Qoala Case Study: Centralizing Insights For Increased Company Productivity
How Qoala optimizes the easiest access to insurance for Indonesian mobile users using Holistics’ Self-Service Business Intelligence.
Holistics is a great tool for companies to visualize their data. It makes it easier for them to see everything, and acts as a single source of all their analytics.
Fazlurrani Izzattisselim
Business Intelligence Manager, Qoala
About Qoala
Qoala is a disruptive insurtech company that uses big data, machine learning, IoT and the blockchain to revolutionize the insurance landscape in Indonesia. They partner with big companies, including eCommerce and travel platforms, to enhance customer experiences through their unique and innovative insurance products.
Qoala creates a seamless customer experience through automatic claims, personalization and fraud detection engines. Founded in 2017, they were started by a group of mathematicians and computer scientists with strong insurance and technology backgrounds, with experiences at BCG, Traveloka, and Accenture.
Qoala now has more than 8.5 million insurance transactions, ranging from travel and logistics to health and smartphone, for B2B, B2B2C, and B2C.
The Problem
Qoala aims to make insurance easy and accessible to everyone. In the Indonesian market, the largest pool of internet users are mobile phone users. Therefore, one of Qoala’s top priorities was to make the app as easy to use as possible on smartphones.
Unfortunately, Qoala’s app and product data was spread across multiple databases in their microservices setup. The nature of Qoala’s business also meant that they had to deal with a diverse range of data types across many different sources:
- In insurtech, it was necessary for Qoala to negotiate terms with both insurance providers and distribution partners. During such discussions, various partners would often ask detailed questions about how the business was performing. Qoala required instant access to answers for any number of questions that a partner may ask.
- Qoala serves many product variants to their customers — from general insurance, microinsurance, all the way to life insurance. This meant that the data for one product may come in a completely different format compared to another. To make things worse, such product data was scattered across different sources.
- Qoala continues to work with many partners. Each partner provides data in a different manner. Some of these partners provided data via APIs, others through JSON files, more still through Excel spreadsheets, CSV files, or Google Sheets. This made it difficult for Qoala to reconcile numbers across different sources.
After six months of increasing demands from management, Qoala’s data team decided that enough was enough — they had to figure out a scalable solution to address all these issues. This led them to Holistics.
The Solution
Qoala currently uses Holistics as one of their primary BI tools. Insan says that their product and ops and business teams check Holistics on a daily basis.
Qoala’s data environment is complex. They have product data stored in MySQL replicas, and they pipe analytical data into Redshift. They also collect data manually from their many insurance partners. Such data arrives in a broad array of formats.
Qoala uses Holistics to combine all these data sources. They regard Holistics as their single source of truth.
Most remarkably, when asked about their learning curve, Insan said that “Because everyone on our data team had prior experience with BI tools, we didn’t take much time to familiarize ourselves with Holistics. We took only a few days to become productive with it.”
The best feature we found in Holistics is the ability to centralize all the information, which means that we can stream information from any kind of source and put it under one dashboard or report. With this, we can easily ingest the data and deliver the report or dashboard with ease.
– Insan Ramadhan, Data Team Manager
Killer Features
Here are several killer features that Qoala found with Holistics
Holistics makes it easy to combine data across 10 MySQL replicas and one Redshift instance, along with a variety of manually created data sources.
Unlike other tools, Qoala found that Holistics was ridiculously easy to integrate. “Holistics is the easier way to integrate with (our infrastructure),” Insan says, “I don’t think we really needed time for integration, we just connected our data sources and all our numbers were there.”
Insan says that they particularly enjoy the ability to view their Holistics dashboards from their smartphones. This means that teams all across Qoala may check on numbers or trends while on the go.
Insan comes from a Tableau background, but he finds the chart varieties available in Holistics to be quite complete. Qoala’s data team is able to quickly and easily create effective visualizations for their business teams.
The Future
Qoala intends to change the insurance industry for the better, by making claim performance as seamless and as painless as opening an app.
To achieve that, Insan believes that Qoala will need to analyze whatever data they have to find an edge against the incumbents in their industry.
As a result, Insan and his team are looking forward to Holistics 3.0.
“With Holistics 3.0, the business user doesn’t need to query anymore,” he says, “And they can just drag and drop metrics. This makes data more accessible across the business. This way, we can turn Qoala into a more data-driven company.”