Life Is Great for Customers Using Insurance Leader's New Portal

"Sun's greatest value to us comes from its scalable and reliable servers which give us the flexibility to plan for future growth and the ability to handle our full range of mission-critical e-business requirements readily. We are happy with the support that Sun has provided in terms of the quality of service and the professionalism of its people." - Mark Lim, Head of Information Technology and eBusiness, Great Eastern

Name of Company

• Great Eastern Life

Industry

• Financial Services

Applications/Solutions

• iPlanet[tm] Web Server 4.1
• iPlanet Application Server 6.0
• elipva ePAF Portal Application Framework
• Oracle 8i database

Products/Services

• Sun Enterprise[tm] 450 server
• Sun Enterprise[tm] 250 server
• Solaris[tm] Operating Environment

Key Business Challenges

• Propel Great Eastern to the forefront of the e-insurer arena
• Provide customers with an alternative channel for communications and transactions 24x7
• Generate leads and pre-sell for life insurance products
• Project hip, dynamic image in line with new corporate positioning

Key Business Solutions

• 270% increase in Web site hit rate
• $500,000 in new premiums in eight months from leads generated online
• Scalability to accommodate future growth plans

Key Alliances

• elipva

Great Eastern Life Assurance synchronized the publication of its totally new Web site with its overall repositioning as a youthful, dynamic insurance provider. Lifeisgreat.com.sg has proven highly popular with customers, who visit it almost three times as often as the old site. While online they learn important information, conduct transactions, and indicate interest in new products - resulting in $500,000 in new business just in the site's first eight months.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. and elipva provided the underlying technology for Lifeisgreat.com.sg. The reliability and service Sun provides have helped the company achieve its goals to date. With Sun's scalability, Great Eastern is unconcerned about the system's ability to support tomorrow's ambitious expansion plans. Sun's operating system, the Solaris[tm] Operating Environment, can easily handle the heavy traffic and data sets - allowing Great Eastern the stability and availability it needed for its new portal.

Singapore and Malaysia's Life Insurance Leader Develops New Internet Strategy
Great Eastern is the undisputed life insurance leader in Singapore and Malaysia. Incorporated in 1908, it is also the oldest and most established life insurance company in the region. In addition to Singapore, where the company is headquartered, and Malaysia, the firm also has business operations in Brunei, Indonesia and a representative office in Shanghai China. Great Eastern is also the only public-listed life insurance company in Singapore.

Great Eastern firmly believes in harnessing technology plans to achieve better customer and agent services, streamline processes and optimize resources. With the growth of the Internet in recent years, the company realized that it could achieve significant time and cost savings, as well as open up innovative ways of customer relationship management, by wisely leveraging this technology.

Great Eastern's old corporate website ran on a Dell server with Coldfusion as its applications software.

"We recognized that the Internet setup in place would be insufficient to propel Great Eastern to the forefront of the e-insurer arena," said Mark Lim, Head of Information Technology and eBusiness for Great Eastern Life. "In addition, the company was undergoing a complete re-positioning exercise. We wanted to shed our conservative and traditional image and be perceived as a dynamic and forward-looking 21 st century company. Our corporate logo, corporate tagline, marketing approach and agency structure all underwent improvements."

As an important part of the plan, Great Eastern decided to re-launch a completely new portal on an open platform that would be highly scalable, flexible and stable. The portal would be renamed Lifeisgreat.com.sg, tying in with the new corporate tagline "Life is great!" and supporting the firm's new corporate image of dynamism and innovativeness. It would serve as an additional platform to communicate, anticipate, plan, advise and satisfy the life needs of customers at every stage of their lives with financial planning at the core - and to enable them to transact online 24x7. The new site was designed to enhance relationships with existing customers while building relationships with new customers. An important objective was to generate leads and pre-sell for life insurance products. The site was also designed to act as an alternative distribution channel for simple insurance products.

Requirements for Security, Stability and Availability Lead to Sun
"Once we crystallized our business strategy and objectives, we set out to identify an IT solution," said Mark. "As a leading financial services company in the region, we needed to ensure that our portal would be highly secure, stable and available 24x7. To cater to our plans for further development of online capabilities and support the company's regional expansion, we needed a highly scalable solution built on an open architecture. After some investigation, we determined that Sun was the right platform for achieving those objectives."

For application software, the company's search led to ePAF Portal Application Framework from elipva, a supplier of e-business solutions. Insurance is a specialty of elipva's. Their software is designed to improve lead generation and response, enhance customer and agent self-service, and ease the management of e-campaigns and content.

Two servers comprise the Lifeisgreat.com.sg network. A Sun Enterprise[tm] 450 server manages the Oracle database and runs the elipva application as well as iPlanet[tm] Application Server software. At the front end is a Sun Enterprise[tm] 250 server running iPlanet Web Server software. The Sun platforms are protected by SunSpectrum Gold(sm) service.

Host of Information and Transaction Services for Customers
Lifeisgreat.com.sg was launched in January 2001. Among its functionalities is e-Connect, a secured login area where Great Eastern policyholders may access their policy information and conduct simple transactions. A membership management function allows the company to establish and maintain a relationship with its portal users.

Click-n-travel is Great Eastern's online version of its Travel Insurance plan. All previous transactions and customer particulars are tracked. This makes it very convenient for a repeat customer to simply log on, key in the latest travel particulars and submit the proposal form.

The i-Planner application provides Web and wireless Internet users with an objective tool for preliminary fact-finding. Interested users fill out an inquiry form and the lead is automatically channeled to an agent for follow-up. A SMS server then alerts the agent regarding his new lead so that he can log on to the portal to retrieve the lead details. The backend system is fully automated and requires very minimal maintenance.

270% Hit Rate Increase and $500,000 in New Business
"The dynamic content, user-friendly functionalities and bold designs of the Lifeisgreat Portal have contributed positively to our new corporate image," reported Mark. "Our daily hit rates had increased by about 270% compared to our old website, and online leads have generated about $500,000 in new premiums in less than 8 months."

The Lifeisgreat Portal will continue to be enhanced for customers. New services for staff and agents will be implemented into the portal. With the congregation of customers, agents and staff at the Lifeisgreat Portal, Great Eastern hopes to leverage the Internet to achieve greater business effectiveness and build stronger relationships between the various stakeholders.

"Sun's greatest value to us comes from its reliable servers, running on the highly scalable Solaris Operating Environment platform, which gives us the flexibility to plan for future growth and the ability to handle our full range of mission-critical e-business requirements readily," Mark concluded. "We are happy with the support that Sun has provided in terms of the quality of service and the professionalism of its people."

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