insurer Streamlines Agent, User Experience With NETSCOUT

European Insurer Streamlines Agent, User Experience With NETSCOUT

Highlights

The Challenge
  • Oracle CRM issues hindering agent communications, insurance transactions 
  • IT lacking data center visibility into Oracle environment performance 
 The Solution 
  • nGeniusONE® Service Assurance platform 
  • NETSCOUT® InfiniStreamNG® appliances 
  • NETSCOUT Packet Flow Operating System™ software for Certified PFS 5100 
The Results
  • Reliable agency communications and insurance processing assured in advance of COVID-19 demands 
  • Software-based PFS and installed NETSCOUT platform used to resolve issue with low CapEx burden 

Customer Profile

This leading Insurance company maintains business operations across Europe and is expanding into new markets in the Americas and Asia Pacific. The company’s success is linked both to this wide geographic coverage and its role as a leading insurance provider in several European countries. 

As part of this multinational presence, the company has built a network of hundreds of companies and business partners, thousands of regional agency locations, and some 75,000 employees. In supporting this infrastructure, the company has established a number of in-country data centers operating in a primary & secondary configuration to balance network traffic and bring architectural solution redundancy. The company uses NETSCOUT solutions to provide visibility into, and real-time monitoring of, these business-critical environments. 

With a healthy financial bottom-line across the regional markets served, the company had the means to establish a number of emergency provisions to support their customers in response to COVID-19, including: 

  • Establishing dedicated hotlines to support customer calls related to health, coverage, and financial issues 
  • Launching a first-of-its kind Telemedicine center in one European country 
  • Starting emergency funds in numerous countries to help establish pandemic hospitals and support employees, customers, business partners, and long-time healthcare providers 

The Challenge

Wanting to enhance both customer experience and their agents’ efficiency in one service region, the Insurer made the strategic decision to upgrade their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to an Oracle platform operating in a primary data center. As designed, the Oracle CRM offered the potential to improve operational efficiencies, while reducing costs for insurance companies like this one. 

Soon after deploying the CRM, the information technology (IT) team began getting calls about their insurance agents experiencing slow response times between Oracle insurance applications and agency devices. When IT resources attempted to troubleshoot this issue, they soon realized they did not have visibility into this new Oracle CRM environment necessary for real-time monitoring, troubleshooting, and restoring responsive operations for thousands of their regional insurance agent offices. 

Solution in Action

The IT team addressed their CRM visibility issue quickly and economically by adding software-based NETSCOUT packet flow switch appliance technology to their existing nGeniusONE platform to improve network traffic capture and aggregation flowing to their installed InfiniStreamNG (ISNG) appliances. 

With these software-based PFS appliances, IT was able to tap and mirror parts of the network in a manner that improved visibility into the network traffic flowing between the Oracle CRM and application environment. With this change, the ISNG appliances collected network traffic and generated NETSCOUT Smart Data in real-time for nGeniusONE analytics. As a result, nGeniusONE provided both a high-level view into the overall Oracle CRM environment and the granular analytics necessary for both troubleshooting and resolving the issue. 

While the IT team has traditionally realized high value from nGeniusONE’s ability to automatically recognize communication protocols across their environment, the NETSCOUT solution now offers a platform for refined Oracle CRM monitoring and analysis, providing the functionality needed to visualize and troubleshoot: 

  • Busy Oracle servers 
  • Oracle session latencies 
  • Oracle database errors and messages 
  • Load balancing issues within Oracle real application clusters 
  • Oracle issues of most impact to communities of agency users 

The Results

For large-scale businesses managing delivery of increasingly critical financial and insurance transactions during COVID-19, there is an even-greater need for reliable technology platforms used in delivering needed resources to their clients. When the Insurer’s IT team resolved the Oracle CRM issue in early-2020, they were unaware of the future magnitude of their successful troubleshooting in the timeframe preceding the pandemic’s arrival in Europe. With Oracle CRM restored to full operations, their more-than-1,000 geographically distributed insurance agencies today have critical access to customer data necessary for processing claims and financial business desperately needed by so many of their clients. 

For the local IT team, addressing the CRM performance issue with a software-based NETSCOUT packet flow switch solution was attractive, as it reduced capital expenses. Leveraging nGeniusONE and ISNG technology already operating in their data center was also a big win for their organization. 

Eliminating the Insurer’s communication issues with their agencies helped the company to confidently support their customers and realize a leading role in providing regional medical and financial support in the communities they supports during a challenging time.