Accelerating Time to Value with Salesforce Industries

This is the third part of a series that started with Introduction to Salesforce Industries and OmniStudio, which provided an overview of the Salesforce Industries solutions and OmniStudio platform. The second post in the series looked at the industry-specific data model, detailed the product modeling process, and described how highly configurable attributes enable you to build complex product structures.

This post covers how all the elements come together to unlock value and expedite innovation in the insurance industry.

Content last updated in June 2021. Roadmap corresponds to Summer ’21 projections. Our forward-looking statement applies to roadmap projections.m

A Salesforce Industries refresher

According to McKinsey, business building has become a crucial strategic priority for incumbent insurance carriers as they look for ways to meet the threats and opportunities of an ever-evolving and increasingly digital industry. The current pace of launching new insurance products is sluggish due to the rigidity of legacy architecture stacks and the lack of an agile platform that supports rapid changes to product offerings. Various stakeholders (including customers, shareholders, partners, and employees) have an interest in increased velocity. Insurance leaders want more agility to meet the constantly changing needs of the market and the ability to take advantage of the wealth of data they’ve collected over the years.

The Salesforce Industries digital insurance platform (as part of the Financial Services Cloud) accelerates digital transformation by enabling carriers and intermediaries to build and run their core insurance processes on the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform. The industry-specific prebuilt processes and integrations enable the rapid deployment of solutions to carriers, intermediaries (such as brokers, agents, and producers), and policyholders to power:

• Quoting
• Policy administration
• Claims management
• Billing

Salesforce Industries Financial Services Cloud — Insurance supports numerous lines of business, including Property and Casualty (both for commercial and personal lines), Life and Annuities, and Specialty Insurance. It is also aligned with industry standards, such as ACORD. When combined with Tableau CRM and Salesforce Einstein predictive capabilities, it can be used to create unique and tailored data-driven experiences for policyholders and intermediaries and open opportunities for innovative product offerings.

Let’s dig a bit deeper into how the Salesforce Industries Financial Services Cloud — Insurance architecture accelerates time to value using mostly low-code tools.

Quote to buy

Today’s insurance leaders face a variety of challenges: accelerating new product launches, competing with disruptors like insurtechs (or adjacent offerings from established tech giants like Amazon, Tesla, and Google), and improving business processes through omnichannel automation. Incumbents are often held back by legacy architectures with lots of manual back-office processes. This leads to antiquated user experiences, siloed customer data, and a low rate of straight-through (i.e. automated) processing for leads, quotes, and claims.

With Salesforce Industries you get a comprehensive solution for modern quote-to-buy processes that enables you to:

1. Design and launch new products to market with low-code tools — With an industry-standard data model, product catalog, and metadata-driven tools like Calculation Matrices, Rating Procedures, and Product Attributes, subject matter experts like actuaries and insurance product analysts can own the product design process with light-touch IT support.
2. Deliver an omnichannel, streamlined digital experience — Using the capabilities provided by the low-code OmniStudio platform you can create a truly omnichannel (online, mobile, and point of sale) experiences that put the customer (and not the policy) at the center. You can deploy processes built using OmniScript to an external customer-facing site or to a mobile app. This build-once-and-reuse strategy helps reduce future maintenance cost and technical debt.
3. Integrate with other systems — You can reduce the quote form to just a few questions or enhance the underwriting journey by retrieving information from legacy or third-party systems using Integration Procedures and DataRaptors.
4. Automate more processes — By combining core platform low-code tools like Salesforce Flow and OmniStudio and built-in services (for example, getRatedProducts and createUpdatePolicy) you can deliver on customer expectations for instant fulfillment with more straight-through processing powered by automated business rules for product eligibility, accurate pricing, and automated underwriting approvals. Underwriters can focus on complex referrals and trust the configurable rules engine to tackle applications of simple-to-medium complexity.
5. Improve intermediary experiences — Brokers, producers, and agents can access the enhanced quote-to-buy journey via Experience Cloud (formerly Community Cloud) to provide personalized experiences for their customers. They can reuse the FlexCards, OmniScripts, and Integration Procedures that power your internal underwriter and sales agent processes.

Policy administration

Once a policy is live, the next challenge is to service the policyholders. This involves a variety of processes such as claims, payments, endorsements (adjustments/modifications), cancellations, reinstatements, renewals, responding to policyholder queries, and updating contact information. Salesforce Industries provides a number of prebuilt front-end experiences, processes, and integrations to reduce the cost to serve.

With Salesforce Industries and OmniStudio you get:

• A more agile middle office — You can build guided business process flows for service agents and underwriters using OmniScripts, Integration Procedures, and built-in services to manage the policy lifecycle. With the Industries Interaction console, agents can quickly authenticate and identify the caller, see a 360-degree view of a customer grouped into sections, and access Flex cards that display contextual, actionable information.

Using a series of built-in services and OmniStudio tools you can easily build a guided business process for the agents to follow when they need to update a policy. There are also prebuilt services to cancel a policy, reprice it, update the list of insured items, and so on.

• Customer self-service — You can expose the guided process flows built using OmniScript, Integration Procedures, and FlexCards to the policyholder via an Experience Cloud member portal. Alternatively, you can use OmniOut to port the process flow to a portal platform built using non-Salesforce technology. The policyholder can perform many self-service tasks like generating a quote, obtaining a policy, making policy amendments, and changing the payment method and frequency. This means that your customer service reps can focus on adding value for complex scenarios, freeing more time to support the claims journey.
• Enhanced intermediary distribution experiences — Brokers, agents, producers, and other intermediaries play a crucial role in the insurance value chain. With Salesforce Industries and Experience Cloud, you can build an end-to-end branded portal for the intermediary that can not only drive lead management and the quote-to-buy journey but can also provide a subset of policy management activities like updating policyholder data, adding new members to an existing policy, and adding more insured items or coverages to the policy.

• Support for meeting stringent audit, security and compliance requirements
• Audit — The core Salesforce platform includes a number of tools and solutions to help with audit-related tasks, including audit trails, field history tracking, login history, and record modification fields. In addition to this, Salesforce Industries has a new functionality called interaction tracking. This event-tracking service captures details of the actions that users perform, and it can track any type of event. For example, you can track the time it takes to complete the steps in an OmniScript, or what fields were viewed or actions launched in a FlexCard. The Tracking service writes the data to a Tracking Entry object, (VlocityTrackingEntry__c), which you can then feed to standard reports, Tableau CRM, or an external BI system.

• Security — Salesforce Industries solutions are 100% native to the Salesforce platform and therefore come with an array of security features supported out-of-the-box to ensure security, privacy, and availability.
• Compliance — Salesforce maintains a comprehensive set of compliance certifications and attestations, and all Salesforce Industries solutions inherit this compliance. You can also add an additional layer of compliance by using the standards-based data model and metadata-driven tools provided by Salesforce Industries.

Claims adjudication

In the highly competitive landscape of insurance, a streamlined claims management process can be a huge differentiator and have a significant positive impact on customer satisfaction and retention. Policyholders, today, expect the process and interaction to be hassle-free, quick, and transparent.
With Salesforce Industries Financial Services Cloud — Insurance, you can create an easy to follow FNOL (first notification of loss) process, as well as configure a workbench for claims adjusters or supervisors to review and process claims quickly and efficiently. They can easily capture claimant information, adjudicate and subrogate payments, and trigger payments to various parties.

The claims module works seamlessly with coverages, limits, deductibles, and consumption of those deductibles, so you can build complex claims processes with little customization.

The claims module also captures all the interaction and updates made to the Claim record in a separate object called Claim History. In essence, it is a single view of notes, activities, and approvals against the Claim record. This claim history is particularly useful in audits if the carrier receives a claims dispute.

Conclusion

As an architect, you have an opportunity to realize value within weeks and months instead of years by using Salesforce Industries to design and architect industry-specific solutions, while making use of low-code to no-code tools. To learn more about OmniStudio and Salesforce Industries, check out the Build Guided Experiences with OmniStudio trail.

Also, be sure to bookmark the TrealheaDX 21 session, Salesforce Industries for Architects to learn more about how to use these prebuilt industry solutions to deliver value faster. In this session, Trailblazers from Vistra Energy talk about lessons learned implementing Energy & Utilities Cloud.