Jake Soffer is the Founder of Rollio, transforming Salesforce from a database into a productive assistant for Sales and Service teams. Jake was interviewed by Michael Fiedel, a Managing Director at InsurTech Ohio and Co-Founder at PolicyFly, Inc.
Jake, does the insurance industry have fair expectations on how their CRM should be impacting their business?
“The industry absolutely does have a fair expectation. We want to be able to see where our company has been, where our company is today and where our company is going. It's a fair expectation because we've been able to do this with data. We've seen some amazing companies that we work with use over 150 years of data from when they first incorporated. It’s pretty wild how far back they can look in their organizational history to predict where they should be heading. If we have this vault of intelligence and knowledge that we call CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and feed it more and more better quality data, the ability to harness and analyze this data grows, and it's fair game to think that the ROI (Return on Investment) is going to grow with that.
The type of insights we should see should be magnitudes greater of an ROI than we've ever been able to get before. It's because of what question it answers, which is: why have we seen so many trends in data with more this, less that, or more this, more that, but now, we can really see why with the ability to analyze that information. Why do my customers prefer this product over that product? Why do eight phone calls, meetings and touchpoints increase probabilities of landing a new customer by 30% versus six touch points? In the past, we've only been able to see a quantitative perspective of X meetings equaling X close rates, or this many support agents in your contact center allows you to hit this SLA (Service-Level Agreement) number or close this many cases in a day. We've been able to see trends such as if you increase this, you've increased this output, but we haven't always been able to understand why. With new things going on in the AI (Artificial Intelligence) world with BI (Business Intelligence) and process mining, we can really uncover and digest why, so we can be efficient about where we strategize, make initiatives and invest.”
How essential are improvements in data entering empowering these types of systems?
“They're not just somewhat essential; they're absolute. We are continuing to leverage these enterprise systems like CRM, BI and all of our tools that tell us where our company's been and where it needs to go. We have 6, 7 and 8 figure investments that all hinge on one thing, the input of data, and if it doesn't happen, those systems just sit there. We see this all the time with failed projects being frustrated projects, and we go down this expensive rabbit hole of hiring an expensive consultant to tell us how to reshape it. Let's reprimand our users, or let's reward the ones that are doing it. At the end of the day, that doesn't solve the crux of the problem, which is, our users and employees that use a tool like a CRM. They're human beings.
When they clock out at 5:00 PM, they're using the same human intuitive interfaces and experiences that we spend so much time and money on for our customers. It needs to be the same level of thought for our employees. It doesn't make sense that there's this disparity after five o'clock, when I'm on my couch trying to get a quote for insurance or change my mailing address, that it’s a completely different interface and experience than when I'm in work entering data like I did 20 years ago.”
How are internal systems receiving or not receiving the proper attention towards enhancing their user experience?
“We work with a lot of companies that come to us because it's an important thing. Or, there are a lot of other great solutions out there besides us that are fantastic at focusing on the user, showing them that this isn't just a big brother tool. That's not why CRM exists. It's for them too; it's not just to output data. It's to make them more efficient, helping them engage with their customers and clients, but the biggest thing we see is the growing level of attention and communication. We saw this trend of lots of transformation teams and innovation teams at organizations just popping up, and they thought it was their job to just go out and find solutions without even uncovering the problem. Now, we're seeing these transformation teams and innovation teams think in a really smart way and communicating with the frontline users.
What’s the worst part of your day? That's the magic question. If we can get down to what causes that as a VP of transformation or innovation, if I can truly understand that from our frontline employees, I can then go find a solution that I know is way more likely to solve an actual problem that we have just by that level of communication.
How is Rollo being applied within the insurance industry? It feeds into that first question. If the response from the users is ever, ‘Hey, I just have this huge burden of CRM. It feels like a second job to me to constantly create my leads or update my opportunities.’ If that's the challenge that they're sharing with their innovation and transformation teams, that's where we've been applied, is taking that human, consumer experience and applying it to the enterprise and employee side, making CRM conversational.
If you know how to text or tweet, you can now master Salesforce. It's a really simple problem. We've been applied in a valuable sense when there’s communication between the transformation and innovation teams and the frontline user with the complaint from the frontline user of their biggest pain in the day. It could be putting details from their client interactions into Salesforce in an efficient way, so it doesn't feel like this huge burden. If that's the case for that organization, that's where we've been able to cut that burden in half.”
InsurTech Ohio Thanks Its Presenting Partner
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