Overview

The online process of selecting health insurance can often feel overwhelming and confusing for consumers. To combat this and improve the customer experience, one direct-to-consumer health insurance distributor invested in a forward-thinking business model that aligned customer care agents with clients who needed them most.

The challenge

Spring Venture Group is a leader in insurance-distribution technologies, helping clients navigate their insurance options to get the best rates possible – specifically in the senior healthcare space. Intending to streamline and consolidate its technology stack for serving clients, Spring Venture Group partnered with Merkle to implement Salesforce and develop a multi-year roadmap for continued growth.

Merkle conducted an initial discovery of Spring Venture Group’s technology stack, noting the brand needed a robust marketing platform and had multiple existing Salesforce CRM environments for its sales representatives in various business units. The agency provided Spring Venture Group with a multi-year, large-scale implementation plan to centralize the brand’s sales operations using Sales Cloud.

The approach

Spring Venture Group provided Merkle with access to its existing business units to understand its current processes, technology configuration, and data architecture. Merkle then shared change recommendations to the data structure, as well as configuration enhancements, to accommodate all business processes living in one environment.

First, Merkle began the large-scale Sales Cloud implementation, including consolidation of all existing CRM environments, the configuration of analytics, implementation of new automated business processes, and multiple migrations of data from other platforms.

Throughout the implementation process, Merkle and Spring Venture Group spent many hours on-site together, conducting multiple reviews and test scenarios. As a result of the collaboration, Merkle provided customizations to fit what Spring Venture Group needed, including auditing the data architecture and configuring the data security model and sharing settings.

As part of the solution, Merkle leveraged the Lightning version of Salesforce to improve usability for all end users. The agency also configured the Sales Cloud solution to provide Spring Venture Group with the ability to monitor agent performance, customer retention, and company financial performance within a single platform, while making it easier to manage.

When Spring Venture Group established a new B2B partnership with Smart Match Insurance and needed a client-facing portal to accommodate sales representatives’ needs, the brand tasked Merkle with expanding its Salesforce footprint with Experience Cloud.

Merkle leveraged its user experience and branding expertise to design the new Experience Cloud portal and layer on new automated processes for business units. The agency also configured analytics, portal access by user account, and a light integration with Spring Venture Group’s Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for lead intake.

The outcome

Spring Venture Group‘s complex cross-cloud Salesforce solution merged its business units into one unified organization leveraging Sales Cloud and Experience Cloud to provide clients with an improved experience. Merkle continues to provide daily support for the solution centered around helping sales representatives be more efficient and close sales. Using the new, unified platform, Spring Venture Group can connect with people to educate, learn, and help clients get the best healthcare insurance rates possible.