QuoteWizard boosts engineers’ efficiency, employee satisfaction, competitive edge with Microsoft Power Platform

The right talent with the right tasks

Seattle-based QuoteWizard, a Lending Tree company, offers its leading online insurance comparison and research tool to help customers easily connect to quotes for auto, home, life, renters, and health insurance. It serves both the customers and employers who purchase insurance and the insurance companies and agents who provide it.

Digital at its core, QuoteWizard runs a sophisticated development and engineering shop, and it uses a help desk system to triage engineering tickets. Historically, however, the system relied on a lead engineer. This high-value human resource had to manage and assign the large volume of email-based tickets to an internal engineering team, matching the right talent with the right tasks.

The lead engineer’s experience, expertise, and human ingenuity helped cut through the complexity generated by multiple processes and procedures, but the system proved inflexible and hard to scale as the business grew. Worse, it left one of the company’s most valuable engineers mired in endless tickets and scheduling. If he had an emergency or wanted to take a vacation, his absence could lead to bottlenecks, misassigned work, other engineers bored to tears or out of their depth by turns, and backlogs that could take days or weeks to clear.

QuoteWizard saw an opportunity to apply machine learning to its ticketing system, empowering it to approximate the lead engineer’s human intelligence and automate the work then involved in his role so he could move on to bigger, better projects. Technology that “learns” could understand engineers’ unique skills and route tickets appropriately, with a high degree of accuracy and no human involvement. QuoteWizard wanted smart tools that it could use to streamline ticket triage, improve business efficiency, and help prioritize engineers for tasks best suited to their strengths and interests.

Already a Microsoft 365 user, QuoteWizard chose Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft Power Automate to build an automated, AI-powered engineering ticket routing and scheduling platform. Creating this powerful solution helped the business make assignment and scheduling processes more efficient—and free its lead engineer from a mountain of support tickets, helping route the right tickets to the right engineers to give employees more opportunity to focus on the tasks they wanted to do.

From idea to prototype to productivity

Born digitally and built on code, QuoteWizard is technologically savvy. Its engineers build and deploy complex AI applications on their own using Azure Machine Learning—but just because the team is capable doesn’t mean they need to expend the effort every time, especially when there’s an easier, low-cost—and low-code—option. So rather than developing AI components from scratch, the company used AI Builder within Microsoft Power Apps to automate its development ticketing platform.

“Because we already had Microsoft 365, the net cost for us to build our application using Microsoft Power Platform was close to zero,” says Joseph Springer, Senior Director of Technology at QuoteWizard. “And because AI Builder had the right capabilities and works so well with our existing architecture, doing this work in the Microsoft stack was a no-brainer for us.”

In fact, Springer—who doesn’t have a data science background himself—was able to develop a prototype with just four hours’ active work over the course of two weeks and no need to involve a specialized resource like a data scientist. Springer then handed his completed prototype to the engineering team to transform into a full solution.

The team built a custom machine learning model in AI Builder so that the system no longer required a lead engineer to manually filter, review, and assign tickets, meaning that the lead engineer could move on to more interesting, valuable work. The model uses object detection and text classification to evaluate job logs, determine which engineer’s skills match a given task, and assign the job accordingly. QuoteWizard used Microsoft Power Automate to build and automate a new ticketing process that eliminates the need to capture new requests by email and includes a Azure DevOps connector. The connector links a routing platform in AI Builder to Azure DevOps workflows, ensuring tickets are sent to the right resource at the right time.

“We’re leaning into Microsoft Power Automate to streamline processes and help our engineers focus on higher-value work,” Springer adds. “We now get more value from our team, and they derive more value from their work. It’s a win-win.”

In fact, since implementing the new solution, QuoteWizard has promoted the lead engineer into a more effective role where his skills have a bigger impact on the business.

Higher business value, happier employees

By implementing the new solution, QuoteWizard has gained new efficiencies and created value for its business and its engineers. Because tickets get quickly and automatically routed to the most appropriate resources, work happens successfully and sooner—no more backlog—leading to higher engineer productivity, utilization, and employee satisfaction. Before the company implemented its Microsoft solution, it could take QuoteWizard two hours to assign tickets to a team of engineers; now, assignments are immediate, helping eliminate a major bottleneck.

Using Microsoft Power Platform and AI Builder has helped QuoteWizard improve performance not just for its internal teams but also for the insurance companies it partners with. COVID-19 has caused many customers to shift to online purchasing—leading to a spike in demand from customers and a need for the insurance companies to ramp up their online presence.

“We’re shipping more product to internal and external customers than we ever have,” says Ian Smith, Vice President of Operations at QuoteWizard. “As our insurance company partners embrace online marketing at a new level, they need us to be nimbler. We’re using Microsoft Power Platform and AI Builder to help us meet those customer needs and give our partners a competitive edge.

“Being able to execute on this work and increase our insurance partners’ speed to market makes us more competitive and ultimately more successful, too,” Smith adds.

What’s next for QuoteWizard? QuoteWizard hopes that because the new engineering ticketing system frees up the team’s time and helps engineers focus on more interesting projects, more engineers will want to stay with the company for a long time and help it build great things. QuoteWizard plans to explore Microsoft Power Platform further to help it devise other solutions that drive value internally and externally. It’s particularly interested in automating many of its repetitive tasks, giving employees more space to innovate and test new ideas, ensuring they gain a high level of personal value from their roles.

“We see a lot of opportunity to use Microsoft Power Platform to build more business value,” Springer says. “We’re excited about all that’s possible.”

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