Gain Customer Intelligence to Transform Your Most Important Business Relationships

Customer 360 in Salesforce enables insurance firms to deliver outstanding, personalized customer experiences at every touchpoint, own and expand their markets with competitive offerings, and make customers feel seen and understood.

Customers want coherence and consistency

According to research performed by Salesforce, 85 percent of customers across industries worldwide expect consistent interactions with businesses that provide services or products. But 60 percent state that their experience feels like communicating with separate departments, not a single organization. At the same time, findings Salesforce published in 2023 demonstrate that 35 percent of insurance customers switched to another provider during the previous year and 53 percent of financial services customers said that they would change to a different provider if it could deliver a better digital experience. These observations challenge insurance agencies and brokerages to interact with their customers as unified, informed teams and deliver more productive and friction-less digital experiences than their competitors do—or face increased customer dissatisfaction and turnover.

Addressing customers’ needs and preferences starts with visibility

The Salesforce consulting team at Sikich has for years helped insurance businesses and other clients design and deliver competitive, rewarding customer experiences built on the Salesforce Experience Cloud. Key to accomplishing this is identifying and connecting all the data that matters—including customer satisfaction and retention statistics, business and employee performance metrics, marketing and sales trends, customer engagement levels across channels—and tracking the time spent on onboarding customers, communicating with them, processing claims, and other account management tasks.

Salesforce and its partners have long used the term Customer 360 to refer to the practice of creating and taking advantage of a unified data environment that enables complete customer visibility. Based on a 360-degree view of individual customers, insurance agents can offer products that matter to them, communicating in a personalized manner based on customer preferences. Employees in any customer-facing role can confidently rely on the same, complete information to answer questions and initiate the best next steps in customer account lifecycles.

Empathy is good for business

With Customer 360, the nature of insurance sales changes as agents and their customers pursue a shared goal of meeting important needs in the most effective manner possible. Agents have an easier time offering and explaining services in a way that resonates with customers and corresponds to their needs. They can immediately focus on customers’ interests instead of asking informational questions that are already answered by Salesforce data. When they suggest additional service offerings or coverage adjustments, they are far more likely to be effective than when they’re probing blindly. They can also shorten the time from first contact to closing business.

At every touchpoint with an insurance firm that practices Customer 360, customers know that they have the attention of professionals who understand them and are aware of their history and communications with the business. They don’t need to repeat essential facts or educate new contacts regarding their concerns. They can interact with an agent or use an insurance company’s app, chatbot, portal, or website, maintaining a consistent experience. When they see that this experience quality is not an exception, but simply the way their insurance provider does business, their sense of trust can grow and they become more likely to share new concerns, voice requests, or consider new products.

Bringing light to marketing initiatives

For sales and marketing executives, Customer 360 eases and accelerates the activities of driving ongoing customer experience improvements, driving organizational and team performance, and harnessing the opportunities that customer transparency can reveal. Salesforce has always included state-of-the-art data management, analytics, and reporting capabilities to help translate the data assets in insurance firms into insight that can support agency teams in achieving the best possible customer outcomes. Salesforce analytics make it possible for your insurance agency to assess the quality of the customer experiences you deliver and drive better customer retention based on a deeper understanding of customer journeys. By drawing on current industry data, you can compare your company’s experience quality and business results to the most successful insurance organizations or use industry averages as a benchmark.

The next level of Customer 360

Salesforce has added advanced automation and AI capabilities to Customer 360 for insurance agencies and brokerages. In these areas, the solution delivers all the capabilities of a sophisticated, feature-rich CRM system while providing coverage for insight and processes that used to require additional software tools—without ever losing sight of customers at the center. You can draw on data insight to better understand customers, streamline critical processes like claims management, and exercise more control over the business. AI complemented by automation can enable the efficiencies to give your insurance firm stronger momentum with greater agility. You can then dedicate more attention to innovating how you win, serve, and retain customers, for example, by creating digital experiences that can make agents’ and customers’ interactions more effective and enjoyable.

Adjusting transparency to support business roles and goals

Thanks to the intuitive design and a wealth of guidance provided by Salesforce, it can be easy for business users in your insurance firm to finetune how they receive data intelligence and best serve customers on the CRM platform. The Sikich team can adjust Salesforce capabilities closely to your team members’ and executives’ customer insight needs. We show you how to set up and track metrics that help advance the business, design strategies to improve customer experiences, and run a more efficient operation.

When insurance employees find out that they can perform their tasks in a single software environment instead of multiple tools while also doing a better job for customers, they tend to readily embrace Salesforce. Even so, there are many ways to configure screens and processes for the best possible productivity, speed, and simplicity. Sikich consultants can save you valuable time and avoid needless distractions in adjusting the Salesforce environment.

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: Imagine what modern CRM could help you achieve for your insurance customers
  • 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.