‘My 10-year-old baby’: The inside story of QBE Qnect

A decade ago, QBE launched its all-encompassing online portal for intermediaries. A genuine disrupter, its development and rollout experienced immense highs and some lows — as told by one of the original UI testers and current system owner.

Cast your mind back to 2014. The insurance business was very different.

While many industries were making advancements in automation and digitalisation, our business remained highly manual, and paper based. Intermediaries regularly liaised with underwriters and broader servicing teams in-person or via the telephone. Providing a quotation, managing a clients’ portfolio, and processing payments — among many other chores — were greatly time-consuming for both parties. In turn, customer response times were slower than those of other service industries. Frequently, underwriters and support staff would be accused of ignoring all sorts of requests from intermediaries; when quite simply, there wasn’t the hours in the day to process each and every enquiry promptly.

This was notably the case for SME and personal lines. Both continue to be low in premium; and back then, neither justified enormous headcounts. It was a catch-22: did we hire more people to handle the volume of enquiries, and subsequently put up our prices; or did we keep our policies competitively priced, and maintain our slow servicing times?

Fortunately, there was a third option.

Aspiring tech leadership

More than a decade ago, QBE had contemplated developing a digital solution to meet these challenges. The vision for such a solution was simple: for QBE, it must handle large volumes of policies and quotations in a sustainable, efficient and cost-effective way; for intermediaries, it must be fast and easy to use, from anywhere and at any time.

It also needed to automate the entire end-to-end experience for our intermediary partners. From quotation to policy issuance, to endorsements and renewals, the processing of payments, and even cancelations. Yet like most insurers back then, we weren’t sure how to go about developing one. Plus, if we did, we weren’t entirely convinced that our intermediaries would use it, despite our market research indicating that they would. It was a risky proposition.

Further factors eventually prompted us to take the plunge. QBE’s leadership recognised the potential of digitalisation to disrupt the insurer-intermediary relationship, enabling the latter to execute tasks, which typically took hours or even days to complete, within seconds. The company was ambitious and wanted to be a first-mover.

In addition, QBE had become a well-known and respected insurer for Singapore’s and Hong Kong’s SME segments. Like all companies, we wanted to maintain this and grow our market share. But in an increasingly competitive environment, we also needed something extraordinary to realise our ambitions. The solution was what would become Qnect.

Frustrating, exhilarating

I was one of several user interface (UI) testers selected to help develop Qnect. Given its uniqueness, we would build it entirely from scratch. The portal would be created by three teams: a user experience (UX) team in Singapore, which I was part of; a UX team in Hong Kong; and platform developers in the Philippines.

Working across different locations brought about many challenges. Notably, videoconferencing technology in 2014 wasn’t as robust as it is today, while internet speeds and general connectivity were patchy. Discussions with overseas team members were often inaudible; calls frequently ended unexpectedly.

The Singapore team huddled up in the ‘war room’. A conference room with no windows, bright lights, and freezing-cold air conditioning. We were given a stack of testing scripts to incorporate into our designs. The walls became plastered with A3 sheets of paper featuring all sorts of diagrams and charts; every space on the white board featured messy handwriting and seemingly abstract sketches; the tables were completely covered with documents and drawings. It was ironic that we were designing a paperless digital solution using lorryloads of physical paper.

Mapping out Qnect’s user journey from end-to-end was a complicated and extensive task, as was designing its UI. For three months we tested, changed, tested, changed — again and again. For every problem we solved, we would create yet another. It was frustrating yet exhilarating. Tempers often flared; it was a tense environment. Plus, we were under enormous pressure from our colleagues to deliver. Internal stakeholders set ambitious deadlines. Some we hit, others we missed. Frequently we questioned whether we would succeed. Some of the team were convinced we would fail.

Key breakthrough

Two fundamental features were critical to the project’s success. Making sure that the underwriting parameters were protected; and ensuring it met the needs of intermediaries. The first was clearly in our control, yet the second needed feedback from users.

Accordingly, we invited a selection of these to our offices as part of a focus group. Using a projector, we presented the end-to-end user journey, and our UI designs. Immediately there were nods of approval — thank goodness we all thought! We then realised that this was indeed a solution intermediaries needed.

That’s not to say that everyone approved. Given that a significant proportion of our intermediaries were then in their 50s, 60s and even 70s with many computer-illiterate, there was always going to be some resistance to Qnect. We were also cognizant of the fact that even tech-savvy intermediaries, young and old, may struggle to navigate the platform. We therefore facilitated a series of training sessions held at several external computer labs to meet these knowledge and skills gaps.

Live, tried and tested

A further goal of Qnect was to make it an integral part of our intermediaries’ working day. Following an extensive rollout, including training sessions with our intermediaries, quickly it was becoming just that. Every day, users would log in to conduct a specific task or action. Upon a customer asking for a quote for instance, the intermediary would search for an appropriate policy or solution, select accordingly and click ‘generate quote’, and send this to the customer via email. This simplistic process remains in place today.

Intermediaries can now manage their clients’ portfolio of policies, send automated renewals when the appropriate time arises, and process a variety of digital payments. More recently, we’ve embedded The Business Times and The Straits Times into the platform, allowing users to access timely news and current affairs in addition to information and documents needed to service their customers.

As expected, uptake was gradual. By the end of year one, about 10% of our intermediaries in Hong Kong and Singapore were using Qnect. By year five — 2019 — this number had stubbornly plateaued at 60%. Events of a year later would prove to be bittersweet: 2020 saw the COVID-19 pandemic send economies worldwide into lockdown, and while on one hand, closing down our offices for months was highly disruptive, on the other hand, Qnect enabled intermediaries and ourselves to carry with some form of normality.

That we were ahead of our competitors with a live, tried and tested solution during this proved invaluable to our business at QBE. It ensured that we didn’t experience the impact of the pandemic as negatively as others. By the end of lockdowns, almost 100% of our intermediaries were using Qnect.

Qnect 2.0: The next 10 years and beyond

Over the past decade, continuous upgrades and enhancements have kept Qnect ahead of the pack. It is today viewed as an essential tool by our intermediaries for not only servicing their clients and customers, but also by providing timely information on policies and other insurance matters, in addition to general news and business insights. It also incorporates lifestyle features as well.

Indeed, while Qnect is 10 years old, it is far from a 10-year-old solution. Its next incarnation — for now, we call it Qnect 2.0 — will feature more upgrades, including a CRM system to further deepen the client relationships of our intermediaries. Both will benefit from all of the strengths the platform has acquired since its launch, including stability, consistency, a proven track record, and the multitude of features we have intermittently added.

However, the success of Qnect isn’t solely down to the team that developed it. Moreover, it is ultimately the result of QBE and its intermediaries managing and embracing change. This is no easy task. A decade ago, both QBE employees and intermediaries feared that one day, Qnect might replace their jobs. But what it has actually done since then, is remove mundane manual chores and given staff the chance to work on more complex, exciting and meaningful tasks — while simultaneously enjoying greater work-life balance. Personally speaking, Qnect has made my career at QBE as an underwriter and business unit head much more fulfilling. In Singapore, I also have ownership of the system as well — it’s my 10-year-old baby!

Perhaps more significantly, Qnect epitomises QBE’s journey here in Asia: how against challenging environments, we continue to outperform and deliver to our partners, clients, and the wider QBE team. Both are remarkable stories.