Explore Quoting Processes
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the steps in the basic quoting process.
- Define the role of services in quoting.
- Explain how the quoting process uses Lightning web components.
- Explain how JSON code supports quoting.
About the Quoting Process
In the previous units, you learned about product modeling and rating, and how they support quote creation. The third component of Quote, Rate, and Apply is the quoting process itself. The Digital Insurance Platform streamlines the quoting process for insurance and healthcare products and services, including for new opportunities and existing customers. Here are the high-level steps.
- Get user input: The customer chooses to create a new quote. They’re presented with an online form to add the required details, for example, personal information, vehicle details, and driver history.
- Select products, rates: The Digital Insurance Platform uses this data to identify relevant products or plans and their rates. Next, the customer selects the plans they’re interested in and chooses coverages and deductibles.
- Create quote: The provided services and Lightning web components do all the behind-the-scenes work to generate a quote. The quote gives you more than just the dollar amount. It includes a summary, quote number, and a list of the products and premiums.
Quote Process and Services
The Digital Insurance Platform gives you services for each step in the process.
To help you build insurance business processes quickly, the services 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.
Note: The services are methods of Apex classes that carry out a single function or a set of functions. 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.
What do these services do specifically in quoting? Some examples are:
- Get products with rates.
- Create new quotes.
- Retrieve information about quotes.
Quote Process and OmniScripts
For a service to work, it needs something to call it. For your quoting solution, you’ll use OmniScripts to call many services.
OmniScripts are part of the OmniStudio suite of tools. 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. Services are available for many business processes. In the context of quoting, OmniScripts give customers a guided path to obtain a quote.
Here’s what the process looks like.
OmniScripts ask users a series of questions. They collect user input, and then call out to a service to get back information about a product and the calculated rates. OmniScripts and Services communicate using data written in JSON. When a customer provides an input, an OmniScript takes the input and passes it to the service in JSON notation. The service then does the work and returns the output to the OmniScript, also in a JSON format.
Lightning Web Components
OmniScripts and Services interact using JSON format. Lightning web components take the JSON output that a service returns to the OmniScript and format the code in a way that customers understand.
This example shows part of the JSON returned for getRatedProducts.
The JSON structure contains information about the product, such as its name (PPO 5000 HSA), currency (USD), and price ($12,119.96).
And here’s what the JSON structure looks like when it’s formatted and displayed by a Lightning web component.
Much nicer when formatted in the Lightning web component, isn’t it?
Recap
In this unit, you learned about typical quoting processes in insurance companies and how Salesforce supports these processes with Quote, Rate, and Apply. You learned that:
- Services that come out-of-the-box help you build insurance business processes quickly and reduce the need for custom programming.
- OmniScripts support these processes on the front-end and provide a guided path for customers to get a quote.
- Lightning web components take the complicated JSON structure that OmniScripts work with, then format, and display the information in a way that customers understand.