The challenge

New Ireland Assurance Company (NIAC) has undertaken a set of projects to digitally transform their operational processes to make it easier for their Financial Advisors and Customers to do business with NIAC.

NIAC were looking to implement an advisor portal that will allow Financial advisors a view of all customer policy and proposal information

NIAC choose Salesforce as their platform, to support their transformational program of work. Community cloud was used for building the Financial advisor facing portal. Service Cloud was used for back-office support teams assisting the financial advisors.

The first phase of the project involved building the portal to accommodate policy and proposal customer details pages. The second phase of the project focused on digital journeys for new business quotes and applications.

The approach

Community Cloud – The advisor portal was built as part of the Community Cloud. It encompassed a homepage providing information on pipeline of key requirements or tasks a Financial advisor has to fulfill for their customers’ existing business. The portal provided a database and search page for advisors to sort through and manage their customers’ details.

Service Cloud Console – Was used by back-office support to assist advisors with their queries. Merkle implemented a “login as” feature which allowed back-office support to emulate advisors profile in the portal to support queries

Fund Switch – Merkle implemented a solution to allow advisors to transfer funds in and out of Pension and S&I policies. The  switch details would be sent to the customer to authorise via DocuSign

Quotation Process – Merkle implemented a digital quotation and application journey on the portal to allow advisors to generate quotes and applications for customers to sign and submit into the back-office for processing. These digital journeys were implemented on a product rules engine built and managed within Salesforce.

The outcome

Focusing on digitising and automating processes, NIAC has been able to target increases in productivity for advisors and back-office staff, identify cost-saving opportunities, as well as improve the overall experience for customers, employees, and advisors.

Efficiencies - The speed of new business quotes and applications being submitted into New Ireland was significantly increased.

Time-Savings - Reduced overhead on back-office support chasing up on advisors for missing details on application forms

Advisor Autonomy - Advisors are now able to manage their pipeline and action requirements issued to them from New Ireland back-office operations much quicker. The portal gives advisors much more control over searching and processing customers’ details.

Fund Switch – Fund switch can now be performed as part of a digital process, replacing the previous paper approach. Advisors can now play around with different fund options through the portal before sending them digitally to the customer to sign off on.

Digital Optimisation – Advisors can now run quotes for different products and edit inputs to get a quote that best suits the customer. Applications can now be submitted online through the portal removing the paper application approach. Authorization and sign off from the customer can now be obtained digitally. Applications are submitted straight into back-end systems removing the overhead of manually inputting paper applications into databases.

Expected Results – 1,500 Advisors on-boarded onto the Community. 500,000 Customers managed through the Community