In conversation with Salesforce
What is your role at Salesforce?
I head Salesforce’s solutions for the P&C insurer sector. This involves connecting capabilities across Salesforce and partner products to deliver solutions that help insurers and MGAs compete in their chosen markets.
What is Salesforce’s background in supporting the needs of the insurance industry?
Over the last 20+ years, Salesforce has partnered with thousands of insurance customers across property, casualty, life and health. We have helped global carrier and broker brands, regional firms, MGAs and insurtechs compete as customer-focused companies.
Our main aim and function are to help our clients engage their customers and partners as well as manage successful relationships. We have been busy extending insurance-specific functionality for our insurance clients, including middle- and back-office processes. Our investments now mean we offer a broader and deeper set of platform capabilities beyond core CRM for the insurance market.
A key initiative within these investments was the launch in 2016 of Financial Services Cloud, which caters for the specific needs of insurers and other financial services companies. Our insurance clients use this for managing insights into their customers, sales discovery and prospecting, service interactions, and automating workflows. Salesforce also acquired Vlocity and its Digital Insurance Platform applications in 2020. These applications run on Financial Services Cloud and its data model and are used by our clients to manage insurance products, policies, claims and more – all directly on Salesforce.
Beyond this, our insurance customers have been taking advantage of Salesforce’s growing Customer 360 capabilities across sales, service, marketing, digital experiences, automation and data and analytics. Salesforce’s acquisitions of Mulesoft and Tableau have expanded our data management and analytics offerings, and our more recent acquisition of Slack has allowed us to include digital collaboration, for example between underwriters and brokers, into our insurance solutions. Insurers also have access to thousands of value-added software partner applications on the Salesforce AppExchange. In terms of most recent developments, we have now launched our new AI Cloud for GPT-driven applications.
What specific solutions does Salesforce offer its insurance clients today?
We combine Salesforce’s products, along with those of our partners, to offer solutions from front-office sales and distribution to middle- and core insurance operations. We aim for comprehensive support across the value chain for insurers and brokers.
For example, we support sales and service agent productivity with unified customer insights, AI-driven next-best actions, workflow automation, and personalised interactions. Underwriters use our underwriter workbench for streamlining their work; they can extend quote-to-bind processes to brokers and automate portfolio underwriting. Business users can quickly configure products in low/no-code environments, while claims managers can auto-adjudicate claims and speed up the management of reserves and payments. Carriers also use Salesforce for managing their broker networks, selling directly to customers online, and for group benefits.
How does the Salesforce platform help insurers differently from other systems?
Salesforce offers a comprehensive customer-centric platform to help insurers engage their customers and partners.
First, the platform’s logic is customer-centric. Insurers and brokers have a foundation of a single unified, real-time view of their customers with data managed securely in one place, AI-driven insights and recommended actions.
Second, building on this data- and AI-driven CRM foundation, core insurance and digital engagement processes work in tandem on the platform. Insurers can quickly configure products in low-code and then deploy automated quoting and other experiences near instantly across a range of digital channels. This agility, and ease of change, are critical to speed to market.
By combining our Customer 360 capabilities, our clients can manage efficient, automated journeys that are also personalised throughout the entire customer engagement lifecycle – from marketing through quoting, underwriting, billing, policy administration, claims, service, renewal and upsell.
How does the Salesforce platform work alongside other systems?
Salesforce partners with independent software providers whose products complement our own insurance solutions. For example, we partner with data enrichment, documentation management and payments software providers within our automated underwriting solution.
From a broader ecosystem perspective, we support our customers in being able to interoperate with existing systems where needed. Our solutions are modular, which eases adoption, and customers use our API-driven integration capabilities, including through Mulesoft, to ensure data moves seamlessly between Salesforce and other systems.
What success stories can you share from your insurance clients?
LV= uses Salesforce to manage personalised, automation-assisted customer sales, service, marketing and claims, and monitor changing customer needs in real-time, for over 7 million direct business customers. Prudential Financial uses Salesforce to allow customer self-service for simple transactions which reduces call centre demand while easing access to important advisory services. Among our MGA clients, Azur Underwriting, now part of Aviva, and more recently, N2G, a joint venture between Nationwide and Generali, have also been recognised by industry consultants for their leading business initiatives using Salesforce’s underwriting capabilities.
How are insurers using Salesforce to effectively distribute their products?
Our insurance platform is flexible in supporting a wide range of distribution models, such as agent-based, portal, online, hub or exchange. Our customers can manage processes for quote-to-issue, policy administration and claims as well as across a wide range of digital channels.
This might also be where insurance is bundled with a partner’s products outside of insurance, known as embedded insurance. For example, a major UK warranty insurer client has successfully embedded its insurance products into the sale and service of domestic appliances sold by a major US white goods manufacturer. Likewise, we have an MGA customer in France who is using Salesforce to embed warranty insurance for consumer electronic devices. Another client in the USA is using Salesforce to streamline broker submissions and automate the underwriting of builders’ risk policies bundled into property developer loans. Overall, we are seeing an increasing number of companies choosing to embed insurance which creates a natural cross-sell opportunity. The opportunities extend far beyond bancassurance, for which clients are also using Salesforce.
Where can insurers learn more about Salesforce and what it offers for the insurance market?
Salesforce World Tour London is on June 29th. We will be showcasing how we’re combining our Customer 360, data management and latest AI capabilities to increase productivity. And on September 12-14th we will be welcoming customers across the world to Dreamforce in San Francisco.
Those interested in attending Salesforce World Tour in London or Dreamforce in San Francisco can find out more here, https://www.salesforce.com/uk/events/london/ and here, https://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/. Customers can also join remotely on the Salesforce+ channel.