Manage Products and Policies

Learning Objectives

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

• Explain how Insurance Brokerage simplifies the creation and management of insurance product models.
  
• Configure insurance policies using product models.
  
• Use Product Catalog Manager to standardize and compare insurance data across carriers.
  
• Manage policy updates, renewals, and endorsements.
  

Managing Policies for Brokerages

In the last unit, you learned how Insurance Brokerage for Financial Services Cloud helps brokerages do things like manage complex data and build strong client relationships. Now, you delve into policy management–a critical function for brokerages as they configure, manage, and update client insurance policies.

Effective policy management is more than just choosing plans from carriers. Brokerages must standardize data, structure coverages and benefits, and keep policies accurate and up to date. With standard models, brokerages can efficiently compare offerings, configure policies for clients, and make adjustments when plans change.

The Product Model

Every insurance policy starts with a product model—a structured representation of the benefits, coverages, and terms offered by carriers. By standardizing this data, brokerages can confidently compare offerings and create policies that align with client goals.

Managing diverse benefit plans from multiple carriers is hard work. It’s because each carrier uses different terminology, coverage groupings, and benefit attributes, which makes it difficult to compare options and recommend the best fit for clients. Insurance Brokerage simplifies this by providing a Product Catalog Manager, which standardizes insurance data across carriers.

Justin Pardo is the Salesforce admin at Cumulus Brokerage. He uses Product Catalog Manager to configure a standardized product model for an Employee Benefits (EB) product.

The model organizes medical, dental, and vision coverages under a unified structure. Each coverage has grouped benefits and attributes for consistency across policies.

In the product model hierarchy, each level represents a plan component. Here’s how Cumulus structures the EB model.

Instead of building new benefit specs and attributes from scratch for each product, admins can make the most of product classification templates. This way, each new benefit spec inherits predefined attributes by default, ensuring consistency.

The Policy Model

Once a standardized product model is in place, brokerages use it to define client-specific insurance policies. A policy inherits the structure of the selected product, but with details specific to the client, such as coverage limits, deductibles, and premium amounts.

Here’s how the specs you create during the product-modeling phase relate to an insurance policy and its child records.

The table describes these objects in the context of the Cumulus scenario.

Configure the Policy

At this point, you might be wondering how to configure a policy, so consider a scenario. Julia Marks, a customer service representative at Cumulus, wants to set up a new insurance policy for a customer. In this unit, learn how she creates the policy record, defines coverage details, and populates benefits and attributes. In this way, Julia turns a product model into a client-specific offering.

To start, she creates a new Insurance Policy for Sally’s Aviation and links it to the Employee Benefits root product.

The new policy and policy coverage hold all the coverage details.

Next, Julia adds an Insurance Policy Coverage to the policy, which references the Medical product.

By connecting the Medical coverage spec with this specific Medical coverage, she ensures all benefits and attributes from the spec are available on the policy.

Once the high-level policy details are in place, you configure specific coverage information—from tier structures to benefit attributes.

To easily add and manage benefits directly from the Insurance Policy Coverage page, simply create a custom tab and then add the Plan Benefits Lightning Component.

Next, define the tier structure. Tier structures are important for network-based insurance plans, helping carriers define cost-sharing levels and provider access. In most health insurance plans, lower-tier providers offer the highest benefit levels with lower out-of-pocket costs for members, while higher-tier providers have higher cost-sharing requirements.

Julia selects a two-tier structure for the Medical coverage, based on the standard in-network or out-of-network framework.

After that, it’s time to assign benefits based on the carrier’s plan design. Because the coverage inherits benefits from the product model, you simply fill in the appropriate values for each tier.

For the General Plan Information group, Julia adds the Annual Deductible for both tiers.

If a plan doesn’t include a certain attribute, just leave it blank to exclude it from the coverage.

After saving the benefit details, you can review them from the Plan Benefits component. They’re grouped by the product model’s benefit structure and displayed across tiers, so it’s easy to see everything at a glance.

With all the core details in place, you’re ready to tackle policy updates.

Edit the Insurance Policy

Policies aren’t static. They must evolve alongside client negotiations, carrier updates, and regulatory changes. Insurance Brokerage makes it simple to modify policy details so your clients always have accurate information.

Cumulus Brokerage receives a revised carrier document for Sally’s employee plan. The document includes increases to Annual Deductibles and Office Visit Copays for out-of-network services.

Julia simply selects those terms from the Plan Benefits component, clicks Edit, and updates the values.

After she saves her work, the policy page instantly reflects the new coverage details.

This flexibility keeps your brokerage agile because clients always have accurate and up-to-date information.

Manage the Policy Lifecycle

Configuring a policy is only the first step. From creation and issuance to renewals, endorsements, and cancellations, brokerages must keep everything running smoothly. This means no manual errors! With Insurance Brokerage, you automate these tasks to save time, boost accuracy, and simplify workflows.

Streamlined Policy Actions

Need to make a quick update? Insurance Brokerage puts key actions (edit, endorse, renew, cancel) at your fingertips—both in the policy list view and on the policy detail page.

With the intuitive interface, your team keeps the data clean and the policy records consistent.

Renewals Support

Renewals can be time-consuming and error-prone, especially when they require input from multiple teams working in different systems—or outside the system altogether. Insurance Brokerage simplifies the process by retaining and reusing key policy data. When renewing with the same carrier, the system automatically duplicates relevant details—such as covered individuals, beneficiaries, and coverage parameters—for a seamless transition. If the renewal involves a different carrier, the solution preserves essential policy information while allowing brokers to update carrier-specific fields, reducing manual rework and ensuring consistency.

For example, Julia initiates a renewal for an HMO Platinum Policy. In just a few clicks, the system copies over the necessary details, so she can focus on confirming any changes rather than re-entering the same data.

Endorsements with Clear Version History

Endorsements, common in P&C lines, let you modify policies midterm—updating coverage limits, deductibles, or terms. Insurance Brokerage maintains a crystal-clear version history, so each endorsement is logged and linked to the original policy. That way, everyone can track changes confidently for compliance and auditability.

Repurpose Existing Policies

Many policies share a similar structure, or they share benefit packages. Repurposing existing policies as templates saves time and keeps similar offerings consistent.

These features smooth out the entire policy lifecycle by reducing manual data entry, minimizing errors, and improving overall efficiency.

In this unit, you learned how Insurance Brokerage simplifies benefit plan management and policy lifecycles. Standardized product models, streamlined workflows, and flexible policy management capabilities mean that your brokerage can work smarter and wow clients at the same time.

In the next unit, explore how you can enhance policies even further with rate plans, contribution plans, and eligibility rules.

Resources

• Salesforce Help: Set up Insurance Products
• Salesforce Help: Product Modeling
• Salesforce Help: Manage Policy Lifecycle Processes