Driving Agility in Motor Insurance – How Sain Innovation Helped Launch a Customer-Centric Digital Claims Platform

Background & Business Need
Client: A leading private motor insurance provider in India, offering car, two-wheeler, and commercial vehicle insurance.
Product Focus: A digital claims experience platform designed to simplify, speed up, and personalize the claim lifecycle for policyholders.
The company recognized that traditional motor claims processing was:
• Paper-heavy and time-consuming
• Lacking transparency and real-time updates
• Costly due to manual interventions and error-prone steps

With rising competition from digital-first insurers and aggregator apps, the client aimed to develop a unified digital claims platform that included:
• Self-service claim initiation
• Real-time vehicle inspection through video upload
• Claim status tracking and proactive notifications
• Integration with repair shops and surveyors

Objectives
• Build an MVP in 12 weeks using Agile
• Deliver an intuitive, mobile-first customer claims experience
• Optimize feature prioritization using business value vs size trade-offs
• Use user story mapping and relative weighting for roadmap decisions
• Enable cross-functional teams to deliver iterative value in sprints
Sain Innovation’s Agile Enablement Approach
1. Product Discovery & User Story Mapping
We conducted discovery workshops with:
• Claims managers
• Field surveyors
• Policyholders
• Customer support reps

A User Story Map was created with the following key activities:
• Login & Authentication
• Initiate Claim → Upload Documents → Video Inspection → Track Status → Settle Claim

Each activity was broken into:
• Epics (e.g., Video Inspection)
• Features (e.g., Auto-frame vehicle damage)
• User Stories (e.g., “As a customer, I want to record a 15-second video of my vehicle damage, so that I don’t need a physical inspection”)

We prioritized based on core journey MVP and additional “delighters” like AI-based damage detection.

2. Agile Product Roadmap Using Relative Weighting Technique
To prioritize epics and features, we used the Relative Weighting method:
Feature Business Value Urgency Cost (Story Points) Weighted Score
Video Upload Inspection High (8) High (8) Medium (5) 2.56
Track Claim Status Medium (5) High (8) Low (3) 2.66
Repair Shop Locator Low (3) Medium (5) Low (3) 1.33
AI Damage Estimation High (8) Low (3) High (8) 0.41
This helped visualize trade-offs between value vs size, enabling leaner MVP definition.

3. Lean MVP & Incremental Releases
MVP (Sprint 1–4)
included:
• Self-service claim registration
• Uploading documents and videos
• Real-time claim status updates
• Integration with core insurance engine

Release 2 (Sprint 5–8)
added:
• GPS-enabled repair shop locator
• Push notifications for updates
• Surveyor override workflows

Release 3 (Sprint 9–12)
explored:
• AI-based damage detection (experiment stage)
• WhatsApp chatbot integration
• Analytics dashboard for internal claims team

4. Team & Ways of Working
• Cross-functional Agile squad: Product Owner (Claims), Scrum Master, UI/UX, Backend Devs, Mobile Devs, QA
• 2-week sprints with Sprint Review involving business heads
• Visual boards (Jira) and real-time tracking
• Definition of Done included: UI approved, API integrated, tested across devices, UAT passed

Outcomes
Metric Before Agile After Agile MVP (12 weeks)
Average claim resolution time 7 days 2.5 days
First-time-right claim filing 58% 85%
Customer NPS (claims) 42 68
Support call reduction — ↓ 40%
Development velocity — 30–35 story points/sprint

Challenges Overcome
Resistance to Frequent Releases
Traditional IT was used to quarterly rollouts. Sain introduced sprint reviews and showed live customer feedback to ease buy-in.

Backend Complexity
Claims engine integration was complex. We sliced stories into backend-only and frontend-dependent and created “tech stories” for spikes and refactoring.

Feature Pressure
Product leadership wanted AI features fast. We used value–size matrix to demonstrate ROI in simpler wins first.

Strategic Impact
• Client positioned as a digital innovator in the motor insurance market
• Achieved faster, transparent, and simplified claims processing
• Created a reusable Agile playbook for future products like renewals and policy servicing
• Team became self-sustaining Agile team, scaling Scrum-of-Scrums for integration with underwriting and support modules

Key Takeaways
• User Story Mapping clarifies MVP scope and value delivery
• Relative weighting helps say NO to low-impact features early
• Agile is a business enabler—not just a tech delivery model
• Sprint Reviews with stakeholders build trust and reduce rework
• MVPs built with value–size trade-offs create momentum and focus