Salesforce CRM for a US insurance buyout agency

Solution

Itransition deployed and configured a Salesforce-based CRM solution tailored to the insurance domain. The CRM allows adding, storing, and managing clients’ profiles, including associated documentation, opportunities, and quotes, as well as calculating future insurance payments based on several criteria and rules. The end users of the delivered system are the insurance buyout agency’s employees: sales managers, researchers, and marketers.

Considering the strict deadline of just 3 months and the fact that some of the customer’s requirements went beyond the scope of the standard Salesforce UI, we suggested splitting the project in two phases.

The first phase included the configuration and delivery of a Salesforce instance with the standard functionality and UI, allowing the customer to start using the system as soon as possible, as well as to collect users’ feedback. During this phase, we also implemented payments calculation and clarified the requirements for further data migration.

The second phase included data migration, development of custom pages, components, and workflows, as well as adding custom logic where the out-of-the-box Salesforce functionality didn’t cover the customer’s business needs.

Salesforce for insurance: a closer look

The delivered CRM consists of the following tabs:

The Home tab aggregates information about the key items in the system by indicating recently viewed Leads, Annuity, Quotes, as well as all Marketing and Research events.

This tab includes several components:

• Today’s Task displaying the next 5 tasks assigned to the user.
• Events displaying the calendar with upcoming events created by the user.
• News providing access to relevant and up-to-date information about clients, partners, competitors, and industries the customer works with. It includes articles from reputable news sources from the past 30 days.
• The Chatter feed enabling users to follow other employees and records to see related updates.

The Opportunities tab allows viewing, editing, and deleting active deals related to leads, tracking and updating all data on existing deals, as well as creating a new deal in case the lead has active payments. A new deal is created based on the information from the Annuity and Quotes tabs as well as the documents available for this lead. Users can sort deals by Lead Source, Status, Insurance Company, and Date.

The Leads tab allows creating and managing clients, updating and tracking their data. It is a central entity in the CRM system, containing complete information on the customer’s clients, their current status, payments, quotes, follow-up deadlines, and so on.

To create a new lead, a user fills in the Last Name field as well as such optional fields as Lead Status and Insurance Company. Apart from editing and deleting existing leads, users can add and edit preferred contact channels (such as email or phone) with their verification date and time, as well as specify the language of communication with the lead.

The Lead tab also enables the following:

• Storing contact information, including a lead’s physical addresses, phone numbers, emails, social media profiles, etc., with the County and City fields populated automatically upon entering a zip code. This was a custom module, developed to expand the out-of-the-box Salesforce feature.
• Marking an address as verified or inactive, with the system indicating the date and the initiator of the status change.
• Tracking the history of lead profile modifications, indicating the changed fields and values as well as the date and time of the change.
• Creating notes and uploading documents associated with leads, with the types of files preset in the system: Settlement Agreement, Qualified Assignment, Annuity Contract, Driver’s License, Social Security Card, and Benefits Letter. Supported formats include PDF, PNG, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, TV5. By clicking on the link, users can open larger files from the local storage in the edit mode.

The Annuity tab allows specifying an annuity for leads to track their payments, which can be either recurrent or one-time lump sums. Payment information is entered manually based on the lead’s court documents. The system automatically calculates annuity payments and displays them in the Remarket tab.

The Quotes tab allows creating quotes as commercial offers to leads, containing information on the available payments and insurance buyout percentage. Users can mark quotes as Quoted, Approved, Accepted and Rejected and choose among multiple methods of automatic payment calculation. Several quotes can be calculated from a single annuity.

The Sold Streams tab is for keeping track of a lead’s insurance payments previously sold to our customer or other companies. The system automatically sums up the sold streams and displays them in the Remarket tab along with the annuity payments remaining for purchase.

The Remarket tab displays the payment flow related to each lead and indicates the lead’s sold streams as well as the remaining payments available for each entry, if any.

The Follow Ups tab allows automatically adding follow-up data on each lead, providing information on how often the lead has been contacted, the date of the last contact, and the method of communication (phone call, email, SMS). This information is also displayed as flags, the colors of which depend on the time passed since the last activity.

The Marketing tab represents the company’s marketing activity regarding all or specific leads. The tab contains an overview of all available records with the possibility to create new records, update or delete existing ones. The supported methods of delivering marketing materials include direct mail, email, text message, and text campaign.

The Individual Research tab is for adding information about leads sourced during research. The tab allows automatically marking leads with the Contact/Court Research Needed tag before research starts and the Contact/Court Researched tag after research is complete.

The Lead Gen Research tab contains research data about potential leads and deals, with the possibility to upload lists of leads to the system.

The Live Transfer tab allows recording cases of transferring a call from one sales manager to another and features statuses such as Live Transfer Sent and Live Transfer Accepted to be checked by each sales manager respectively.

The Calendar tab allows viewing and managing planned and past events, is accessible to all users, and shows each employee’s current workload.

The Search tab is used for searching any data in the system in order to quickly find leads, quotes, addresses, and more.

Data cleaning and migration

Our Salesforce developers also migrated the customer’s data related to about 80,000 leads from scattered Excel files to the CRM. We cleaned data in the process, which resulted in removing almost 40,000 (50%) of duplicate lead profiles.

Before the migration, we also did data mapping to make sure all the original fields would match with the custom ones in the destination system. At this stage, we also cleaned duplicate values and fixed errors.

In an important move, we also helped the customer decrease their cloud hosting fees by advising them to store documents and media files in their local storage while using links to access them from the CRM system.

Results

Itransition delivered a customized Salesforce CRM system for the insurance buyout company ahead of the deadline. The system is fully tailored to their unique client management workflows covering client data collection, communication, automatic annuity and quote calculations, marketing, and activity planning.

With their client data successfully cleaned and migrated to the new system, the company has improved their client management productivity by nearly 75%, while the number of leads grew by 54%.