HEDVIG - Delivering seamless customer support with a renovated back office application

Background

Hedvig is a Swedish, app-based insurance startup that was founded in 2016 with the vision to change the insurance industry for the better. From the very start, they’ve been working to create a convenient, reliable, fair, and modern insurance system. One that gives customers the opportunity to purchase insurance anytime, anywhere, simply using their phones. 

With Hedvig, customers can purchase customized insurance policies for their homes, families, and themselves with easy-to-understand terms and faster claim payouts. Today, Hedvig supplies insurance to thousands of Swedes, and continues to grow year after year. 

Not long after launch, Hedvig got in touch with us at Fastdev to help them create tools that would enable more seamless and effective interactions between their support team and customers.     

Challenge

Looking at Hedvig’s system architecture, it was clear that in order to make things run smoother for Hedvig’s support teams, our development team would first have to restructure the back office application and move from a monolithic structure to a microservice environment. 

We set to work, implementing a solution that would involve addressing the application’s front and back ends, and putting modern frame structures and languages in place—such as React, TypeScript, GraphQL— as well as new technology to redesign Hedvig’s architecture and help them meet their goals. 

Development Process 

Step 1

First, we separated the front end from the back end. To get the front end to work with TypeScript, our development team had to exchange the regular JSX components with TSX components. The basic part was redesigned, and then custom-coded using TypeScript.

Step 2

Next, we adapted the business logic to GraphQL. This was done only for a few components such as chat, methods, and queries. Our development team also made certain configurations to ensure that GraphQL, and its various work processes, would operate properly.

Step 3

Finally, we carried out all development-related processes such as development, testing, synchronization work with Hedvig, and integration with third-party services.

Results

The final solution included several applications: 

• A chat room where Hedvig’s support team can communicate with customers and receive and share files
• A workspace where insurance policies can be more easily created and edited
• And a system function that enables automated payouts to customers   

“Fastdev has great developers with topical skills and a clear perspective on various design choices,” says John Ardelius, CTO and Co-founder at Hedvig. “It felt really good to have both a Swedish counterpart in the project as well as senior developers available in the team to problem solve with. Overall, they were very helpful and always had the best solution in mind. Time zone differences were never an issue.” 

Not only did Hedvig end up with a solution they were happy with but, with support from our team, they were able to make it happen in a fast and efficient way. 

“With help from Fastdev, we were able to parallelize important development work-streams,” says John. “The consultants also brought some new ideas and perspectives into the overall system architecture discussion which was very helpful.” 

“We were able to shorten our time to market while keeping our development costs under control,” he adds.