The Initial Problem

H2O Partners, Inc. approached CURTIS Digital for help with developing a custom portal to house various types of information that FEMA Call Center employees needed access to during flood insurance claim calls. The most important of these content types is, by far, the FEMA Flood Manual that is released every year in April (and updated again in October). Prior to the portal's development, call center employees would have to store the various manual PDFs on their computers and keep notes about changes between the versions in Word docs, saved in emails, or even worse, scribbled on Post-It notes or legal pads. In addition, it was too time consuming for them to access the various flood insurance training files that H2O had developed for them. H2O, and FEMA, needed a central location to store everything that an employee could possibly need while on a call, and they needed to be fast.

The Custom Solution

CURTIS Digital proposed developing a custom web portal that emphasized search across the different “facets" of information–the FEMA manuals and the H2O-developed resources. In addition, CURTIS Digital proposed developing a Q&A section where employees could ask questions and help each other find information in a manner similar to Stack Overflow. 

Because the call-center has different, isolated teams and roles, the system needed to support complex user management. The portal allows for granular role creation (down to who can read specific types of content), and lets admins sort people into teams. All content is tagged to a team, meaning Underwriters would never have to wade through Customer Service materials or vice versa. 

The most complex part of the system is the manual annotation lifecycle. Because updated manuals are released bi-annually, FEMA needed a way to carry applicable annotations forward into the new manual versions and leave the obsolete ones behind. To handle this, CURTIS Digital built an annotation reconcile flow. This area of the system computes the differences between two manual versions, highlights the differences, and allows admins to copy relevant annotations across from one version to another. 

Results