Inspiring Extraordinary Customer Success with Salesforce

In your personal experience as a global head of client relations what would you say in terms of the evolution of salesforce platform itself? What changes would you like to see in terms of the evolution of such a platform, and how organizations work with your teams in today's agenda?

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 can we compliment 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 in to what we already have, helping us functioning more efficiently.

Being a health insurance company that deals with millions of people, when it comes to the data protection aspect, I do believe you have a really good protocol and approach in place as is. It would be really great if you could elaborate on that for our clients and readers to have a good idea of 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 EU members who access our data. In fact, we have people in the middle east, colleagues from Singapore, Asia, Latin and North America. Moreover, we constantly review our business models to adapt to the changing needs of our customers. For instance, China implemented a data protection law for barring 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 set of guidelines and regulations drive the technology forward in accordance with the organizational structure, which in turn, shapes your business model.

What advice would you like to share with budding and evolving companies? What would you like to suggest them in terms of Salesforce implementation and also working with technology?

Salesforce can give you a lot of things. The offering is pretty vast in terms of what Salesforce offers itself, and also 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, looking around your immediate needs. The guiding principle to my team is look at the 80-20 road. We don’t solve all the problems at once, and rather focus on 80 percent 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 are you 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.