Branch

Branch is an insurance carrier built on advanced technology that offers affordable home and auto insurance to users. Users can receive quotes immediately, customize their coverage, and bundle them together to save money.

Branch uses Airplane Tasks and Views to manage customers, update policy documents and coverage plans, and resolve customer issues.

Managing processes in-house was unsustainable

Initially, Branch's engineers spent significant amounts of time building internal tools in-house to manage critical processes for their Support and Data Teams. These processes included updating customer information, modifying insurance policies, releasing new features, and more. To run these processes, engineers manually executed one-off command line scripts and depended on the Design Team for UI/UX items needed for modifications and feature releases. These technical tasks quickly became bottlenecks for non-technical team members who required operations to be built or executed, making processes more time-consuming and more error-prone to complete.

Branch quickly realized that managing their internal tools in-house wasn't scalable. Engineers and designers were spending significant resources building and managing internal operations. In order to eliminate technical bottlenecks and widen access to their internal tools without compromising security, Branch looked for a better solution externally.

Airplane removed technical and design bottlenecks

Branch found Airplane online and decided to test it out. Right away, Branch's engineers found it simple to transfer their existing one-off scripts, such as creating new users, into Airplane Tasks that anyone on their team could use. Building operations using Airplane’s CLI was similar to what they were already used to, making it easy to recreate their critical operations immediately. Airplane provided Branch with several benefits including:

• Strong built-in UIs: Airplane automatically provided UIs for tasks built using code. Branch was able to simply transform their existing bash scripts into Airplane Tasks and the corresponding Airplane UIs were created. This eliminated the need to build UIs from scratch and saved engineers significant amounts of time.
• Robust Views templates: Airplane's extensive template library made it simple for Branch to clone and develop their own dashboards via the CLI and connect to various third-party resources. Using Airplane Views templates, Branch was able to build complex internal UIs within minutes.
• Granular permissions: Branch used Airplane to set granular permissions for their Support Team members. In Airplane, there are four roles that any user can have: viewers, requesters, executors, and admins. Branch set requester permissions for less-technical team members for tasks, such as creating new users, to train them on how to use Airplane. Once trained, Branch simply updated their permissions to executor and had them deploy tasks directly. Having built-in permissions settings in Airplane allowed Branch to easily manage their sensitive operations securely.

Airplane has helped Branch save time, money, and resources by streamlining their most critical operations. Branch's engineers no longer spend significant amounts of time running one-off scripts and can empower non-technical team members to execute operations themselves. Airplane's developer-first experience also made it simple for Branch to transform their existing scripts into powerful Tasks and Views in Airplane.

Use cases

Branch uses Airplane for some of their most critical operations:

• Stripe billing dashboard: Branch's Support Team is responsible for resolving customer billing and refund issues as quickly as possible. Using Airplane's Stripe dashboard template, Branch built a Stripe dashboard to streamline their billing and refund processes. Branch's engineers simply cloned the Airplane template, inputted their Stripe API key, and immediately saw all of their customer transactions populate the View. The Support Team could now search for customers and issue refunds with the click of a button. This alone saved several hours of time and $25,000 annually due to increased efficiency in their billing processes.
• User management dashboard: Branch built a user management dashboard in Airplane to manage their independent insurance agents (called agencies). Using this dashboard, the Support Team could create new agencies, update their information, and change their permissions easily. Previously, Branch used a 13,000-row Google Sheet to manually manage this process. Using Views saved them significant amounts of time due to the increased efficiency of their agency management process. Just one button in this Airplane View called "reset user password" saved over $15,000 annually.
• Regenerating policy documents: Insurance policy documents are complex and critical to keep up-to-date when regulations change. To ensure their documents maintain accuracy, Branch built an Airplane Task and connected their GraphQL API to regenerate the documents on demand when changes to policies were made. This saved their Compliance and Underwriting Teams significant amounts of time.
• Combining billing services: Branch plans on using Airplane Views to build a dashboard that combines two billing sources: Stripe and ChargeDesk. This centralized dashboard will allow Branch's employees to view customer billing information in one place, streamlining the customer management process.

Branch executes 15,000+ runs per week and has built over 100 objects (Tasks and Views) in Airplane. They currently have 140 users on their Airplane team. Airplane has been critical in helping Branch manage their customers and agencies efficiently. Christie Brandao, one of Branch's Software Developers, stated that "Airplane has saved us significant time and resources. Airplane's pre-built UIs and templates made it easy for us to build our most critical operations in minutes. Technical tasks are no longer bottlenecks and we can finally scale our internal tools effectively."