One Management System to Rule Them All
More than three years in the making, CRM pioneer Salesforce is rolling out an AI-powered agency management solution designed specifically for insurance brokers.
Few service providers can say they revolutionized the administration of a commercial enterprise.
On this short list is Salesforce, whose cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to manage the customer relationship gave diverse businesses a radically new way to access centralized data, streamline sales processes, automate marketing campaigns, and harvest customer insights.
More than 150,000 companies worldwide now employ Salesforce’s customer relationship management (CRM) solution, giving it dominant market share. Numerous insurance brokers use Salesforce to manage their customer relationships and sales pipelines. Meanwhile, policy management, billing, reporting, and other tasks are performed using a traditional agency management system (AMS).
Now, Salesforce is scheduled in February to launch the AI-powered Salesforce Financial Services Cloud for Insurance Brokerages. By combining CRM, AI, and real-time data, the new solution can automate and streamline time-consuming broker and agency processes including policy servicing and commission processing, boosting team productivity, improving operational efficiency, and generating personalized client experiences—“all on a single platform,” the company states.
Among the services:
- A solution that helps account teams and finance professionals streamline managing commission splits involving different producers;
- An employee benefit servicing solution that helps account managers navigate the benefit plan renewal process;
- A property and casualty insurance industry servicing solution giving brokers a consolidated view of client property details and policy information across different insurance carriers;
- The ability to configure and integrate business applications without needing additional hardware and software, via Salesforce’s platform as a service (PaaS); and
- An AI-powered client engagement solution that uses the Salesforce Data Cloud platform, which centralizes and unifies all of a company’s customer data across different systems, offering every broker and agency team member access to the complete view of every customer.
By providing a holistic view of the client and its varied risks, Salesforce expects the new offering will help producers and account managers improve processes and deepen client relationships. The company plans to expand the brokerage platform’s functionalities in coming years, thanks to the Salesforce CRM platform’s well-regarded flexibility and configurability.
This raises the question: Will brokers need both AMS and CRM platforms in the future?
To help answer that question and get a better sense of the platform’s features, Leader’s Edge spoke with Michelle Lewis, Salesforce senior director, agency & brokerage solutions, who is leading the new vertical industry solution.
The following Q&A has been edited for clarity and cohesion.
Editor’s Note: Michelle Lewis left Salesforce for an undisclosed opportunity in December 2024. Salesforce was actively recruiting her replacement at press time.
Q
Your career includes leading the agency and brokerage solutions team at Salesforce the past three-and-a-half years, following a two-year stint as director of enterprise applications at insurance broker ABD. Before that, you were director of product management at AMS vendor Vertafore, also serving other roles over 18 years there. Why did you leave Vertafore for ABD and why then leave ABD for Salesforce?
A
The CIO [chief information officer] at ABD was a colleague of mine from years past. He brought me in to move their legacy systems into the cloud and open up new ways of doing work for the account teams. He wanted to make the marine [insurance] team feel they had a workspace configured just for them, and for our clinical trials and pharmaceutical teams to feel the same way. During my time there, I saw that Salesforce had a position open to lead product strategy and solutions for independent agents and brokers. It was an amazing opportunity, and I jumped at it.
Q
When you started in 2021, was Salesforce beginning to think about developing a vertical insurance broker platform?
A
It was an evolutionary process. The company launched a financial services cloud focused on asset managers, retail banks, and insurance companies [in 2016] to transform the way they engaged with their clients. Gradually, it has evolved to add sector-specific services. When I got here, there was no vertical focused on insurance brokers, but that was the plan.
Q
What was the plan?
A
Well, we started with a blank page. My first few months, I helped the internal sales and distribution teams better understand the differences between insurance companies and insurance brokerages. I was in a very unique position to help them understand specifically what a broker does, what they care about, and how to talk to them. Things progressed from there.
Q
I understand Salesforce established an informal program with a handful of insurance brokers to think through and experiment with early versions of the platform.
A
We lined up five brokers with different lines of business as our “design partners.” They’re effectively early adopters and are configuring on top of the platform to meet the needs of their account management teams for each line of business. Now that we’ve productized this for commercial retail brokers to run their front, middle, and back office on Salesforce, I expect we’ll see greater adoption.
Q
Why do you anticipate wider adoption ahead?
A
Well, for many early adopters, the needs of their industry-specific account departments like aviation or marine require a more bespoke view of their clients insofar as their assets and coverages. The marine team, for example, might want to see data on vessels and boat captains, whereas aviation wants to see data on planes and pilots. It’s easy to configure that on the platform without having to wait on an AMS vendor to change the underlying software. By providing brokers with a preconfigured set of business processes, a robust data model, and a baseline from which to start, they can have this information and expand their needs over time.
Q
I’ve heard from brokers that the platform’s configurability is extremely quick and easy.
A
I’ll give you an actual example. In January [2024], I was at a meeting with a large and very highly acquisitive agency. I was showing the CIO what can be done with direct bill commission statements. He said it would be nice if the policy number could be put in the table. I showed him how. Boom, it was done, and it blew him away. The whole premise and promise of Salesforce at the beginning was if you needed to add something, like an integration to the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) to look up plane data, you can.
Q
What will the platform’s functionality be upon the launch in February? Will it be able to manage the entire operations of an agency, handling tasks like policy management, billing, and reporting?
A
Commercial retail brokerages will be able to track and manage all client policies and plans and manage all their account team members, tasks, and workflows.
The platform will also handle reporting, direct bill commission statements, and producer splits. Our partner ecosystem includes integrations to external data sources and tools like comparative raters.
Q
That’s a lot of functionality. Anything else to add?
A
As mentioned, we have a road map going farther than what will be available this spring. Already, our design partners are working with us on items like agency billing and accounting function subledger calculations. We’re also continuing to build out our ecosystem of platform partners.
An AMS is a set of capabilities used to manage clients, policies, and revenue. Can a broker or an agency configure the Financial Services Cloud for Insurance Brokerages platform to do what an AMS does? Yes.
Q
Where does the platform exceed AMS capabilities and where does it fall short, if at all?
A
Interesting you bring that up. I recently spoke at the Large Agents Roundtable on Technology about whether the line is moving between CRM and AMS or if there even should be a line.
Q
What was your opinion?
A
I said I didn’t believe there should be a line. Certainly not for highly acquisitive agencies that needed to integrate data, producer leads, opportunities, and everything else they found out about the customer. It is tremendously impactful and important to get every new agency on a centralized system, which you wrote about in Leader’s Edge in your article “After You Buy, Integrate.” Lots of brokers have a use for CRM and producer tools, but I could see opportunities for workflow orchestration, onboarding of new clients, [and] getting more into the synergy between sales teams and the handoff to account management and customer service teams.
Q
That’s where Salesforce comes into the picture?
A
Unlike AMS, the platform can be extended for what a broker or agency needs as it grows and scales. Given all of the challenges in the coming years facing brokers, from disparate back-end systems to the looming retirement cliff, there’s a need for an agile platform they can configure to their specific service processes.
Q
Will a broker still need an AMS once it migrates to the Salesforce platform?
A
Right now, most commercial retail brokers are using more than just one core AMS. Sometimes, they have multiples per line of business or multiples simply due to acquisitions. Our customers are looking to not only simplify their back-end technologies but to do that on a platform that provides flexibility and sets them up for future innovation. We are eager to start those conversations, not only to simplify their back-end technology stacks but to set them up in service of their future growth objectives.
Q
Will brokers and agencies with long-standing business and personal relationships with AMS vendors possibly break ranks to extend their current Salesforce functionalities into full-scale operations management? Put another way, why have two platforms when you can have one, assuming the Salesforce platform will manage everything brokers need?
A
An AMS is a set of capabilities used to manage clients, policies, and revenue. Can a broker or an agency configure the Financial Services Cloud for Insurance Brokerages platform to do what an AMS does? Yes.
Q
The press release on the launch mentions the use of an AI-powered client engagement capability, called Agentforce, to create a complete client profile unifying all relevant structured and unstructured data on the platform. Elaborate on the types of data we’re talking about and the value to producers and account managers in using the Data Cloud.
A
I’ll start with the data unification. The platform gives brokers the ability to unify in-force policy data, client interactions like email correspondence and meetings, and different line of business notifications, such as a lost broker of record. To answer your other question, the AI value of the Data Cloud for brokers is that once you have this unified client profile, producers and account managers can use AI to help identify patterns and critical trends, such as gaps in coverage or potential retention risks. They can also use the tool to focus their efforts on tasks like prioritizing prospects.
Q
There are thousands of insurance brokers and agencies in the United States. Are you targeting a specific size broker with the new platform?
A
We are looking initially at the 100 largest brokers, those with an interest in more than what their current vendors have been able to give them. We’ve heard over the last three-and-a-half years a desire for an option other than what has been the status quo the last 25 years. There is a lot of hunger for what we’re providing. Once we have the product out in February and the system integrators get enabled and up to speed, we’ll be looking at a good year [of business] ahead, as well as continued investments on our part.
Q
Every platform, solution, or tool is marketed as something easier and faster than existing platforms, solutions, and tools. Nevertheless, they all require changes in workflows. What is available in terms of customer support?
A
We have an embarrassment of riches, a massive ecosystem that includes our internal folks and a community of trailblazers that provide free education. We also have a very strong systems integrator ecosystem, from all the big consulting houses to smaller firms focused on [industry] verticals that understand the insurance space.
