CMS upgrades that make cents: Economical Insurance

In 2015, ecentricarts was asked to do a quick exercise in front-end development for Sonnet Insurance, the vibrant, most recent addition to the Economical Insurance family of brands. After the successful launch of Sonnet.ca, the Waterloo-based insurer and ecentricarts agreed to tackle a much needed Content Management System upgrade for three different Economical Insurance websites:

1. Economical.com, for consumer-facing insurance claims and coverage
   1. Requirements: easy and bilingual content control, geolocation, accessibility compliance, and secure payment processing
2. EconomicalSelect.com, for group insurance benefits
   1. Requirements: bilingual content control, geolocation, content personalization, and sweepstakes application and processing
3. SelectBrokerResources.ca, an extranet for Economical brokers
   1. Requirements: custom order form creation and payment processing

Functional requirements aside, Economical Insurance’s top priority was to gain more control over their content, and to reduce the time spent in content management limbo.
 

By upgrading their broker extranet and group benefit platforms from Kentico 7 to 9, and replacing the dated proprietary CMS of their consumer-facing site with Kentico 9, ecentricarts addressed Economical’s usability and efficiency pain-points across all three websites in one fell swoop. We incorporated a host of custom functionalities into the new CMS to improve the online experience for Economical’s content teams as well as each site’s end users, resulting in a more contemporary, custom, and user-friendly experience.
   
Content editors for both Economical.com and EconomicalSelect.com can now create new pages and manipulate content site-wide with ease, while branded marketing material order forms (brochures, packages, etc.) can be created, added, and processed faster than ever at SelectBrokerResources.ca.
 
Our team found a great balance between allowing Economical content editors CMS flexibility, without creating total anarchy — all text background colours, page layouts, and image placements can be changed with ease, but we’ve hard-coded specific style parameters so that every page will always be on brand, no matter the configuration.
 
Another key benefit was the addition of custom macro settings — once logged in to an Economical Select account, users see different banner images depending on their industry/field of work specified in their benefits package.  Industries include emergency services, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and more.
 

Key User Experience Features

• Increased site performance (faster page load times, improved information architecture) for both consumers and internal content administrators
• Geolocation capabilities so only applicable insurance options are displayed
• Fully responsive

 

• AODA compliant as reviewed by Economical Insurance's in-house accessibility consultant (Economical.com)
• Simple layout and easy creation of collateral ordering forms (SelectBrokerResources.ca)

Key Technology Features

• Custom Kentico widgets for high degree of page control/flexibility
• Custom macros for content personalization (EconomicalSelect.com)

 

• eCommerce premium payment transactions via Moneris Hosted Tokenization API
• Use of Kentico email marketing to manage newsletter subscriptions and content
• Internal Economical system integration for location-based “Find a Broker” functionality
• Kentico and Google Analytics integration for conversion and behaviour tracking
• MVC controllers to incorporate custom smart search indexes through the Smart Search API (Economical.com)
• Taleo HR portal integration for career listings and job applications (Economical.com)