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Allianz
Inspiring Extraordinary Customer Success
Allianz offers 100 million customers in more than 70 countries a wide range of products, services, and solutions in insurance and asset management. Addressing the health and wellbeing protection needs of their clients worldwide, they offer international health, life and disability insurance, as well as a wide range of health and protection services to private individuals, families, organizations and partners. The article is based on the interview excerpts from Alexander Bender, global head of client relations at Allianz, briefly elucidating the way they leverage Salesforce in the competitive insurance space.
Challenges in Managing Workforces with Platforms Like Salesforce
If I look at how Allianz has managed the transition to working from home, I would say there is a wider set of challenges than meets the eye, as you need to be well-equipped with the technology enabling the work-from-home system. For instance, facilitating a helpline that answers customer's calls. Since the major challenges that organizations face nowadays are centred around adaptability, Salesforce is always a step ahead, as you can access the system anytime, anywhere, without hampering the productivity of your workflow. When I look at other non-technology related challenges that we, as an insurance company, have now, it is more around offering data protection. Across the globe, companies are implementing increasingly stringent data protection measures. As we are operating globally with customers from around the globe, with some of the regulations implemented, it becomes much more difficult to access the information around the globe. As a result, Salesforce effectively responds to this urgency as we have data centres across different parts of the world. For us, anything that provides data protection is something whose potential can be enhanced and maximized using Salesforce.
Processes Leveraged to Make It a Successful Project
We were working under the parentage of Allianz Care, a global health partner issuing international health insurance with a high number of customers based in the UK. Subsequently, we faced a challenge with Britain leaving the EU. As we couldn't operate under the EU anymore, we quickly needed to find a partner in the UK. Luckily, we have the Allianz company that becomes the actual insurer for this.
Hence, we had to transfer all our businesses from Allianz Care to one of our sister companies, which then enabled the operations of our businesses in the UK. That, in itself, was quite a cumbersome process of transferring policies, which proved to be quite strenuous on our back-end systems. The interesting thing is if you take a look at it through Salesforce, it is actually quite simple. Salesforce allows the much-required flexibility that our back-end systems don't.
Evolution of the Salesforce Platform
Salesforce has evolved as an outstanding system of integration and functionality. The CRM provides the backbone service needed to allow easy data collaboration between multiple departments, centralized customer information, an array of reports and statistical options, and the ability to run on any browser, tablet, desktop, or mobile device. Moreover, I think we cannot fight existing systems that customers have because we have our entire system for managing insurance policies, which we are definitely not willing to give up. We like to think about how we can complement what organizations have, and accordingly, Salesforce helps us in addressing these agendas. Moreover, Salesforce helps any other spontaneous requirements to be quickly integrated and plugged into what we already have, helping us function more efficiently.
How Allianz Has Coped up with Data Management and Data Protection
As a health insurer, we store massive amounts of data, with amplified data protection required for the sensitivity of the information, and being a part of the Allianz group, we adhere to Allianz privacy guidelines. This is very closely related to the general data protection regulation in the EU, and all the companies that work with the Allianz Group comply with those guidelines, which I think is important because when we deal with other parts of companies within the Allianz group, we know that they are following the same rules. When you look at data protection through the lens of an international company, we don't just have EU members who access our data. In fact, we have people in the Middle East colleagues from Singapore, Asia, Latin and North America. Consequently, data protection has become the topmost priority for us. Besides, we constantly review our business models to adapt to the changing needs of our customers. For instance, China implemented a data protection law barring the transfer of data outside China. Hence, we cannot attest a global model to China as it has its own set of rules, and we need to implement the business model correspondingly. Thus, these sets of guidelines and regulations drive the technology forward in accordance with the organizational structure, which, in turn, shapes your business model.
Salesforce is always a step ahead, as you can access the system anytime, anywhere, without hampering the productivity of your workflow
Salesforce can give you a lot of things. The offering is vast in terms of what Salesforce offers itself and with third-party applications. What frequently happens is you can get carried away and become overwhelmed. It is more like going to a sweet shop and deciding which one to pick. For me, it is about stepping back and looking around at your immediate needs. The guiding principle for my team is to look at the 80-20 road. We don't solve all the problems at once and rather focus on 80 per cent of them before moving on to the next. The other key factor is you need to be clear and sure about what your process is or what you are trying to get assistance for to support your process. After that, you can conceive ideas on how technology can help enhance your processes. For me, these are the most crucial constraints on implementing Salesforce and developing relevant technologies.
