Salesforce Expands Financial Services Cloud With New Insurance Innovation- Bringing Policyholders, Insurers And Agents Together

Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, today announced new insurance-focused enhancements to Financial Services Cloud that enable insurers to build stronger, more personalized relationships with policyholders. As an extension to Financial Services Cloud, insurers now have a unified, 360-degree view of their policyholders–including household relationships, life events, coverage and claims–across all lines of business.

The insurance industry is experiencing a revolution. Leading insurers are beginning to explore innovations in digital, data and cloud technologies to drive profitable growth, distinctive customer engagement, agent productivity and innovative new business models. However, many of these companies are still challenged by legacy processes and systems, fragmentation between siloed businesses and functions, a lack of an end-to-end digital strategy and the talent to execute.

Without the ability for insurers to revamp their core activities, including the adoption of a digital-first platform and more collaboration across business units, they risk losing the loyalty of their customer base to competitors. In order to be successful, insurance companies must improve policyholder trust and transparency, create added value and provide more personalized experiences to their customers.

"Now, more than ever before, the insurance industry is working towards delivering more relevant and engaging experiences at every stage of a customer's life," said Ayan Sarkar, Global Head of Insurance, Salesforce. "By leveraging data and AI and digitizing touch points, we can now help insurers deliver distinctive experiences. We're thrilled and excited to partner with insurers on this journey to transform the industry with new insurance innovations for Financial Services Cloud."

Introducing Insurance Innovations in Financial Services Cloud

Financial Services Cloud transforms the way financial institutions engage with customers through intelligent, integrated and personalized capabilities. It allows companies to unlock customer loyalty through unified experiences while seamlessly bridging channels and geographies across both consumer and commercial lines of business.

The latest capabilities in Financial Services Cloud arm insurers with expanded out-of-the-box functionality specifically designed for the insurance industry.

• The Agent and Customer Service Rep Console provides an always-on, comprehensive view of performance metrics, relevant insights and actions across each policyholder's touchpoints, household relationships, policies, claims, coverages, life events, business milestones and more. For example, reps and agents are able to work more productively and deliver exceptional customer service with access to data on current policies,claims and recommendations for right coverages.
• Lightning Flows provide consistent, step-by-step guidance for common customer service requests across channels, devices and apps. Pre-packaged Lightning Flow templates--such as First Notice of Loss and Beneficiary Change—are integrated with leading technology partners to apply business rules consistently and reduce inefficiencies. For example, a customer service rep can collect all of a policyholder's information to initiate First Notice of Loss without having to switch between screens on multiple systems.
• Life Events capture and visualize major triggers of changes in insurance needs, such as purchasing a new home, graduating from college or changing jobs. For example, an agent can help families adjust their life, home and auto insurance coverages upon the birth of their first child.

In addition, new enhancements to Einstein Analytics for Financial Services provides agents and their managers with intelligence to optimize their books of business. For example, pre-built analytics can help agents conduct customer tenure and churn risk analysis to maximize retention. Similarly, distribution managers can conduct product penetration and white space analysis to drive growth in their territories.

Finally, new enhancements to Community Cloud for Financial Services delivers pre-built templates to quickly and affordably deploy branded and engaging portal experiences for independent agents, brokers and distributors. This allows insurers to leverage their investments in customer success across their extended ecosystem. This also lays the foundations for Salesforce to deliver additional future innovations on the themes of frictionless business and standards-based permissions-driven sharing of data across financial services organizations.

Major global insurers are already leveraging the power of Salesforce Financial Services Cloud to get closer to their policyholders:

• Pacific Life leverages Salesforce as its enterprise-wide, integrated CRM platform to bridge the gap between Pacific Life's sales, service and marketing teams and to help them reimagine how they engage with financial professionals.
• Amica Mutual Insurance Company leverages Salesforce to provide representatives handling both sales and services-related interactions with a single view for every customer interaction, eliminating the need to toggle between systems to piece together information.
• Tokio Marine & Nichido Fire Insurance Co., Ltd. aims to unify its business across sales, call centers, insurance agencies and marketing divisions with Salesforce to deliver greater personalized engagement at scale and exceed customer expectations every step of the way.
• LV= General Insurance leverages Salesforce to future-proof its business and meet both the needs and expectations of customers by staying one step ahead in relevant conversations with them.
• Generali France leverages Salesforce to enable company-wide transformation and improve processes of Tied Agent Networks and Salary Network Sales processes, all with the end goal of becoming a key lifetime partner to their customers and policyholders.

Salesforce Partners are Driving Industry Success with Financial Services Cloud
Salesforce has a comprehensive ecosystem of technology partners that extend the power of Financial Services Cloud through insurance solutions built on the Salesforce Platform.

• Guidewire: With Guidewire Digital for Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, insurers benefit from a solution that takes advantage of the extended Financial Services Cloud data model. Using real-time, bi-directional synchronization from Guidewire to Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, insurers can equip their teams with customer-centric sales and service capabilities including 360-degree customer views, new business prospecting and tracking tools, task and activity management, and fast quote and bind workflow.
• iPipeline: iPipeline's AgentOne® agent desktop provides immediate, single-sign on access to the tools needed to execute daily business activities. AgentOne enables life and annuity agents to guide customers through the insurance sales process—from health class estimation and quotes and illustrations, to needs analysis, e-Signature and e-delivery.
• Vlocity: Vlocity's Digital Insurance Platform powers quoting, policy administration, claims management, service and billing which can be deployed to brokers, agents, policyholders and service representatives. Designed for property and casualty, life and annuities, and employee benefits lines of business, Vlocity enables speed-to-market and customer-centric experiences through straight-through processing and a digital-first approach without code.

Comments on the news

"Our strategic transformation is grounded by the changes in our environment to digitize our business, enhance customer experiences, empower better decision making and drive operational excellence," said Rob Goodman, Assistant Vice President and CRM Program Owner, Pacific Life. "We believe our path forward will be guided by the needs of customers at the center of everything and we are leveraging strategic partners like Salesforce to provide next-generation capabilities to transform our customer engagement model and technology infrastructure. The integration of marketing, sales and service activities is critical to delivering a positive, brand-reinforcing experience at every touchpoint in the customer journey."

"Responding to increasing customer expectations is a key industry driver, according to multiple survey projects that we have conducted in the past 18 months," said Mike Fitzgerald, senior analyst, Celent. "Meeting those expectations will increasingly be about reaching out to partners to use the best solution/data/process available. Cloud platforms enable insurers to access the entire ecosystem of providers."

Availability and Pricing

• The new insurance capabilities in Financial Services Cloud are available today and start at $150 per user per month  
• Einstein Analytics for Financial Services is generally available and priced at $150 per user per month
• Community Cloud for Financial Services will be generally available on October 15, 2019

Connect with Salesforce

• To view the public announcement during InsureTech Connect, tune in live at 9:30 am PT on Tuesday, September 24 via the link: http://bit.ly/FSCINS    
• For a look into Pacific Life's partnership with Salesforce, read the full customer success story: http://bit.ly/PacLife
• For more information on Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, visit: http://www.salesforce.com/financialservicescloud
• or more information on Salesforce Einstein Analytics, visit: https://www.salesforce.com/products/einstein-analytics/overview/
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