The Agency Management System (AMS) is the central information hub for most insurance agencies. However, Account Managers (AMs) and Customer Service Reps (CSRs) often use the Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) system because of its excellent sales, marketing, and customer service functionality. As a result, agencies have two information systems that don’t share information.
For agency staff, it is a tedious manual process to transfer data between their AMS and Salesforce because. Not only is time wasted but increases the likelihood of errors and omissions.
Without proper integration between AMS and the Salesforce CRM, Salesforce becomes a glorified and overpriced Rolodex used to store client information and schedule meetings. However, Synatic provides a system for automating the connection between Salesforce and any AMS, ensuring both systems have the same up-to-date, business-critical data. With accurate customer and policy details in both systems, agency staff are equipped with all the information needed to effectively cross-sell their customer better. This also leads to higher sales and improved revenue.
AMs and CSRs rely on Salesforce to capture and record client information and interactions. But when operations staff want to see a client’s journey through the sales cycle from lead to account, the disconnect between Salesforce and AMS presents problems. The same applies to the finance teams who work primarily from the AMS to access policy information and service the client.
Without the up-to-date sharing of data between Salesforce and AMS, it is difficult to make data accessible to a wide range of people, and creates barriers that prevent staff from accessing, communicating about, and using data effectively.
This means the goal of a single source of truth for all client and policy information is thwarted.
Processes are inefficient as demonstrated by this example.
A producer creates a lead within Salesforce. Once the sale is successful and the lead is converted to an opportunity, AMs manually generate an account within their AMS. They then transfer the information manually from Salesforce into the AMS, sometimes using an Excel spreadsheet to populate the necessary fields in the AMS.
Once the account is in the AMS, service staff begin documenting and quoting business for the client adding additional information to the policy in the AMS. At the same time, the producer may add additional information about the client in Salesforce.
The policy data in the AMS, and the updated client information in the CRM, remain siloed in the respective systems, creating a fractured view of the client and their policy if the systems are not properly integrated.
Because agencies don’t have a single source of truth, problems can occur.
An agile, data-driven agency will be an impossible goal without shared knowledge that can improve processes.
The Salesforce platform is complex. 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.
Both the AMS and Salesforce can be customized for specific agency needs. These customizations can further complicate the data integration process.
Some agencies use developers to write programs to integrate their AMS and Salesforce. The problem with so-called hand-coded 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. Because hand-coding needs skilled developers, it becomes expensive.
Synatic’s CRMSynch solution enables agencies to move data bi-directionally between their AMS and the Salesforce CRM, allowing them to access client information from Salesforce in the AMS effortlessly. When using CRMSynch, changes made to an account in the AMS are reflected within Salesforce, updating producers with information such as new endorsements that occur in the agency’s AMS.
CRMSynch makes life for producers, operations and finance teams administratively easier by seamlessly integrating data within their AMS and Salesforce. This eliminates the need to bounce between multiple systems and screens to access Information.
Whatever AMS is used — e.g. Vertafore, Applied, Hawksoft — CRMSynch can integrate it with Salesforce. Integration is performed using pre-defined connectors that reduce development time and effort and brings agility and efficiency to the work environment.
Insurance agencies have a challenge getting data shared between their AMS and the Salesforce CRM. Synatic’s CRMSynch solution can integrate data from various AMS systems with Salesforce. This allows for more efficient processes, better customer service, and improved reporting, With CRMSych, agencies get a 360-degree view of customer and policy data, and agents can access policy information, claims data, and client details in a single system, whether it be the AMS or Salesforce.
