A common challenge in the insurance industry is the fast-changing digital space, systems, and technologies. As the insurance industry continues to advance, it’s nearly impossible to keep up with a constantly changing market—unless you have a system that helps your company stay ahead of the curve.
Many insurance businesses are looking for the “next big thing” to streamline sales & operations without jeopardizing the customer experience. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is the premier platform to help insurance companies optimize sales, service and enhance customer relationships.
Throughout this blog, we’ll discuss the following topics:
What Is Salesforce Financial Services Cloud?
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) is an integrated platform that’s engineered to specifically support financial services. Powered by Salesforce Lightning, this insurance-focused platform makes it easier for insurance agents to deliver high-quality customer service with customizable and proactive dashboards and reports.
FSC improves user productivity and engagement with clients. It enables agents to provide practical, goal-focused advice to the clients all within a single platform. Insurance agents can provide insight on customer and policyholder relationships and display reports in charts and metrics, including:
- Sales performance by policy
- Monthly sales and renewals
- Closed claims
- And more
FSC provides report templates that minimize organizations’ efforts and ensure that everything is streamlined and cohesive for every customer. This makes it easy to adjust crucial information, like an address change or an added beneficiary.
Salesforce’s MuleSoft Anypoint Platform allows insurers to integrate data across departments and back-end office systems quickly. Through this platform, APIs can be built and reused for services across all channels.
How Insurance Companies Put Salesforce Financial Services Cloud Into Action
Salesforce partners with a variety of insurance companies to maximize the way they operate and engage with customers. Here are several case studies on how major insurance companies have integrated Salesforce in their operations to optimize the way they work:
Pacific Life Offers More Strength and Stability by Integrating Salesforce Into Its Operations
Pacific Life Insurance Company was looking to digitize its business, enhance the customer experience, and boost operational efficiency. This major insurance company partnered with Salesforce to develop a platform that improves the visibility of customer interactions.
Pacific Life integrated Financial Services Cloud across its U.S. locations to enhance visibility. Employees have single-point access to customer data. As a result of this integration, employees who engage with customers can deliver an easier and more customized experience.
Allstate Uses Salesforce To Put Its Agents and Customers in Good Hands
For Allstate Insurance, onboarding agents is a very tedious process. However, partnering with Salesforce made the onboarding process quick and seamless.
Salesforce provided functionality to Allstate, enabling them to turn a 90-day agent onboarding process into a 21-day process. This gives new agents the opportunity to grow, advance, and train much quicker than before.
Allstate employees take advantage of the Salesforce1 app because it allows their salespeople to work from their phone or tablet rather than their laptop. Allstate salespeople have the opportunity to run business and close deals from any location.
Farmers Insurance Knows a Thing or Two About Salesforce
Since 1928, Farmers Insurance has valued customer relationships and interactions. Relationship building is a core value to the company because their agents stand alongside their customers throughout their life, especially during significant life events—both good and bad.
Farmers wanted to uncover a way to use technology to support the relationship between agents and customers. As technology continues to advance, so do the expectations of customers. That being said, agents need a way to deliver their services differently.
Insurance operations have gone from handwriting information to typing to calling toll-free numbers. Today, phones are advancing and providing opportunities for a customer-business revolution. As customers move to more mobile solutions, insurance businesses should follow the same route.
Farmers Insurance collaborated with Salesforce to develop a mobile app that allows agents and customers to report a first notice of loss quickly. This app development allows customers to be more proactive and knowledgeable about the insurance claims process.
The development of the Farmers and Salesforce app was critical because it allowed them to rethink their approach to the first notice of loss. Through the app, the customer has a visual approach to the claims process. This enhances the process for everyone involved because it speeds it up without leaving the customer in the dark.
CNA Insurance Gets Lean and Stays Agile With Salesforce
As the insurance industry changes and adapts, customers continue to want quicker delivery of information. CNA Insurance partnered with Salesforce to develop a sustainable solution.
Within four months, a team of six CNA developers who had no prior experience with Salesforce developed a strategy for their agents. Even with a tight timeline, Salesforce allowed them to build consistent reports for their clients and policyholders quickly.
By partnering with Salesforce, CNA had the opportunity to make additional releases or enhancements to fit the wants and needs of the customer each month. Salesforce is a one-stop shop for getting work done and consolidating extensive amounts of data.
Today, the CNA and Salesforce platform is a primary source for work distribution and data collection. They allow big data to be easily maintained and controlled, allowing businesses to prepare for future growth without changing processes.
How To Build Long-Term Trusted Relationships With Financial Services Cloud
Most insurance companies continuously seek ways to maintain great relationships with customers while maximizing operational efficiency. Here are three steps that FSC allows insurance businesses to make to achieve these goals:
Step 1: Track Your Overall Business
With FSC, insurance businesses have the ability to find and track business metrics in one place. Through the agent console, advisors and agents can discover insight on policies, premiums, and renewals to drive meaningful interactions with the right customers at the right time.
Step 2: Get a 360-Degree View of Each Policyholder
FSC gives insurance companies a panoramic view of their customers, allowing them to cater to essential needs while also driving business growth. This brings each customer’s most important information to the attention of the advisor and agent, including policies and claims for auto, homes, and life insurance, as well as financial accounts and household data.
Step 3: Provide Relevant and Timely Advice
Salesforce FSC allows advisors and agents to track crucial life events and business milestones. This is important because it allows them to provide timely and relevant advice and helps identify appropriate upsell and cross-sell opportunities. These crucial milestones include getting married, buying a house, starting a business, having children, and more.
Benefits of Using Salesforce for Insurance Companies
Optimized Claim Management Process
One of the toughest challenges of insurance companies is the claim management process. By integrating Salesforce into the mix, the process is made much more accessible. This task requires a lot of strategy and data to produce significant results. Salesforce streamlines this information and keeps it all in one place for agents to find quickly. It also enhances the customer-company relationship because it makes communication more efficient.
Quick Handling Time
No matter what or who is insured, insurance cases need to be resolved quickly. Whether it’s health or car insurance, the quick transfer of information from one person to another is necessary. Salesforce makes handling cases much more efficient, reducing handling time and improving performance requirements.
FSC is a customized version of the Salesforce platform that enables insurance companies to sync information to different channels. Additional customizations can be built into the platform to meet specific business requirements.
Maximized Marketing Efforts
Salesforce is so much more than a CRM platform. While enhanced customer relationship building is the main highlight of the software, it can also be used to revolutionize an insurance company’s marketing efforts.
Many insurance companies are so focused on managing their customer relationships that they forget to generate new business opportunities. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the perfect fit for these businesses that are looking to streamline their marketing efforts. This enables the company to manage marketing tasks and communication seamlessly.
Enhanced Customer Service
Insurance companies are always looking for ways to improve their customer service. Through Salesforce, they have the chance to optimize the way they respond to their clients. Salesforce for insurance providers makes perfect sense because it allows the company to deliver better customer service that can only be achieved through a deeper understanding of the client.
Make the Move to Salesforce With Abstrakt Cloud Solutions
As a Ridge, formerly Silver, Salesforce Implementation partner, Abstrakt Cloud Solutions focuses on working with insurance businesses across the United States to offer Salesforce integrations, implementations, migrations, management, and support services.
Many insurance companies are hesitant to make technology-focused advancements to their day-to-day operations because if a process isn’t broken, why fix it? Insurance businesses handle a lot of moving parts, from updating a client’s lifestyle to changing policies. In addition to these constant changes, agents also want to exceed customer service expectations to retain their customers.
Salesforce enables insurance businesses to streamline how they operate by having everything they need under one cloud-based software. Although an insurance business’s process isn’t broken, Salesforce allows agents and reps to work more efficiently and pitch new policies to account holders when the timing is right for them.
Ready to optimize the way you work and engage with customers? Contact us today to get started!
