Founded in May 2014, Berkshire Hathaway Travel Protection (BHTP) is a travel insurance company headquartered in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. The company concentrates on travel insurance services, which are offered direct to consumers via the company’s website or distributed through travel agents, tour operators, and other travel partners.

Situation

BHTP had deployed a responsive website and iOS and Android apps to its B2C market and was seeing strong demand from the agent distribution channel to sell its products. However, BHTP did not have a platform to distribute these products to agents and needed assistance to launch one within an aggressive two-month time frame.

Strategy

Creating Web portals and responsive sites is well within Wipfli’s capabilities and expertise. Working in close collaboration, Wipfli and BHTP’s IT team operated under an agile/Scrum methodology, approaching the project as a series of four two-week milestones. Each project deliverable was unit-tested and reviewed for acceptance testing by the end of each milestone. BHTP now has a fully functioning agent portal that meets the requirements of the agent market channel, allowing the company to further expand its business.

Benefits

The agent portal provides secure, authenticated access for agents to quote and purchase travel service products from BHTP's website. In addition, it has the capability for agents to provide e-mail addresses and travel dates that feed automated follow-up e-mails to customers not ready to make a purchase. The portal also enables agents to view all the policies purchased on a customer’s behalf and make changes to them, including cancellation. In addition, the portal shows agents how many policies they’ve sold and how much commission they’ve earned via an easy-to-read graphical dashboard.