Reducing time-to-insight, cutting costs, and boosting customer conversion rates

About

The online insurance platform Assurance leverages data science and a personal touch to find the ideal insurance and financial services product match for each customer. The company’s mission is to make it radically easy for customers to purchase life insurance, mortgages, or similar products that are right for them, and data is an essential piece of that strategy. 

As customers progress through their buying journey, Assurance has different models running in the background at each step. However, the company had distributed, siloed datasets and was struggling to join data from one database to another.

Challenge

Assurance is a data-driven company with data stored in multiple PostgreSQL databases in AWS, an AWS S3 data lake, and other sources. The company relies on very powerful metrics to help make business decisions. Assurance was facing several challenges:

• It struggled to join data to its data lake or from one Postgres database to another.
• Data engineers wasted time manually copying and transferring data.
• Data scientists waited in line for access to new data sources. 
• Queries and reports could take up to three or four months to complete.
• The long time-to-insight made it a challenge to determine which product or program deserved priority over others.
• Distributed, siloed data made it difficult to match agent availability and customer demand during peak usage.
• Much of its data and predictions were in JSON, which was slow and time-consuming to parse.

These challenges meant the company had trouble scaling to meet its needs, limiting its ability to grow the business.

Assurance tested open source Trino as a possible solution, but experienced limitations with the connector’s ability to access certain data types in Postgres.

Solution

Assurance selected Starburst Enterprise, a natural progression from Trino, as the solution to its data connectivity problems. The company deployed Starburst in one AWS account, using the cloud formation template to set up autoscaling, security groups, various high-performance connectors, and compute clusters. 

Assurance has one cluster dedicated to ad hoc queries from the Business Intelligence (BI) layer (Looker and Tableau) and another dedicated to production jobs and data engineering. 

Results

Starburst allows Assurance to access all of its data together and spend more time creating models and performing analytics. Starburst’s impact on Assurance’s business has been significant.

Time-to-insight reduced to hours. Starburst and Trino instantly bring together different data sources and federate queries, dropping time-to-insight from a few weeks to a few hours.

Reduced stress on data engineering. 20-30% faster queries and fewer ETL projects put far less stress on the data engineering team.

10% increase in conversions. Faster data access and better insights translate into a 10% increase in customer conversions in 1/100th of the time.

Real-time sales optimization. Assurance now can bring together shopper and marketing data and use it to incentivize licensed insurance agents to log on to the platform during peak times. Improving the agent experience makes them more likely to return, which helps Assurance convert more customers.

Starburst also provides critical assistance in one of Assurance’s most important revenue-generating events: The 7-week Medicare open enrollment period. Starburst delivers tremendous value to Assurance in three key areas:

1. Optimized agent licensure. Starburst helps the company analyze data and plan for sufficient licensed agents from each state, assuring adequate coverage and increasing conversion rates while cutting costs by 40%.
2. Accelerated time-to-insight. It takes the data science team only a week to collate and format data now. With a single point of access, the team can quickly respond to issues as they arise, in just hours.
3. Enhanced recommendation engines. Assurance draws on its own data and that of third parties to recommend products to customers. With Starburst, the company can offer recommendations while the shopper is still going through the workflow, resulting in better retention rates and increased revenue.

Starburst has proven to be a valued partner by delivering fast, high-performance, distributed access to more data in an enterprise-ready platform. Every business team relies on the data accessed through Starburst to help customers get the best insurance policies possible, to help agents be more successful, and provide the company with measurable results.

More resources: Shen Wang’s Voyager profile