Automating Fact Checking and Claim Processing for Lifeline Applications
Customer
The Customer is a socially conscious US company that provides wireless telephone services for low-income clients in 15+ states.
Challenge
The Customer’s prospects could apply for available Lifeline discount programs personally at one of the company’s offices, by phone, or by filling a Formstack form on the company website. Though the web form proved to be the most popular way of application, it also was the most problematic in terms of fact checking and claim processing. This made the company’s managers check and register new clients in the CRM manually every time a form was submitted. For this reason, the Customer was looking for a reliable custom software development partner to enhance the process of application through their website.
Solution
ScienceSoft’s team delivered a solution made of 3 elements: a web service, a local database, and a WordPress plugin.
The solution’s central part is the web service that communicates with applicants and automatically processes their data. The application workflow starts when the web service gets a notification from Formstack about a new form submitted on the Customer’s website. Integrated with Formstack, the web service gathers a prospect’s data, adds it to the local database and simultaneously sends a notification that the claim is pending approval.
In the background, the web service requests LexisNexis and the National Lifeline Accountability Database (NLAD) to verify the prospect’s data. The reports of these institutes help to discard forms with fake personal information and duplicate claims for Lifeline discount programs. If the calculated risk level is considered acceptable, the workflow proceeds; if not, the prospect gets a notification about the rejected application.
Taking into account that the clients of the wireless company are mainly uneducated, the web service was tuned to spot out the prospects tossed out by NLAD due to spelling mistakes and initiate manual checking of their data by the company managers. In addition, the application form was split into parts so that every time a prospect presses the Next button, the filled-in data is instantly verified by LexisNexis. This way, the web service makes prospects double-check the validity of their personal information before submitting the form. This feature helped to reduce the number of applicants turned down as a result of misspelling.
To allow further processing of successful candidates’ data, the web service was integrated with the Customer’s CRM system (BeQuick). This way, the solution automatically registers new clients in the CRM, specifies information about their tariff plans and loyalty programs, attaches the provided certificates, and generates PDFs with order details. At the same time, the client gets a notification about a successful registration through the Customer’s website.
For smooth interaction between the web service and the Customer’s website, our team also implemented a WordPress plugin that enabled redirection of applicants to relevant pages of the website during application stages.
Results
ScienceSoft came up with a solution that helped to improve online application for the Lifeline discount programs supported by the Customer, a wireless company. The Customer received a system that allowed automatic processing of submitted forms as well as data checking by NLAD and LexisNexis to prevent trickery and duplicate claims for the discount programs.
Technologies and Tools
PHP (Symfony 2, Doctrine), PHP daemons (queue), MySQL, WordPress.
