Case Study 2 - Insurance Company Email/SMS Notification System
In this case our client was an insurance company that specialized in car insurance. Their idea was to send a client two notifications, one 30 days in advance, and another 15 days before insurance expiration. Since their obligatory car insurance was annual, people tended to forget about the upcoming expense, and a way to remind them a month in advance would help them plan their budget properly.
The catch was that client already had an application for administering clients' accounts, but the developer that had made that application did not want to add requested features. On the other hand, our client did not want to change their core application just to get this new feature. Also, they told us they'll be migrating their database from Access (MDB) to Microsoft SQL Server Express database very soon. As a result, their budget was tight.
There were many ways to complete this task, but most of them would require a serious investment of time and money, so we decided to build a web solution using WhizBase. That way we covered everything the client needed: sending email, SMS, and the future database migrating issue.
We built a simple system that parsed the database once a day, found records that should be processed (customers that needed to be notified), checked if the record contained valid email address, and if it did, it sent an email notification (email was always first choice because our client did not have to pay anything for sending an email). If there is no valid email address, but record contained an SMS number, our application sent an SMS using an ordinary mobile phone attached via a USB cable. If there were neither email address nor SMS number, the program saved an ordinary letter to be printed and snail-mailed to the customer.
About nine months later, they migrated their system to MS SQL Express, and it took us less than two minutes to modify our application to work with the new database. The client was so happy with our work that he hired us to build two corporate web sites for his companies.
