It’s an exciting time in insurance technology! On September 24, Salesforce announced an insurance-focused extension to its Financial Services Cloud. New enhancements are designed to help insurers to strengthen relationships with policyholders and include a 360-degree view of each customer across all lines of business.
These new capabilities also provide insurers with expanded functionality designed specifically for their industry, such as pre-packaged Lightning Flow templates for First Notice of Loss and Beneficiary Change, detailed Life Events, an Agent and Customer Service Rep Console, and pre-built templates to help deploy branded experiences in Community Cloud.
We at Silverline are excited for what this means for the insurance industry — insurers, agents, and policyholders alike. As a Trailblazer Community for Insurance leader and Silverline’s Insurance Industry Principal Consultant, I’m happy to provide my two cents.
The insurance industry is changing
The change in the customer-first digital revolution has forced insurance companies to update their processes and legacy systems to become more customer friendly.
Many consumers picture insurance as a necessary evil. They have to have it, but when you need to interact with the company that provides the benefits… it’s almost always painful. Salesforce has been the leader in enabling companies across industries to gain a 360-degree view of their customers for 20 years. Now they have taken that experience and applied it to the insurance vertical.
Every insurance provider I have worked with struggles to get all their prospects and policyholder information easily accessible in real time. The FSC for Insurance solution is an accelerator that does just that. In a “buy vs. build” IT world, this solution provides all the major components to transform the insurance business and surface policyholder data for optimal customer service — whether it be in call centers or self service via a community.
Salesforce enables innovation
I had the privilege of working with the FSC for Insurance product team to give feedback on features and objects through their beta program prior to the Spring ’19 launch. As I continue to work with my clients, I love that we can give feedback for changes that are seen as soon as the next release. The out-of-the-box functionality for Einstein Analytics helps CSRs quickly identify life changes opportunities and potential risks/issues, and suggest product solutions in the interface to optimize service and retain the policyholder.
It’s not just the end policyholder that suffers from the choppy terrain of the legacy systems and data being piecemealed together. Agents and brokers are demanding fast quote to bind workflows that allows the sales process to move quickly. The most recently released integrations with systems like Guidewire and iPipeline allow for bi-directional data flow that enhances the agent experience. In short, it makes independent agents want to do more business with the provider due to ease of use.
Insurance-focused updates for the future
In talking with Mike Piehl, our VP of Vlocity Practice, he also weighed in on what this announcement means for Silverline and our clients: “It’s good that Salesforce is extending the standardized insurance objects. This lets us deliver value to our clients more quickly and allows for additional innovation from ISVs.
An extension like this provides a clearer distinction boundary between existing insurance solutions built on Salesforce, like Vlocity and FSC. Insurance companies can look forward to reduced cost and complexity in leveraging life events as insurance opportunities to either drive sales or improve brand recognition. “
Fred Cadena, Silverline’s VP of Financial Services Strategy, agrees. “The Financial Services industry is transitioning from a more transactional relationship based on the ‘selling of products’ to developing a more ‘holistic view of the customer.’ The extension of FSC to include insurance features reduce the effort required by Silverline clients in the insurance industry to gain a complete view of the relationships they have with their policyholders,” he said.
“FSC for Insurance can increase operational efficiency with pre-built workflow templates for managing common services requests and enabling the automation of certain tasks. It can also help deepen and grow relationships by centralizing the view of policyholder assets and coverages, making clear where gaps may exist.
By standardizing the data model elements needed to support insurance sales and service functions, insurance companies are able to eliminate (or avoid) technical debt and ecosystem partners are able to create solutions that integrate more easily with the platform.”
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