Your Review on: Active Quote

[MarkW]

For all those potential new users out there (including me!), what are your suggestions, thoughts and comments on Active Quote?

 

Note: Active Quote allows you to set rules to govern price and rating criteria for web based quote systems.

 

Did it do what you expected?

Was it cost effective and allow you to focus on specific business?

What impact internally did it have on your business?

[karl]

For all those potential new users out there (including me!), what are your suggestions, thoughts and comments on Active Quote?

 

Note: Active Quote allows you to set rules to govern price and rating criteria for web based quote systems.

 

Did it do what you expected?

Was it cost effective and allow you to focus on specific business?

What impact internally did it have on your business?

Hi Mark,

 

I have literally looked at Active Quote for the first time yesterday (in training with OGI).

 

Overall it sees quite intuitive and easy to use. The only thing we are awaiting back from OGI is how do we override the excesses?

 

I will give you more feedback once we have built the product applicable and gone live.

 

Regards,

 

Karl

[karl]

It seems we cannot override excesses within Active Quote which seems like a big shortcoming to me.

 

We can set/load/discount premiums fine which mirrors the ability to override the premium in MotorWriter so surely this should extend to being able to override the excesses also!

 

Edited 24 June, 2011 by Karl

[Mark Sollis]

We use Active Quote extensively within Brightside - and it does a job.

 

The problems come when you have used it over a number of years and then the maintenance and management functions become the issue, along with the ability to structure the rules in the way you would normally expect.

 

1 - You cant export / import rules globally

So if you have spent a year or two honing and tweaking and have 100 or so rules - you try "backing them up" or exporting the whole new set, from UAT (Test) to Live. Guess what -you can't. Each rule has to be exported and then imported individually. Such a P.I.T.A.

 

2 - The "Logic" Is Baffling

There seems to be a reverse logic on structuring the conditional commands. Something we and others have raised with Open GI and they admint the poor implementation, there are no intentions to fix. Hard to explain here but you cant seem to have a global rule that allows branches "Off" - so you have to have single rules multiple times for each occasion you need to use it - kind of repetitive and a real pain if you are using it in anger. Whilst you can do most things you need to do, it quickly becomes unmanageable. Given then there is no global "export / import" what you do in UAT has to be done again in Live.

 

In short - ActiveQuote does a job but as always, the implementation and usability is lacking big style. As there are no plans to change this then I guess you have no choice - sound familiar?

 

Oh and dont forget - there are two flavours - eCommerce and Back Office - both have capital and recurring. Again OK to use eCommerce day 1 but you try processing an MTA or a Renewal through the quote engine - No ActiveQuote rules are available then unless you've bought that product as well!! So unless you do, you have to get your operators to work out how the original quote was done in order to work out the MTA / Renewal values manually.

 

If you (or any members) want to come and see what we have here and how we try to cope, happy to arrange or discuss details off-line.