I can’t speak more highly of the support we’ve received throughout this project. It’s great to have someone that can act as a sounding board.
Mike WilliamsCRM Director, Vitality
Salesforce is so easy to get to grips with. From a development point of view, we can develop faster because we’re talking about clicks over code. When you don't need to code everything, you can just get on with things and drive progress forward.
Mike WilliamsCRM Director, Vitality
Vitality is a leading insurance business offering health, life, and car insurance. As part of Vitality’s shared value model (what is good for our members, us and society), their Vitality programme is an evidenced based behaviour science approach that uses the power of rewards to encourage members to make positive health choices and take steps to become more physically active.
With a distribution model that includes selling directly to customers and also through a network of insurance brokers and financial advisors, Vitality’s distribution team recognised that it needed a single, scalable customer relationship management (CRM) platform that all of its internal team members and franchisees could use.
By uniting its teams around a shared view of the customer, Vitality would be able to improve visibility over data, streamline organisational processes, increase overall productivity, and make it easier for account managers to engage with brokers.
With Vitality already using Salesforce across selected distribution teams, expanding its usage across its acquisition and retention teams was a simple decision. To help its development team get up to speed with the solution faster, the company used technical support and guidance provided by Salesforce’s specialised support team.
Here are four tips from Vitality's CRM Director Mike Williams, which may help you maximise the value from your digital investment faster.
Having recently welcomed several team members who hadn’t worked with Salesforce before, Williams recognised his team might need support to achieve its objective of uniting its teams on a single, shared platform.
To ensure that the team hit the ground running, Vitality drew on the expert guidance and support included with a Premier Success Plan.
This included having a trusted Salesforce advisor dedicated to Vitality, who worked closely with the team to fine-tune Vitality’s digital roadmap, help it determine the best way to achieve the company’s objectives, and iron out problems that arose throughout the implementation.
Regular meetings with its expert advisor enabled the team to better anticipate challenges and receive the support needed to solve them.
“It's been fantastic to have a point of contact we know we can speak to about pretty much anything at Salesforce,” said Williams. “For example, when we were trying to enable single sign-on, the team that works on our cloud computing platform hadn't done much with Salesforce before. Kam (our Success Manager) was able to find the right contacts at Salesforce to connect the two together. Straight away, people came back to us, connected the dots, and within a matter of a few days, had everything sorted.”
Having laid a solid foundation for innovation, the development team recognised that it needed a roadmap of next steps to enable it to maintain its momentum.
By working iteratively to deploy features available on Vitality’s sales and customer service solutions, the team was able to deliver significant improvements to the user experience for its employees and the network of franchisees working with local brokers to sell Vitality products.
A key priority for the company was to improve franchisees’ ability to manage their schedules and increase visibility over their engagement with the brokers they work with. This not only gives franchisees a better understanding of which brokers they should be targeting and when, but how engagement and sales correlate. Account managers also now have a central place to store notes relating to their engagement activities.
Vitality has also automated calculating and applying discounts to a renewal, making it simpler and faster for retention agents to apply discounts. Retention agents are also able to see which rewards and benefits associated with an insurance product a customer is using, and how often. This makes agents more effective throughout renewal conversations.
Current projects include building a suite of recommendations for franchisees based on engagement, which Vitality will deliver via a social networking and collaboration solution.
With digital skill shortages an issue globally, developing internal capabilities is critical.
Members of Vitality’s development team were able to access expert coaching sessions and training opportunities on relevant topics as part of the company’s support plan.
These sessions allow team members to build their expertise in core areas and develop their understanding of how to use the solution. They are also useful for reassuring the team that they are addressing a particular task or challenge the right way.
“As the manager of the team, it is reassuring for me to know the option is there,” said Williams. “If someone gets stuck or we get stuck as a team, I know we can lean on that resource if we need to. That gives me the confidence to push our roadmap back to the business.”
Access to round-the-clock technical support can help minimise downtime during implementation and testing phases.
To mitigate disruption from technical issues, Vitality’s development team took advantage of the 24/7 technical support included in its support plan. This allowed the team to log a ticket about a critical issue online and receive a response in as little as one hour.
In those instances when a technician didn’t immediately know the answer to a problem, they worked with the development team to find a solution. Developers were also on hand throughout the project to troubleshoot code to fix or avoid problems.
“When we log a ticket, the speed of the turnaround has always been brilliant,” said Williams. “In one recent example, the login flow we were building broke. It wasn't showing anything, but because it was assigned to all the system admin profiles, none of us could get into the system to turn the flow off. We logged a ticket at 4:30 p.m. U.K. time, and when we came back the next morning, at 8:00 a.m., the flow had been disabled and we were back in.”
