Future-proofing the insurance experience with a policyholder 360 in Salesforce

About Cumberland Mutual

Founded in 1844 as a mutual fire insurance company, Cumberland Mutual is now a multi-line carrier. It provides individuals, families, and businesses with the insurances necessary to protect their assets and grow their enterprises.

• Industry: Insurance
• Customer since: 2020
• Use case: Seamless policyholder experience, empowering service reps and agents with a policyholder 360.

Challenge

New generations are digital-first, want more collaboration and personalization. Cumberland Mutual wants to be ready to meet those expectations. “In this day and age, with companies such as Amazon and Netflix that do customer experience really well, our customers have come to expect the same seamless and personalized experience,” Jeff Ritter explains, Head of Corporate Development, Investments, and Strategic Initiatives. “Especially since Covid-19, everyone has embraced technology more than they have in the past. It has really influenced us strategically.”

“ In this day and age, with companies such as Amazon and Netflix that do customer experience really well, our customers have come to expect the same seamless and personalized experience. ”

Jeff Ritter Head of Corporate Development, Investments and Strategic Initiatives

To adapt to these expectations, Cumberland decided to empower their customer service unit to answer billing and other types of service questions, spanning multiple lines of business.

To do so, they needed Salesforce to provide a complete source of policyholder information. Cumberland Mutual integrated multiple source systems, including a legacy system, with Salesforce and implemented a customer service application that takes in all policyholder data from different lines of business. Although this created a centralized and complete source of policyholder info, the data was fragmented over multiple records. “If we searched that customer’s name, and they had 10 policies, they would appear 10 times in the system. There wasn't a single view of the customer”, Jeff Ritter says.

What complicated the fragmented customer view and customer experience even further were differences with data entry at the point of sale. “We sell exclusively through third-party intermediaries, and they are usually the ones filling out the application for each policyholder. There are occasionally small differences during entry. For example, when it's a business name, there may be a comma in one, but not in the other.” Besides a fragmented policyholder view, this caused an incomplete view as some policies would not show up in searches. This led to a loss of productivity for the customer service unit, longer service times, and a suboptimal experience for the policyholder.

“ If we searched that customer’s name, and they had 10 policies, they would appear 10 times in the system. There wasn't a single view of the customer. ”

Jeff Ritter Head of Corporate Development, Investments and Strategic Initiatives

Solution

Their search for a solution that could unify and create a trusted view of the policyholder in Salesforce led Cumberland Mutual to Plauti. With the Duplicate Check functionality, Cumberland automatically consolidates policies that are a 100% match. For the policies that are not an exact match but should be consolidated, Cumberland allows their customer service reps to have a live view of related policies directly on the record page when a customer contacts customer service. Allowing their reps to consolidate those related records, when confirmed by the customer, is key.

Furthermore, all data is being managed directly inside of Salesforce. “The ability to do it all natively, not transferring data to different areas and worrying about security and compliance issues, is helpful,” Jeff Ritter explains. “It has allowed us to match and consolidate those accounts to get a 360-degree view of the customer.”

“ You have set up a great product to make customer data aggregation extremely simple. There are many use cases in the insurance and banking industries that would benefit from a household view perspective. ”

Jeff Ritter Head of Corporate Development, Investments and Strategic Initiatives

Results

Now Cumberland Mutual has all the answers and the right advice at their fingertips. Having a unified and complete customer view also allows Cumberland to be more proactive; “if they (customers) are calling in on one product policy and we see that they have three other policies with us, we're able to point out their other policies that may need service proactively,” Jeff says.

An additional benefit is that Cumberland was able to consolidate the tech stack. “The maintenance that comes with another external system, running on a local machine or a server and to set it up, is much higher compared to a native Salesforce solution.”

“Without Duplicate Check, a 360-customer view would have been almost impossible to accomplish the way we wanted without trying to code an application or integration ourselves and maintain it…You have set up a great product to make customer data aggregation extremely simple. There are many use cases in the insurance and banking industries that would benefit from a household perspective”.

Next steps

When asked about Cumberland's plans with the Duplicate Check functionality solution, Jeff replied, “the next feature we plan to implement is the Flow Action functionality because it will improve current flow processes that we have set up, such as the insurance claims reporting process. So when the policyholder files a vehicle collision claim, they're calling in and providing the names of participants on that claim, including the vehicle occupants. When we are collecting that information, it is difficult to determine if the participant is already represented in Salesforce as a record. However, if we use the Duplicate check flow action within these types of processes to automatically identify potential record matches, the process would be simpler.”

Any advice for other insurers out there?

“If you're looking to create a 360-degree customer view and you're utilizing Salesforce, Duplicate Check is a smooth solution to provide actionable insights that are readily available on the page when customers contact the organization”, Jeff explains. “Other solutions don’t offer that, they are more of a back-end solution, and that's what really makes Plauti stand out.”