I mentioned the Zurich partner community in one of my previous Dreamforce blog posts about the Salesforce Community Cloud Keynote. Here, I’ll dive deeper into the details of a presentation dedicated to financial services partner communities. Kimberley Zatlyn from Salesforce started the session and reiterated the same statistics that were presented in the keynote presentation.
Paul Risk, CTO of The Warranty Group, spoke about a dealer portal community. The Warranty Group sells warranties for cars, phones, etc. Their goal was to have a single system capable of handling any type of warranty product from Auto, AT&T, and so on. They have moved to the Salesforce platform from a very AS400-centric system. They have all sorts of functions from Quote to Sale, claims, adjudication, product setup, etc., in Salesforce. Paul showed a demo of their Quote to Sale application running completely on Salesforce. He also showed a claims portal they built for one of their customers. Paul provided some tips:
- Pay attention to the data model, or you will rework a lot of things.
- Get the user journey right and empower the business units to create their own front end and apps.
- Have the stomach to do it – the transformation may require more than just a new system, and you made need process changes, culture changes.
- Burn the ships – in other words, don’t go back to the old way and figure out how to stay on the journey to the new system and get rid of the old systems.
Marc Fabris from Zurich talked next about the Zurich partner portal. Zurich is based in Switzerland and has 55,000 employees. This application addressed the independent financial advisor market. They built a portal based on a vision of of the following properties
- Ease of doing business
- Integrated experience and analytics
- Personalized experience
- Culture of innovation
Marc has taken a couple of years to fully build out their solution, but they have used an agile process to get features out the door more quickly. In April, they launched the latest version and had a 27% uplift in engagement. They also have the mobile platform using Salesforce1 and are looking to make improvements their, too.
Finally, Toan Huynh from Accenture spoke about the Lighting Bolt solution they built for insurance and how they used them to implement the Zurich portal.
