Company
Joyn Insurance
Year
2023
Type of Work
Product Ideation, User research, Prototyping, Product Management, Design Systems
Platform
Desktop
At Joyn Insurance, the operations (ops) team receives hundreds of submissions daily from brokers requesting coverage for their clients. These submissions often contain multiple pages of data about the risk and fully processing them can take a substantial amount of time. To make sure that time is not wasted on submissions that don't align with our underwriting book, the ops team abides by a list of ‘Quick Decline Rules’ — rules set by the underwriting team that signal the declination of a submission early on in the process.
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This feature centralizes these Quick Decline rules directly into the Spark platform, Joyn's core submission processing system. As a result, Joyn's Operations team has not only maintained but also increased the speed at which they process submissions, even as the volume has grown, all without expanding the team's headcount. This highlights how effectively Spark has boosted operational efficiency without incurring additional costs.
01
Quick Decline
What are quick decline rules?
Quick decline rules are strict underwriting guidelines that help the Operations team identify submissions that should be declined early in the process, before they funnel down to the underwriter.​
02
Current state
To gain a deeper understanding of the goals and pain points, I conducted bi-weekly sessions with the operations team. During these sessions, I interviewed each member about their experiences, and silently observed their screen shares as they processed submissions. Learnings are summarized in the user journey below.
03
Problems
Wasting Operational Resources
Not immediately identifying QDR violations wastes the Ops team's time and resources as they process the entire submission.
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Wasting Underwriting Resources
Human error is inevitable and when rules went undetected, out-of-appetite submissions funnel down underwriters and distract them from focusing on quoting.​
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Unreliable Data Addressing Submission Quality
Not having clean data on QDR violations prevents Joyn from effectively addressing submission quality issues with brokers.
04
Goals
Visibility
Users should immediately see the rule(s) being violated and the data that trigged the violation while processing the submission.
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Minimal Screen Space​
​Keep the alert compact so it doesn't take up too much screen real estate, allowing users to focus on processing the submission.
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Persistence
The violation should never be dismissible. It should only be resolved if the underlying issue that triggered the rule violation is corrected.
05
Sketches
Initial sketches present a streamlined, nimble component anchored at the bottom of the screen, designed to expand and collapse to display vital information.
06
Final Designs
Check out the final design below and click the image to read about the feature points. Don't miss the prototype video to see how the interaction works.
07
Impact
The implementation of the Quick Decline feature has dramatically enhanced the efficiency of the operations team, allowing us to maintain the same processing speed despite an unprecedented increase in submission volume. This achievement highlights our ability to handle significantly higher workloads without slowing down or expanding the team.
The graph above illustrates Joyn's ability to process submissions within 24 hours, even with unprecedented volume of over 4,000 submissions per month. Headcount remained low, thanks to the efficiency improvements provided by tools in Spark, particularly the QDR feature launched in summer 2023. We consistently maintained our key KPI target, keeping processing times low and rarely dipping below 90% of submissions processed within 24 hours.
The graph above shows that even as submission volume surged, the Ops team consistently prepared submissions for underwriters in under 0.80 days. This was achieved without increasing headcount, thanks to the efficiency gained from the QDR launch.
The chart above shows a significant decline in the number of submissions underwriters had to reject as the operations team became more efficient at filtering submissions. The ratio improved from 61.81% in August 2023 to 49.67% in May 2024.