Managing an insurance business becomes increasingly complex as the company grows and evolves. Thus, to handle increasingly complex business processes and maintain high operational performance, companies should consider the adoption of a digital platform that would unite multiple insurance functions and workflows under one roof.
Salesforce can fulfill the role of a unified business platform that centralizes claims, underwriting, policy, customer service, and marketing management. But workflow centralization is not the only advantage of adopting Salesforce for insurance agency. The solution also helps streamline these processes by providing robust automation capabilities and an industry-specific data model.
This article covers five benefits that insurance companies can achieve by implementing Salesforce.
Optimized claim management
Salesforce helps businesses improve the efficiency of claim processing and management, which are both highly labor-intensive insurance company duties.
For instance, insurers can automate and simplify these business aspects by creating comprehensive claim product models. A model is a blueprint that describes a typical claim that an insurance policyholder might file to an insurance agency and includes a set of rules for handling a specific type of claim.
When a customer submits a claim, a claim record can be generated automatically based on a suitable predefined model and then routed to appropriate executives for approval. These capabilities can help insurers save employees’ work time by reducing repetitive manual labor.
Moreover, Salesforce allows agents to track claims, review their statuses (such as active, settled, or closed), and view the details of each existing claim. For instance, agents can check the claim number, the date of a First Notice of Loss (FNOL), and other claim details.
Additionally, Salesforce provides templates that help insurers configure and streamline the identity verification process. These templates can be used to determine what specific details a contact center agent (CCA) should check to ensure that a legitimate policyholder submitted a claim and that the claim is not fraudulent.
Streamlined underwriting
Underwriting, which involves insurance risk analysis and assessment, is another business function that can be supported by Salesforce.
In particular, the solution can aggregate data self-reported by customers (such as names, contacts, and dates of birth) from corporate data collection tools, as well as data from third-party sources (such as criminal, bankruptcy, or vehicle registry records) via Salesforce’s APIs. Thus, by using Salesforce, underwriters can gain a unified view of the data they need to assess risk and adjudicate claims effectively.
Moreover, Salesforce allows insurance companies to set up automated workflows for various underwriting processes, from eligibility checks and risk assessment to quoting and communication with customers. For example, an insurer can create an underwriting script for automated cancellation of quotes that do not meet specified criteria (such as the age of the property).
Enhanced policy administration and servicing
Salesforce helps agents manage the entire insurance policy lifecycle, including policy issuance, approval, renewal, and termination. In addition, the solution provides automated document generation, helping accelerate the creation of contracts, service level agreements, and quotes.
Also, Salesforce allows insurers to easily track their existing policies by looking through their clients’ personal and business accounts. On these account pages, agents can also find data associated with a particular account (such as policy owners’ and participants’ contacts), which reduces the need for manual data search.
Alternatively, insurance agents can view all of their household policies via Salesforce’s Household pages. There, agents can also filter policies by type to find specific ones quicker and create new policies in a couple of clicks without switching to other pages.
More efficient marketing management
Among other things, implementing Salesforce allows insurance businesses to automate their marketing operations.
By creating custom interest tags and adding them to customer records, agents can identify and track customer preferences and inclinations regarding a company’s insurance policies and coverage options. Marketing specialists can also organize interest tags into categories to segment client profiles based on shared preferences and interests and run more targeted and accurate marketing campaigns.
Marketers also can set up and launch campaigns to automatically send predesigned emails to customers according to a plan or after some trigger (such as policy purchase or cancellation).
Among all, Salesforce offers a wide range of marketing analytics capabilities. Insurers can analyze customers’ website interactions, transactions, and social media data and use these insights to provide customers with tailored product and service recommendations or optimize content across email and mobile channels.
Improved customer service and support
Providing excellent customer service and support is critical to an insurance business’s success, and Salesforce can help insurance companies streamline this process.
For example, the CRM allows insurers to set up self-service portals that enable customers to file inquiries and complaints without interacting with customer support specialists. After the inquiry or complaint is submitted, insurers can check it and view all the related data via a single CRM interface, which helps resolve customer queries quicker and more efficiently.
In turn, Salesforce’s mobile capabilities can be useful for insurers providing on-site and field services. By using Salesforce’s iOS and Android apps, insurance field agents can process claims, perform underwriting audits, and handle policy sales or renewals, anywhere, anytime.
Additionally, Salesforce’s Generative AI capabilities can further simplify field agents’ work. For example, an AI assistant can analyze a customer’s data from Salesforce to create a brief about an upcoming work order and provide an agent with recommendations on how to deliver more quality and personalized service.
Final thoughts
Increasing workflow complexity is the inevitable result of an insurance company’s growth, making a business more challenging to manage. To overcome this challenge, insurers can adopt Salesforce. The solution helps insurance businesses centralize claims management, underwriting, marketing, customer service, and policy administration and streamline them with the help of built-in robust automation tools.
Despite all the Salesforce’s advantages for business, companies should approach its implementation wisely, as it is a costly and challenging project. Insurers should consult with certified Salesforce experts before the project starts to assess the platform’s viability for their business processes. Consultants can also help an insurer define the right Salesforce products, as well as implement and customize them, ensuring successful Salesforce adoption.
