Salesforce Case Study – Agent Application

Summary

Kenway Consulting helped a leading financial services client automate the process of onboarding potential new Agents, by designing and building a scalable solution to digitize their New Agent Application using the Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Experience Cloud, and additional integrated tools within.

Client Profile

• Industry: Financial Services
• Client: Insurance Premium Financing Services division of a National Financial Services Provider
• Client Description: National financial services corporation that provides traditional commercial and community banking services, wealth management guidance, mortgage origination, commercial insurance, premium financing, short-term accounts receivable financing and certain administrative services such as data processing of payroll, billing, and treasury management services. 

One of the company’s non-bank subsidiaries falls amongst largest insurance premium finance companies operating in the United States, serving commercial and life insurance loan customers throughout the country, operating with approximately 200 employees. The client generates revenue by offering financing on insurance premiums to Agencies that act on behalf of insured parties.

The Problem – The “Why”

One of the largest premium finance organizations in North America wanted to digitize their new insurance Agent Application process to streamline the onboarding process and catalyze more rapid engagement of new agents, resulting in improved back-office productivity and more revenue generating activity. In addition to increasing business process efficiencies, the agent onboarding portal aimed to enhance the overall agent experience and allow agents to interact with and track progress of their applications.

In order to provide custom lending terms to new insurance agents/agencies, the company collects specific information via the application process to onboard new agents and inform financing decisions. Historically, the application process for new agents was:

• Manually time-consuming and inefficient 
• Reliant on paper-based applications shared via e-mail
• Lacking any status tracking of applications 

New Agent Applications were submitted as scanned PDF documents attached in an e-mail and saved as local files, requiring employees to manually enter the provided information into Salesforce. Further, due to the manual nature of the agent onboarding process, there was lack of any tracking or visibility on the status of applications until a final review was made.

Kenway was engaged to architect, design and build a technology solution that would combine the activities executed by internal and external parties from the start of a new application through the approval process. Ultimately, Kenway built out a solution to allow external agents to complete all the required paperwork in an online portal, facilitated by Salesforce’s Experience Cloud, with a legally binding signature, and directly sync the information from the application back to the client’s Salesforce Sales Cloud environment. Finally, Kenway helped build an integration from their Salesforce Sales Cloud to sync the data from the Agent Application to external applications. 

Top Considerations for Driving Change

• 4,375 manual hours spent for 500+ new Agent Applications taking employees 10-15 minutes per application on manual data entry
• 2500+ files to be manually collected, tracked, reviewed, and processed (5 files per application) that had to be Teams spending non-value add time on saving and organizing email attachments. 
• 3,000 hours annually on correcting the data entry error and missing fields due to the manual nature of each application

The Solution

Kenway designed and built a scalable solution that utilized industry-leading techniques to build upon the client’s existing Salesforce platform, all while incorporating the need for legally binding signature verification, the ability to provide additional documentation and to validate the Agent Application, and the workflow automation requirements.

The architecture included a mix of enterprise applications and custom development to simplify and automate the overall application experience for both potential new agents and company employees. The solution maintained a high level of flexibility in the process, bi-directional exchange of information, and minimal manual work required to ingest, store, and derive value from the data captured throughout.

New features, such as the ability for each applicant to keep track on the status of their applications, were achieved by building a Salesforce Community Portal (via Experience Cloud) for new applicants to access and complete any necessary tasks. Kenway also developed a mechanism to support repeated submissions by the same application, while maintaining the data filled out in the original submission and any subsequent submissions within the current Salesforce instance.

To ensure that, upon completion, the applications were legally binding, DocuSign was integrated into the Salesforce portal and process. Kenway leveraged the DocuSign interface to create data-validation rules to prevent submission errors, pre-populate agent information that was submitted previously within Salesforce, require a legally binding signature before submission, and attach the completed and signed application as attachment on the underlying Salesforce Object.

What We Delivered

In addition to the Salesforce Community Portal, Kenway designed, developed, and automated supporting business processes with added functionalities and features that significantly streamlined the process execution. This gave the client the ability to consolidate a fully digitalized agent onboarding process, in which both parties can execute any needed action in a more efficient and direct way. 

Deliverables:

• Business Process Flows
• Business Requirements
• Technical Design and Documentation
• Salesforce Configuration
• Salesforce Platform Development
• Visualforce/Lightning Web Components
• Digital Signature Functionality through DocuSign integration

Figure 1: Example of DocuSign integration for application form completion

Figure 2: Digital Signature functionality through DocuSign integration

Figure 3: Information management and status tracking of an Agent Application in Salesforce

Achieving Success: How Kenway Spurred Results

With the digitization of the Agent Application and the automation of supporting business processes, the client can now manage the entire agent onboarding process in one consolidated platform. 

• Reduced the combined time spent on each Agent Application from more than 30 minutes to less than 5 minutes
• All follow-up correspondences have been automated based on triggered email reminders from Salesforce
• Eliminated the risk of losing any application over the course of the onboarding process by having all applications automatically and systemically tracked throughout the onboarding process
• Relationship Managers spend less time sending manual follow-up emails
• Enables users to access the real-time status of each application quickly and easily

In addition to expediting and enhancing the client’s internal processing, the Client Portal also improves the user experience for potential new agents. Agents can self-service any inquiries on Application Status or data entry requirements and can move through the onboarding process faster, resulting in quicker revenue generation for the client.

Read more about how we’ve helped drive success for other companies here. >>