Dive into Platform Capabilities

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Explain how the Digital Insurance Platform works with Financial Services Cloud and Health Cloud.
  
• Identify the major components of the Digital Insurance Platform.
  
• Describe the platform architecture.
  

A Multi-Cloud Solution

Cumulus Insurance is in the midst of digital transformation as it implements the Digital Insurance Platform. Customers like Anna Murphy are unhappy with the current inefficient way of buying insurance. Justus Pardo, star consultant who works on a project at Cumulus, comes to the rescue. 

Now, you may be wondering, “What Salesforce products does Cumulus use? How does the Digital Insurance Platform fit into the bigger picture? What does the solution architecture look like for companies like Cumulus?” 

Think of the Digital Insurance Platform as a solution for use across multiple clouds. You can implement the platform in either Financial Services Cloud or Health Cloud. 

The cloud solution you choose depends on your business requirements.

• If you offer commercial insurance, like renters insurance, property and casualty insurance, or auto insurance, use the Digital Insurance Platform with Financial Services Cloud.
  
• If you’re a health insurance company or a healthcare provider that offers health insurance, such as individual or group health plans, use the platform with Health Cloud.
  

What if you have multiple lines of insurance business? For example, you sell both health insurance and commercial insurance. In this case, work with your implementation team to determine which solution is the best fit for your organization. The main takeaway is that you can choose from Financial Services Cloud or Health Cloud to take advantage of the same amazing and flexible platform. 

Cumulus Insurance provides a variety of insurance offerings, such as group health benefits and auto insurance. Since it’s a commercial insurance company and not a healthcare provider, Cumulus uses Financial Services Cloud. But, remember, this is just one implementation scenario. Healthcare providers can also use the Digital Insurance Platform for their Health Cloud deployments. 

Platform Components

The Digital Insurance Platform includes several major components.

• Insurance Product Administration
  
• Quote, Rate, and Apply
  
• Policy Administration
  
• Contract and Enroll
  
• Claims Management
  
• Service APIs
  

Let’s zoom in and learn more about each component.

Insurance Product Administration

Today’s market is pushing insurance carriers to offer more personalized products, faster than ever. In this new environment, taking months to roll out a new product or modify existing coverage is no longer feasible. With the Insurance Product Administration component, you can create and manage tailored insurance products, including rates and rules, on a low-code digital platform. This way, you can rapidly innovate to capture market opportunities.

Quote, Rate, and Apply

Insurance companies use Quote, Rate, and Apply to rapidly deploy digital quote-to-bind processes and dynamic digital experiences for customers, brokers, underwriters, and other internal users. Unlike traditional, policy-focused core systems, digital quoting is tightly integrated with market-leading Salesforce, so you can quickly deliver automated quoting experiences as part of a cohesive customer-centric experience. 

Policy Administration

Use Policy Administration to manage the entire policy lifecycle across quoting, underwriting, issuance, endorsements, billing, renewals, and commissions. Unlike conventional core systems, these lifecycle processes are part of the Salesforce platform, which means they’re seamlessly integrated into the complete digital journey of every customer.

Contract and Enroll

With Contract and Enroll, you can deliver a modern benefits enrollment experience with rule-based operations to reduce contract cycle times and ensure compliance and accuracy. Use the automated-contracting capabilities to generate contracts based on an agreed quote and terms. Upload and digitally manage census data across business lines, and use promoted enrollment to market plans to members and enroll them quickly and easily in plans.  

Claims Management

With Claims Management, you can personalize the policyholder experience and manage the entire claims lifecycle, including first notice of loss intake that drives auto adjudication, reserve management, payment, and more. Seamlessly integrate claims interactions with customer journeys on Salesforce, and easily connect to an expanding ecosystem of applications. 

Note: the Claims Management module is only available with Financial Services Cloud.

Service APIs

To help you build insurance business processes quickly, the Digital Insurance Platform provides many services you can use to reduce or eliminate the need for custom programming. This saves lots of time and makes it easier to interact with and manage data in Salesforce.

The services are methods of Apex classes that carry out a single function or a set of functions, and they’re designed to work together to enable end-to-end business processes. 

Apex is a programming language that uses Java-like syntax and acts as a database for stored procedures. To learn more about Apex, check the resources at the end of this unit.

Lines of Business and Channels

The Digital Insurance Platform supports multiple lines of business and serves various channels. 

The Digital Insurance Platform offers custom processes and features tailored to specific lines of business, like property and casualty personal lines, term life insurance, and group benefits. 

Developers can use premade OmniScripts to give users a guided path for completing a business process, such as creating a customer support case or contacting a lead. They can simply tweak the OmniScripts to fit their use case or choose from a library of available services. All this means you can save development resources by using Salesforce out-of-the-box capabilities. 

The Digital Insurance Platform is designed for creating omnichannel solutions. It’s fully digital and powers automated experiences across portals, apps, chat, and emerging technologies. Users can perform many tasks on their device of choice, and if they need help, they can use chat or email to reach a contact center. 

Solution Map

Now that you know how the Digital Insurance Platform complements Financial Services Cloud and Health Cloud, and the components that make up the solution, you’re probably wondering, how does the platform fit into the broader Salesforce ecosystem? Let’s look at the Digital Insurance Platform solution map to see how the pieces fit together. 

Salesforce is an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) platform that helps companies transform their businesses by uniting their marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT teams with a single, shared customer view. As you can see in the solution map, Salesforce is integral to the Digital Insurance Platform. 

OmniStudio runs on top of Salesforce to facilitate business processes with guided workflows, such as for creating a customer quote or submitting a claim for a policyholder. The Digital Insurance Platform extends these capabilities with modules, including Insurance Product Administration and the components you learned about earlier in this unit. The Digital Insurance Platform and OmniStudio are 100% cloud-native and fully integrated with Salesforce. All this means digital transformation across your lines of business and modern, omnichannel service for your customers.

Recap

The teams at Cumulus are thrilled about the possibilities that the Digital Insurance Platform brings, including the OmniStudio suite of tools.

• FlexCards give sales agents and customer service agents at Cumulus a 360-degree view of their customers. Anna can forget the days when she felt like a stranger to Cumulus.
  
• OmniScripts guide sales agents, brokers, and customers alike through business processes, for instance, creating a quote or submitting a claim. No more PDFs and paper forms!
  
• Data Mappers and Integration Procedures supply the data to support all these processes.
  

With Financial Services Cloud and the overall Salesforce solution, Cumulus Insurance is well on its way to digital transformation. 

Resources

• Trailhead: Health Cloud for Providers
• Trailhead: Get to Know Health Cloud
• Trailhead: Get to Know OmniStudio
• Trailhead: OmniScripts
• Trailhead: Salesforce 101
• Trailhead: Apex Basics & Database