Imagine What Modern CRM Could Help You Achieve for Your Insurance Customers

Delivered expertly, the industry’s leading CRM solution, Salesforce, can help insurance agencies and brokerages be more effective and innovative in serving customers while running an extremely efficient business.

Salesforce leads and transcends the CRM category

When you first hear about Salesforce, you may think of it in terms of a traditional customer relationship management (CRM) system. While it delivers CRM capabilities brilliantly, it can be much more. For many insurance agencies and brokerages, Salesforce can help them transform their business based on complete visibility of their customers, usually referred to as Customer 360.

With sophisticated, yet highly intuitive analytics and reporting functions, Salesforce brings data insight to your customer relationships as well as to your decision-making, forecasting, performance management, and workforce development—without ever losing the focus on your customers. You can simplify and accelerate many processes with Salesforce automations, freeing employees to spend more quality time with customers. An arsenal of Salesforce AI capabilities extends the skills and resources of your team members to rapidly resolve customer concerns, deliver personalized communications and marketing materials, engage in mutually beneficial sales conversations, and provide memorably excellent experiences in every interaction.

Unleashing productivity while designing competitive products

By using business insight enabled by Salesforce, many insurance firms are rethinking their products to appeal to different customer demographics and meet customer needs during challenging, volatile times. At the same time, they’re achieving unprecedented efficiencies. For instance, an insurance agency using Salesforce today provides brokers with home insurance quotes within 90 seconds instead of the customary industry practice of 24 hours. By streamlining its processes with Salesforce, the same agency allows a single underwriter to handle the volume of insurance policy quotes that used to occupy 20 of them. What’s more, this agency has launched seven new, ground-breaking products in the last two years.

Making customers’ lives easier and reducing expenses

Another business, a large, privately held insurance brokerage, uses Salesforce to simplify sales workflows and make it easier for agents to track their progress toward individual and organizational goals as they help customers with greater efficiency. Automations have removed needless data entry and unproductive steps, saving the company roughly $6.9 million and 44,000 hours. By creating compliance documents in the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud and simplifying the task of distributing them to customers, the business has saved another $85,000 and 3,200 hours.

While accomplishing these improvements, the company has also succeeded in easing the steps customers need to take in order to submit claims. Today, 70 percent of claims come in through a portal based on Salesforce Experience Cloud, where customers can track their claims from submission to resolution.

Empowering customers to understand and manage their insurance services

Another insurance business during the pandemic—which was already using Salesforce in a limited manner—quickly pivoted to manage every customer-facing activity through the solution, offering customers extensive personalization while driving remarkable efficiencies. Through Salesforce automation and personalization, this insurer boosted open and click-through rates for its marketing emails to 98 percent. Improved, more immediate and targeted communications on the Salesforce platform have helped the organization increase sales by 128 percent. A Salesforce portal allows customers to update their information and interact with their insurance provider. Brokers, in turn, can use the same portal to gain real-time visibility of the status of customers’ claims.

Keystone Insurers Group streamlines customer-facing processes

Sikich clients have comparable experiences when they work with us to implement Salesforce through our best practices-based methodology, Sikich HEADSTART for Insurance, which comprises Veruna, the well-known agency management system (AMS) developed for Salesforce. Sikich teams often work with insurance clients whose CRM or ERP deployments didn’t yield all the benefits they hoped for, or which didn’t meet with resounding user adoption. For example, Keystone Insurers Group already had Salesforce but wanted to take greater advantage of it. Keystone hoped to reduce the number of manual tasks agents performed, such as data entry, along with some redundant process steps. At the same time, the company aimed to improve its reporting, strengthen financial management with dimensional accounting, and boost solution adoption.

Sikich worked with Keystone to achieve these objectives and facilitated other use cases to generate more value from Salesforce. For instance, our consultants helped the client identify new customer and product opportunities with greater confidence, enhanced document capture to be trackable and reportable, and improved the visibility and velocity of customer onboarding with reports and dashboards built in Salesforce. We also gave recommendations for managing agent commission splits in Salesforce and for tracking the solution’s ROI. At a more strategic, companywide level, we helped Keystone gain a customer-centric perspective across business roles and drive organizational productivity overall.

USAA improves member services by unifying data sources and optimizing workflows

United Services Automobile Association (USAA), the national insurance, financial, and retirement services firm, came to Sikich when it was still using a legacy agency management software. The product’s functional limitations resulted in process inefficiencies and unwanted risks for the agency and its members. It also lacked the scalability to drive growth in an intensely competitive industry. For USAA, Sikich spearheaded technology modernization with Veruna, the AMS. Veruna provided managers with the visibility to assess and grow the business. It also made it possible to streamline many business processes by automating tasks and workflows and by integrating disparate data sources on a single platform. Feedback from agency teams across the U.S. continued to drive momentum for process optimization and far-reaching transformations.

CRM consulting within a lifelong insurance services portfolio

When your insurance agency or brokerage engages with Sikich, you can count on us to apply our industry expertise and resources broadly in the context of the trends and opportunities we see in the insurance industry. Once we understand your goals, challenges, and opportunities, we deliver Salesforce and other technologies as efficiently and impactfully as possible.

While we’re Salesforce experts and proud of the work we do with it, we invite you to also consider us as your collaborators in other contexts. At any time before or following a Salesforce project, we can provide strategic consulting with a virtual Chief Information Officer (vCIO) or augment your resources with ad-hoc, issue-based support or ongoing IT managed services. Sikich offers a suite of cybersecurity services to help you strengthen your security posture and ensure the integrity of sensitive customer, employee, financial, and compliance information. In addition, we can support your insurance business with a large portfolio of business consulting services. For example, we recently worked with Vela Insurance Services to re-create its brand and build a new website.

Take the next step

To find out more or explore Salesforce for your insurance business, you can:

• Contact Sikich.
• Download our ebook Customer experience as a competitive asset for insurance businesses.
• Read other posts in this series:
  • Infographic: Deliver top-quality, highly competitive customer experiences in your insurance business
  • Article: Boost customer retention and satisfaction instead of tolerating customer erosion
  • Article: Gain customer intelligence to transform your most important business relationships
  • Article: Innovate the insurance customer experience and competitively address changing customer needs
• Watch videos on our YouTube playlist about Salesforce and the insurance industry.
• See how we help you generate Salesforce ROI.