Salmon have been working with Endsleigh Insurance to deliver a truly exceptional online experience.

To reflect the way its customers want to receive quotes and buy insurance products and services, Endsleigh Insurance – the #1 student insurance provider in the UK – chose Salmon to build an intelligent online quote and buy platform.

Here are some written details on the project:

Overview:
Salmon implemented a new intelligent eCommerce website for Endsleigh Insurance Services Ltd, ensuring its customers benefit from a truly exceptional online experience that includes the ability to purchase insurance & financial products and services directly.

Business Need:
Endsleigh prides itself on understanding customers and their needs. The solution needed to be designed to allow Endsleigh to display relevant and targeted propositions, and additionally allow underwriters to develop competitive propositions and offers.

Solution:
The new website’s design and experience based architecture is centered wholly on customer needs. The innovative solution leverages a unique “recognition system” conceived by Endsleigh and developed, implemented and integrated by Salmon, which intelligently determines which content to display to any given customer segment. Salmon have developed Endsleigh’s new eCommerce platform leveraging Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft Web Content Management.

Benefits:
Endsleigh’s diverse customer content including documents, web pages, video, photos and reviews are now managed via a central repository. This ensures better knowledge sharing, improved customer communications and increased process efficiency. For returning visitors, the solution automatically checks what knowledge Endsleigh already holds. Importantly this ensures visitors are not only given access to the detail of their cover and claims advice, but also visibility of complementary products and offers or discounts applicable. Other benefits include;

• Capability to implement affinity partner strategy in areas such as co-branded landing pages and white labeled services.
• Access to business tools that allow Endsleigh staff to manage and update the entire online solution themselves, whilst following approval cycles to meet FSA regulation.
• Personalisation that allows Endsleigh to promote tailored products and advice designed to suit each individual and complementary products, offers or discounts.

Salmon demonstrated a high level of technical expertise and a comprehensive understanding of the insurance market and their passion and skills have helped us meet our vision to make endsleigh.co.uk an eCommerce website which can exceed customer expectation and help us lead the market when it comes to purchasing insurance online. Ian Passmore, Managing Director, Endsleigh Insurance

Today we are delighted to announce the complete implementation of a new intelligent eCommerce website for Endsleigh, the number one student insurance provider.

Salmon delivered the new eCommerce platform on-time and on-budget, and engaged with Endsleigh after winning a competitive tender.

Salmon were chosen to ensure that Endsleigh’s customers benefit from a truly exceptional online experience that includes the ability to purchase insurance & financial products and services directly via the internet.

Ian Passmore, Managing Director of Endsleigh said:

“Endsleigh prides itself on understanding its customers and their insurance needs. The solution has, therefore, been designed to allow us to display more relevant and targeted propositions. It can also be used by our underwriters to develop more competitive propositions and offers. Customers will benefit from a website which is streamlined and easier to navigate and also from specifically tailored products and advice designed to suit each individual. Salmon demonstrated a high level of technical expertise and a comprehensive understanding of the insurance market and their passion and skills have helped us meet our vision to make endsleigh.co.uk an eCommerce website which can exceed customer expectation and help us lead the market when it comes to purchasing insurance online.”

Early online analytics demonstrate that the solution is already delivering promising results, supporting Endsleigh’s eCommerce strategy. Bounce rates have been reduced by up to 36% and there has been a 12.5% uplift in web page visitors. SERP rankings have improved by up to 6 places for key motor, home and student products whilst clients have been logging into accounts more often (logon rate up 8.5%).

Salmon have developed Endsleigh’s new eCommerce platform leveraging Microsoft Office SharePoint Server. Using Microsoft’s Web Content Management capability, Endsleigh’s diverse customer content, including documents, web pages, video, photos and reviews are now managed via a central repository. This ensures better knowledge sharing, improved customer communications and increased process efficiency.

Read the full announcement here.

To find out more about Salmon’s Microsoft partnership read the press release announcing our Gold Partnership [Oct 2008]

I’ve just been to get my first sight of Microsoft’s Azure services platform. My first impressions are that it looks no different to any other .Net development approach, one that can be adopted extremely quickly by the majority of the Microsoft development community especially when Microsoft provide their usual kit bag of SDK’s and VS Tools.

Its a far more productive development experience than that offered by the other cloud service providers. It does enforce a structured approach to your development, but to me that is a strength, a little structure to code is always a good thing!

The biggest thing for me however is that Microsoft is having the same challenges as the other major SaaS players are having with regard to the Software + Services model (i.e. on and off premise composite applications).  And that is they still have fundamental business challenges around data protection, service level agreements and application security to think through. It’ll be interesting to see how the platform evolves over the coming months, especially as the commercial models are released later this year.

If anyone wants to get involved in Azure, then Microsoft is in the process of trying to establish a UK user group. So feel free to join in.

And on a final note, if you’re an avid reader of the register and noticed the recent outage on Azure, take note, IT’S STILL PRE-BETA!  Don’t expect it to be stable!  And will it be anything like this (n.b. Be mindful of the date today)

Today, Salmon announced the achievement of Gold Partner Certified status in Microsoft’s partnership programme.  In just twelve months, our Microsoft presence has grown from scratch into a mature practice, complementing our continuing desire to offer our customers choice; and a clear link between I.T. investment and the delivery of measurable business value.

Our solution development with Microsoft will predominantly be in the UK’s insurance and retail sectors.  In fact, we are already helping businesses in insurance increase revenue by improving customer satisfaction and employee productivity while reducing overall operational costs.

Microsoft’s Gold Certified Status recognises both Salmon’s technical expertise and the impact the company has made in solution development leveraging core areas of the Microsoft product portfolio; notably Security, Service Orientated Architecture (SOA), Business Process Integration and Information Worker solutions.

Gold status is the highest accolade in the Microsoft programme.

Salmon is also a Premier IBM Partner and holds partnerships and affiliations with a number of other leading ISVs.  There is a full list here.  The Microsoft practice is headed by Andrew Smith.

If you have been to any Microsoft event over the last 12 months, you could not escape the term “Software + Services”. But what is it? Why should you consider it?

For me, “Software + Services” is an approach that makes the best use of Web 2.0, SOA and SaaS in that it allows a company to concentrate on what they do best and build applications around their own expertise and processes, then leverage specialist applications like virtual earth, google maps, photosynth (amongst others) to deliver a deep, rich, powerful user experience that previously would have been simply too expensive to create. (There is more here)

But it’s not just the richness of functionality that provides a strong argument for incorporating services into your applications – there are many other reasons such as quality and cost. However, one of the most compelling arguments that I see is in business agility and time to market. Many new businesses today are under pressure to prove the business case and deliver a return on investment from technology quickly. For this reason, they simply do not have the time to invest in a major platform build.

At this point there are 2 things that I would look at:

What are my short-term tactical needs?
How does this fit with my longer term strategy?

Tactical needs, in a lot of situations, can be addressed with limited development through cloud services. This is attractive for a young business, where there tend to be limited capex budgets and a strong focus on minimising costs.

However, as a business evolves, its requirements become more complex (driven hopefully by its success) and it is at this point a business should have a sharp focus for being able to maintain control of its IT. This usually means that demands on the system dictate that it should be brought in house, or farmed out to a more appropriate managed service provider. This is where traditional SaaS providers tend to be an issue, as services such as Salesforce.com have little room to move. Personally, I feel this is where Microsoft is almost unrivalled in their ability to deliver a vast breadth of applications – available in the Cloud OR in your office; although they are clearly not the only provider.

So next time you are looking at a project, I would advise you to seriously consider what is available both off the shelf AND in the Cloud : and more importantly how it fits with the journey you want to take.

When speaking to friends who work in different sectors recently, it became apparent that their view of eCommerce and the on-line world is pretty shallow.

They see web sites as basically nothing more than a bunch of pretty pictures, designed, developed and operated by a troupe of digital interactive artists, shuffling about in un-ironed clothes with hair pointing in all directions and an iPod blocking any attempt at conversation.

Frankly I was a bit offended.

Design skills are necessary for sure, but if I were looking for a partner to help design, build and support an eCommerce site, I’d want someone with experience of running large-scale sites taking over £1M each day, an understanding of enterprise systems integration issues (SOA), solid commercial skills and a good grasp of the sector I’m operating in.

Where your average accounting, payroll or CRM system is concerned, change is often considered a bad thing. In strategic terms these are ‘operational’ systems where change is minimised wherever possible to reduce risk and keep a lid on costs. The life expectancy of such a system is often around the 8 to 12 year mark – although we know that some will become entrenched and live for 20 years or more as successive IT managers on 4 year job-change cycles duck the issue of replacing them for fear they’ll lose their job, reputation and future if it all goes a bit pear shaped on their watch.

But web sites are a bit different. To remain competitive they acquire new features on a frequent basis and are more akin to living breathing things in that they evolve in response to market developments. For websites, change is constant and there isn’t the luxury of a fixed quarterly or even biannual release cycle favoured by centralised IT departments. The outcome is that large scale eCommerce sites have a complex code base with multiple code streams requiring outstanding configuration management skills.

The systems infrastructure is intricate too. Managing peak load intra day and shifting demand throughout the year isn’t a trivial task. Frequently a dozen or more application servers will be required. And web servers, database servers, firewalls, routers, load balancers, etc. And they all need configuring and monitoring to make sure the site is up and stays up because – in financial terms – a site outage may be equivalent to shutting the doors on ten or more physical outlets. Now that’s the kind of thing that gets the CEO’s attention!

Integration wise, whether an eCommerce site is small or large there is a significant amount of ‘plumbing’ required to integrate with back-end systems and third parties. Data about products, pricing, offers, discounts and stock positions has to be sourced from somewhere. Orders need to be sent to fulfilment systems. Then we have to consider fraud detection, payment gateway integration (not forgetting 3D secure), image hosting, address verification, and mapping services too. We shouldn’t forget the bunch of data feeds required for affiliates and price comparison sites either. Or email and SMS communications.

I could go on with Web 2.0, social shopping, product reviews, RSS feeds, blogs, Google checkout, etc. but you’ve got the idea now, right? All of this integration work requires traditional Systems Analysis skills as well a detailed understanding of contemporary IT architectures and approaches such as Service Orientation. Experience suggests the more third party integration is required on a project, the more risky it is because of the dependencies involved. I’d want people that have done this before, lots of times and in the large.

In addition to the technical, there is also much to be gained from a partner that understands the business sector too. Any hard-fought for trust engendered by your website will either be reinforced or smashed to bits when the delivery promise made on the website is kept or not by the fulfilment operation that follows, so an understanding of the reality of the distribution centre and store environments is key to providing realistic information to on-line customers. A second site with separate branding probably means different packaging to be used in the DC. Is there physically room for another bench? How will the packers know which brand the order relates to? And let’s face it, Retail is a seasonal business and if you’re not ready for the Xmas peak, January is a lousy time to be looking for alternative employment as nobody has budget until April.

So sure, design and designers are important; an understanding of the psychology of the purchasing process and translation of that into slick browse and checkout processes will undoubtedly do wonderful things to conversion rates. But all in all eCommerce is a whole lot more complicated than pretty pictures.

I just wish my friends could see the big picture.