Amica, a national mutual P&C insurer, is leveraging two new apps developed by a partnership between CRM software provider Salesforce and insurance software company Guidewire.
Amica is looking to maintain its highly rated customer service and move to the next level of digital transformation, the company says. It’s looking for a unified CRM platform that provides a full view of policyholders and actionable, data-driven insights that customer reps can use to help resolve calls more quickly.
The two new apps, Guidewire ProducerEngage and Guidewire ServiceRepEngage, are built on top of Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, and will in offer Amica reps sales and service tools to support richer, more personalized engagement. The result will be a single view for every customer interaction, eliminating the need to toggle between different systems to piece together information whenever a customer needs help with quotes, policies or bills.
“By using Salesforce as a system of engagement, it will give us that 360-degree view of our customers that will help accelerate our customer service calls to first-call resolution a lot quicker,” says Peter Moreau, CIO at Amica. “With our systems today, our customer service reps have to jump around a bit, but now they will have access to all policyholder information at their fingertips.”
Another benefit, Moreau adds, is that the apps will tie sales and marketing teams together more tightly. “Right now our system makes it hard to track how campaigns are doing, this will give us near real-time information about how our sales are performing,” he says.
Guidewire ServiceRepEngage is meant for call-center representatives who spend the majority of their time servicing policy owners, providing seamless access to information about policy claims, billing and pricing. Reps can quickly change policies within the app without having to leave Salesforce or log in to Guidewire separately.
Guidewire ProducerEngage is optimized for insurance producers, brokers and agents who spend most of their time on sales activities. “They can look at opportunities and figure out what is the right product to sell, making policy quotes right from Salesforce,” says Ayan Sarkar, principal business owner, digital, at Guidewire.
As a direct writer, Amica’s customer service reps are also agents, so Moreau points out that both apps address pieces of its IT infrastructure that we were missing, to enable reps to do even more. “Customers are expecting you to have knowledge at your fingertips so you’re not asking them every question under the sun,” he explains.
According to Rohit Mahna, SVP and GM of financial services at Salesforce, the partnership with Guidewire was ignited by patterns the two companies were seeing in the insurance industry over the past 24 months. “So many firms are reimagining the agent/policyholder experience, with next-generation convenience as a big theme,” he says. “Service is so core to building long-lasting relationships with customers and even to things like marketing strategy, but the claims system has been disconnected from customer engagement and CRM was too difficult.” Amica, he explains, “got behind the vision” of change as a “design partner.” “They helped us craft what it would look like to have Guidewire connected to Financial Services Cloud and what that experience would look like,” he says.
The two Guidewire/Salesforce applications will go live internally with Amica’s customer service reps in the next few weeks, says Moreau. Not all capabilities will immediately available, but will roll out in a multi-year, iterative process. “The first release is really focused on getting baseline functionality in place, with multiple future releases that will enhance that and get deeper into leveraging the data to improve our performance,” he says, adding that the company expects to see results in a short period of time.
“Amica is known for customer service and we have been improving our systems over time, but this work with Salesforce and Guidewire will take us to the next level of customer understanding,” he says.
