Ability to change / enter certain questions when status is changed to "On Cover"
It would be very useful to show certain questions when quotes are put on cover such as Interested parties, ERN Number and inception date. The answers to these questions are not always known as the information is entered onto the system but will be known when cover is incepted.
I would suggest that a flag is added to each question called "Required prior to cover" which, when ticked will reshow a question from the standard question set on a new screen when cover is requested. It would also be useful to have questions optional in the quote question set but required on the cover question set. For example, if a client does not know their ERN at quote stage we can still quote and it will not be required until inception. A blank ERN could then trigger a condition to be added reminding the user of it's requirement prior to inception.
Thoughts / comments welcome.
Mark
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I'm working on a specification for this, and can see 3 ways to proceed...
Tickboxes: I liked the tickbox suggestion for the questions editor, so set out initially to design this feature based on this idea alone. However this would seem to have the weakness that you will not have full control of the ordering of questions and the way they look to the end user. This might be OK if these kinds of questions are few and far between but would fall flat if anyone wants to ask, say, 10 questions or more in this way. If it can work for people it will be a breeze to maintain: for anything you DON'T mark as Required, you could tick a box to say 'Although it's not required at quote stage, it IS required prior to cover starting'.
New Question Set "Pre Cover": We could conceivably introduce a third area in the questions editor called something like 'Pre Cover Questions', alongside 'Quick Quote' and 'Full [Post] Quote'. It would not allow you to share a question across all 3 question sets (6 question sets if you consider the existing tickboxes for 'Show On Renewal Quotes' and 'Show On Adjustment Quotes') but would make ordering and pages possible. I can see some users needing this as they might want to create a quick quote with reduced question set but catch everything else here.
Tickboxes and New Question Set: A third, granular approach might be to combine tickboxes and question sets, so that when tickboxes are ticked the questions appear in the relevant question set where they could then be moved around, though this is obviously a more time consuming specification to implement. I'm in favour of course of doing things right rather than twice (or 3, 4 5, 6, times :) ) This third approach might present the problem however that it's hard to manage, while the very first approach is dead simple: tick everything that you MUST have answered before cover commences.
Interested to hear everyone's thoughts.
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Adam, the tickbox method gets my vote by a long shot. Most of the questions we would require at inception would be asked during the quote process but be optional and only required at inception. Question orders could still be changed on the "on cover" set by Javascript so not the end of the world and the comparative ease of development and ongoing system maintenance is a massive plus. It would be very useful to have questions ONLY asked at inception too which could be achieved with another tick box as follows:
Show on:
1. MTA Quotes
2. Renewal Quotes
3. Policy Inception
4. Required for Quote
5. Required at Inception
It would also be worth considering how to handle columns of tables in this process. Some columns may not be required until inception where others would be required in order to quote.
I don't like the idea of separate question sets so much as it would not easily allow a question to be optionally asked at quote stage then required at inception.
Either way, this would be a really useful feature for us.
Cheers.
Mark
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Adam,
I think the tick boxes are the way to go. The best way would be to have all the questions in the question set and questions like the ERN could be allowed to be left blank but when the 'on cover' button is pressed those questions that were left blank show up and need to be completed before it goes further.
I think this should now be made the number one priority, insurers have changed our binders recently to make sure we take the ERN before the policy goes on cover, this is not currently possible. It's costs a lot of time and money to chase brokers for the ERN's
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OK I understand; we'll get you a solution for this. Thanks to everyone for all the ideas. I think the tickboxes will give us what we want here without over complicating it, though I need to give more thought to table columns. We're not going to be able to get this into the next release (which is already in testing) but will aim for the very next one after that. You'll hear from me again before then after I have done further work on the software spec.
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