With Salesforce, State Farm helps customers handle the unexpected.

ike other insurers, State Farm is facing disruption. Artificial intelligence (AI) and the other emerging technologies of the Fourth Industrial Revolution look set to bring change. They offer huge potential for both established players and disruptors to transform insurance products and services. The market entry of tech giants and insurtechs could drive consumer expectations even higher than they already are.

“No one can predict what will happen in the insurance industry five to 10 years from now,” said Fawad Ahmad, Chief Digital Officer at State Farm. “But what we do know is that we have to continuously and rapidly adapt to remain relevant to our customers.”

Founded in 1922, State Farm now has approximately 58,000 employees and nearly 19,000 contractor agents servicing 83 million policies and accounts across the United States. It offers more than 100 products, including auto, home, and life insurance, as well as banking, mutual funds, and commercial products.

Despite being the largest property and casualty insurer in the U.S., State Farm needed to transform to remain the market leader. “Changes were needed to rapidly improve our capabilities. Simplifying our systems, processes, and end-to-end customer experiences continues to be critical,” said Ahmad.

Salesforce’s enterprise CRM platform for financial services, Financial Services Cloud, will be a core component of the transformation. This platform is built on highly customized versions of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud that provide financial services companies with the insights and tools they need to transform before- and after-sales service. For example, it can help State Farm employees and agents quickly find the important details about customers and craft personalized communications across all channels.

“Salesforce provides State Farm agents and employees a holistic view of our customers,” said Ahmad. “From a single screen, we can more efficiently manage a customer’s information and interactions, making it simpler to do business with us. In addition to the personal agent-customer relationships we’re built on, this improved customer experience ultimately drives loyalty.”

For example, when a customer first contacts State Farm to file a claim — whether by phone, online, or via the State Farm mobile app — the agent gets a complete view of the customer’s data and an automatically generated action plan with prioritized tasks. The customer then receives updates and information via their preferred channel — whether that’s an email confirming receipt of the claim or a text message notifying the customer that a claim payment has been deposited into their account.

Being able to access data is crucial to increase efficiencies and improve the customer experience.

To this end, State Farm uses MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform to unlock data from its third-party systems. “We’ve used MuleSoft to connect our systems of record, including billing and claims management, to Salesforce to deliver a connected customer experience,” explained Jason Potts, Enterprise Technology Executive at State Farm.

With MuleSoft, Salesforce features, such as customer search and management, can now access data from third-party systems. “This allowed us to integrate and automate processes across different business areas, simplifying the experience for customers and associates,” he added. And once built, these connections can be reused across the Salesforce Customer 360 platform to rapidly deliver a unified experience across agents, phone, web, and mobile.

Meanwhile, the digital transformation continues as State Farm innovates for its customers, according to Potts. “Salesforce brings its experience from various industries and continues to challenge us to think differently about how we do business for the ultimate benefit to our customers,” he said.