The Salesforce Financial Services Cloud Spring ’23 release is coming out in a few weeks. We’re excited to see that many of the new capabilities offer solutions for the technology goals that insurance companies are looking to achieve, including:

• Digitizing the recruiting and interview process to create a unified experience that flows from the first touch of an agent applicant to the hiring journey and into onboarding
• An interactive onboarding process that walks the agent through the steps to submit their first opportunity and begin independently writing business
• Incentivizing producers to sell by making content and tools available that educate buyers about products as well as target messaging to overcome buyer objections
• Improving ROI on agent investments by establishing training and coaching tutorials throughout the sales journey to extend learning on products, services, and skills 

Here we highlight the relevant Spring ’23 release features and functions for the insurance vertical that will set insurers on the path to success.

The top 5 release highlights for insurance

These are the new Salesforce Financial Services Cloud features that we are most excited about and think are going to be game-changers for the insurance industry:

1. Build business processes for payment authorizations: Set limits on how much users can pay for losses and expenses and build a workflow that routes payment authorization requests to supervisors. They can link directly to the claims details and approve or deny the financial transactions.
2. Apply rules to deeper levels of the product hierarchy: OmniScript Lightning Web Components (LWC) support optional coverage and attribute rules evaluation for coverage in the lowest-level structures of the product hierarchy. The out-of-the-box tool optimizes the rules set up for handling multi-insured item products.
3. Delete census members for a group benefit quote: Use the Insurance Quote Census LWC in the Salesforce data model to delete single or multiple members on a quote record page. The hierarchical tree view helps brokers and insurance carrier administrators browse large, detailed datasets more efficiently.
4. Customize attribute values based on user profiles: Show users unique product attribute values based on their user profile. This allows you to have different flavors of the same product across many different profiles and personas within the quoting journey, which is beneficial for those in product administration roles.
5. Issue an Out of Sequence endorsement: Create endorsements for transactions that have an effective date prior to the effective date of another active transaction on the same policy. For example, an auto owner sells one car and purchases another. Now you can see the component breakdowns of any applicable fees for the participants, issuance, and endorsements.

New features simplify complexity for insurance users

Here are some Spring ’23 release highlights for Salesforce Financial Services Cloud that will help insurance users work more efficiently and effectively.

• Service Process Automation: With this release, Salesforce is launching service process automation within Financial Services Cloud, allowing users to handle end-to-end case fulfillment even if that resolution requires an API call somewhere else. This low-code tool automates processes and spans multiple applications. It will enable insurers to scale service with ready-to-use templates and integrations.
• Actionable segmentation: Users can now easily segment customers and create actionable lists of clients and prospects who they want to receive certain high-touch, relevant outreach. For example, if you’re going to meet with your prospects in New York with the highest net value, you can create a list and filter by the location and net worth. Then you can set an action for the list, like sending a bulk email or calling each contact. When you decide what the action will be, there’s a field with a status in it, so you can keep that status updated and mark your progress to share with team members.
• Einstein Activity Capture for Financial Services Cloud: Use the power of Einstein Activity Capture to sync calendar events into Financial Services Cloud Interaction Summaries seamlessly. An interaction summary is a structured way to capture meeting notes and attendees in one place. It is helpful to prepare for an appointment by giving a broad view of all the interactions and being able to filter by interaction type, such as deal execution, meet and greet, or quarterly check-in.
• Integrated onboarding: Streamline customer onboarding with Salesforce automation and integration. Collect policyholder information and signatures, then verify and screen to assess risk. Store customer items in Salesforce, such as licenses, passports, or deeds. Financial Services Cloud makes it easy for customers to complete their onboarding process. You can now pre-fill capabilities, create a QR code for customers to submit their documents, and verify customer signatures with integration definitions. 
• New help and training: Insurance has a revamped Help and Training landing page in the community. It is incredibly helpful with videos and demos. You can also interact and build some rating procedures and product models.

Enabling a smoother journey for agents and customers

Some of the other release highlights aim to improve the customer journey and create a more seamless process for agents. Those include: 

Dynamic Forms for leads
In the Winter ’23 release, Salesforce had Dynamic Forms available for accounts, contacts, and opportunities, and now they’ve officially extended those to leads. Dynamic Forms lets you transform monolithic page layouts to show users only the data they need to see when they need to see it. Dynamic Forms affect what users see when creating, viewing, and editing records. 

Insurers are trying to capture a ton of information from prospects, policyholders, carriers, and agencies. Dynamic forms use conditional visibility when users look at specific fields or specific information on a page. It makes lead information a lot easier to navigate for your end users and allows them to create a more personalized experience while also helping to improve page performance and loading times. 

Enhanced meeting scheduling
Silverline has many insurance clients using Salesforce Inbox for their sales and producers. It’s an email productivity tool that is included in all UE licensing. The Inbox availability feature helps avoid the “calendar Tetris” issue and accelerates scheduling. 

With the new release, there is a “Book A Meeting” button where customers can view availability across the seller’s Google or Outlook calendar to set up a meeting. Sellers can also quickly schedule meetings by offering Salesforce-recommended best next times, which they can share with one click. 

Dynamic activity composer
The dynamic activity composer gives reps activities at the click of a button and offers more choices than the tabbed activity composer. The new composer is more actionable and allows users to select from up to three email addresses when sending an email and also log the type of email, such as negotiation or meet and greet. 

The dynamic activity composer will automatically be included in the Spring ’23 release. For this rollout, Salesforce is emphasizing the need for thoughtful change management. Rather than going on each Lightning page and turning off the new activity composer, administrators can take steps to enable their users to be prepared for and embrace the change rather than try to hide the new UI. See this article for the steps to create a simple plan for user enablement with in-app guidance. 

Sales Engagement enhancements
Sales Engagement used to be called High Velocity Sales, and the tool is built into the unlimited editions of Salesforce. Sales Engagement is intended for high-volume sales, allowing users to put contacts or leads in the cadence of emails and phone calls. You can now assign a target to up to five cadences, whereas previously, the max was one. For example, assigning a target to a collect invoice information cadence as well as a cross-selling insurance policy cadence. 

Another enhancement to Sales Engagement is with Call Script. Now, when a sales rep selects a Call Script when logging a call, Salesforce will suggest a cadence that goes along with it. Reps are prompted to add the person who was called to the matching cadence or to choose among other matching cadences. Your company can reuse existing cadences designed to guide reps through the prospecting and opportunity nurturing processes.

Conversation milestones
Embed conversation milestones, powered by Einstein Conversation Insights, into your enablement programs to track and improve sales rep skills at scale and tie that improvement to revenue results. Conversation milestones offer the ability to see insights and trends surfaced from voice calls. Calls are recorded and analyzed for keywords and phrases like competitor names or product mentions. Milestones essentially live on top of the Einstein Conversation Insights to automatically create milestones and update them as needed. 

Managers and reps can detect market signals through conversation patterns, such as increased product or discount requests. Users can listen back to the call and zoom into the right part of the conversation to find the critical moments happening within that discussion. Conversation milestones also enable managers to personalize coaching by focusing on each rep’s success and improvement areas. 

Field Service Lightning
Field Service Lightning is a service application that connects mobile or remote employees to onsite services. The Spring ’23 release extends the capabilities of what can be done offline to drive efficiency and mobile worker productivity. We increasingly see insurers use Field Service Lightning for appraisals, claims, processing, and inspections. Workers can now upload and annotate images from the mobile application for iOS and Android. 

Salesforce Contact Center
Contact Center users now have access to Einstein Conversation Insights. This capability works similarly to the previously mentioned Conversation Milestones, where keywords and phrases are picked up on recorded calls. Contact center leaders can ramp up agents quickly for immediate time-to-value and automatically identify customer pain points in real-time to improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn. 

Slack record conversations
With the Spring ’23 release, agents can use the Slack messaging functionality from Salesforce itself. You can maximize agent productivity and reduce the swivel chair experience for agents by enabling them to view and post conversations in Slack from the related Salesforce record directly in the console.

Lightning Threading in email-to-case
Users can prevent duplicate case records by leveraging the new Lightning Threading approach to help email-to-case find corresponding cases so that a new case isn’t created when a related case exists. The benefit is fewer bottlenecks to email-to-case and better keeping of clean data. 

Flows and Flow Builder Enhancements
You can now embed screen flows within Slack as you’re designing the flows. You can view, update, and take action on a list of records using the new native component in screen flows. You can build multi-sub-guided automations that can be surfaced within Slack, which allows you to meet the users where they are. 

Use Salesforce’s Migrate to Flow tool to convert your Process Builder processes into triggered flows. Flows can do everything that processes can do and more. We recommend checking out this page to learn about all the Flow Builder updates.

Automatic upgrade starting spring ’23

Starting in spring 2023, Salesforce is moving its Financial Services Cloud for Insurance managed package to the Salesforce automatic upgrade process. This process aligns with the Salesforce seasonal release cycle, where new features are delivered three times a year (summer, winter, and spring). With automatic upgrades, you also get early access to upcoming releases in your sandbox preview environment.

Starting with the Spring ’24 release, all customers will be required to receive automatic upgrades. Learn more about the steps to complete the upgrade.