Red Alert - Capstone 2022

The insurance industry in the United States is enormous. In 2020, companies providing life insurance made a combined revenue of over 800 billion dollars in the United States alone. This is not very surprising given most homeowners, renters, and car owners have a desire to secure their belongings in case of a major accident. Companies like State Farm, Berkshire Hathaway, Progressive, and Allstate generated more than 30 billion dollars each in total insurance premiums paid by customers in 2020 with many other insurance companies closely trailing behind. Property, home, and auto insurance companies are huge and growing considering that citizens care about ensuring that their property will be replaced or fixed in the event of a disaster. State Farm is also the largest property, casualty, and auto insurance provider in the United States which is why its important that State Farm agents have a tool at their disposale to easily communicate with State Farm clients.

Our team is producing a State Farm agent client communication portal that will enable State Farm agents to robustly search through their list of clients using a search bar interface as well as providing a digital map to allow agents to view and select clients based on their location. This project was created because State Farm agents can not easily and quickily send messages to their clients. Currently, if a State Farm agent wants to send a message to a single client or a group of clients, the agent needs to find the clients contact information in their currently non-interactive list of clients and manually enter each clients contact information into an email or text message. This is extremely tedious if the agent wants to send a message to multiple clients quickily. Besides being able to send notifications to clients, our web app will also allow agents to send messages to clients on specific dates or at recurring intervals such as every week, month, or year. The emphasis of our project is the implementation of a digital mapping system that will allow agents to view their clients on a map where each client is represented as a pin. Using this map, agents will be able to draw shapes around subsets of clients to select them to precisely target specific areas of cities to ensure that their notifications are as useful as possible. For example, imagine a scenario where a State Farm agent living in Superior, Arizona witnesses a lightning strike ignite a brush fire just outside their neighborhood. Without a project like ours, the agent would not have a way to view their clients on a map to determine if they are in harm's way. With the Red Alert web app, this agent was able to open the Red Alert website, select only clients that are located near the fire, and send them a text message alerting them of incoming danger in just a few minutes.

Our solution was to build a web-based, agent-to-customer notification management portal. The Red Alert web application can send messages to clients instantly, on specific dates, or at recurring intervals. Notifications can also be sent as SMS, email, or both. Most importantly, agents can granularly select client subsets from the map by drawing any shape around the clients they want to select, making notifications extremely specific to a client’s location. With our tool, agents can look out for their clients during dangerous situations like natural disasters, but agents can also use this tool to more effectively communicate with clients during their usual work day. For example, an agent could schedule a happy birthday message for one of their clients or an agent could send a notification to all of their Phoenix clients to give them a heads up about an incoming policy change. With Red Alert, agents can look out for their clients like a good neighbor.