The AMS is the central information hub for most agencies. However, account managers and customer service reps often use a CRM like Salesforce because of its excellent functionality for sales, marketing, and customer service. With features like automated emails, sales and marketing dashboards, and lead management tools, Produces and CSRs feel they can better control customer engagement from Salesforce. As a result, agencies are starting to move away from their AMS as the only store of information and instead turning to a CRM as another key solution in their system stack.
Agencies can be daunted by the prospect of transferring data from an AMS to Salesforce because of the manual process of re-entering the data which leads to time and resources being wasted, and the increased likelihood of errors and omissions.
However, there is a way of automating the connection between Salesforce and any AMS that will store all important data inside Salesforce.
Salesforce has become the de facto CRM (Customer Relationship Management) standard in the financial services industry. The reason is that it provides a complete view of customer interactions and better visibility into an agency’s overall operations.
One insurer noted why is Salesforce so important.
"we need to make sure that everyone's kept informed at the right time so that things move forward ... and give information to help us [clients and partners] be more efficient and operate in a more structured way."
An AMS, on the other hand, stores information for specific functions and can, on specific topics, have a narrow view of customer information.
There are several good business reasons why organizations use Salesforce:
The Salesforce platform is both comprehensive, and complex. It's not just a database with functional areas. There are database schemas and object relationships, supported by a sophisticated metadata environment, that makes customizing Salesforce easier. This, however, creates challenges in integrating data with other systems. It is not a simple process of mapping data between the AMS and Salesforce because data objects in the AMS do not match destination fields in Salesforce. Writing data back from Salesforce into the AMS poses a similar problem.
A standard response to an enquiry about Salesforce integration used to be that it required coding. The problem with hand-coding integrations is they are typically written to meet an immediate need without long-term goals such as reliability or scalability. The bulk of integration work then becomes maintaining these integrations with continual updates. Hand-coding also needs skilled developers, which means it is expensive.
A more modern, efficient and automated solution is an integration platform. This platform is designed to make connecting information between systems easier, enabling quicker and more efficient building of data pipelines. A platform that supports all aspects of Salesforce integration can unify corporate data and ensure that there is real-time synchronization between an AMS and Salesforce. The Synatic Data Integration Hub (DIH) addresses the unique integration challenges associated with the Salesforce platform.
The DIH enables faster and easier data integration in several ways, for both real-time and batch integration. It delivers several key benefits:
Synatic can integrate Salesforce to whatever AMS is being used, e.g., Vertafore, Applied, Hawksoft, Nexsure. Integration is performed using pre-defined connectors that reduce development time and effort, and brings agility and efficiency to the work environment. This empowers building complex integrations between Salesforce and your AMS, allowing all AMS data to be available in Salesforce. The prebuilt connectors are available for Salesforce as well as Marketing Cloud and Pardot.
A major reason why financial services companies are investing in a modern platform like Salesforce is because it is able to provide a single view of the customer. However many financial services firms state that one of the biggest obstacles to this is the difficulty of integrating their existing systems with Salesforce. The Synatic DIH provides the flexibility, scalability and range of integration options to remove the problems of integrating an AMS with Salesforce.
To learn more about Synatic’s Data Integration Hub and how the platform can help you turn Salesforce into your agency’s single record of truth, contact Synatic today.
