This post is part of a series sponsored by AgentSync.
It’s no secret that AgentSync has the backbone of Salesforce. But if you’re not familiar with the intersection of technology and insurance, you might not understand why we chose this path of construction.
From a simple historical point of view, AgentSync was not developed in a vacuum. We stand on the shoulders of giants. We are a startup in a legacy industry, in which Salesforce has a solid foundation.
Why Salesforce?
From a personal point of view, long before I wrote a line of code for AgentSync, and before I met Niji Sabharwal – who is my husband as well as co-founder – I worked in a Salesforce environment. I’ve seen Salesforce used to manage waste, in nonprofits that log donations, in tracking farmland use, and I realized it was a powerful platform. My various encounters meant that I was familiar with the engineering aspects of the Salesforce ecosystem.
Niji worked in his LinkedIn and Zenefits positions with Salesforce on the in-house operations side, and knew how powerful Salesforce was with data and reporting. So, from very early on, it made sense for Salesforce to be part of the tools we were building. There are many factors beyond our personal experiences that have made Salesforce an obvious and ideal partner.
Security and Reputation of Salesforce
We built AgentSync from the Security First Policy. One of the reasons Salesforce fit naturally is because we knew that our products had to meet Salesforce’s high expectations for security. Not only will the infrastructure have high security standards, our code will have to go through a thorough third-party check, looking for bugs or vulnerabilities, long before they appear in front of our customers.
Additionally, we’ve been able to use the powerful role-based security framework within the Force.com platform to support our users with the secure and complex engagement models they need within the product to support a range of people from licensing administrators to individual agents. This was very attractive to us and very consistent with our product goal – AgentSync products handle a large volume of data, and protecting our users’ data is of paramount importance.
As Salesforce is widely used in the insurance and finance industry, we knew our partnership would also give us that leverage. Rather than having to go into a detailed explanation of our security standards, anyone familiar with Salesforce and enterprise-intensive standards already knows we’ve passed this high of excellence.
Of course, for anyone looking for confirmation, we have We completed the SOC 2 Type I reportbut we knew from day one that we were operating within very secure infrastructure firewalls.
Flexibility, speed, and infrastructure for Salesforce
My background with Salesforce has been in application design to handle volume, both in terms of scale and in the complexity of workflows. From my previous experience, I’ve learned that flexibility is key to scaling, as business must change quickly often to succeed, and thus enterprise applications that support business must be able to be flexible.
The Force.com platform’s low-code toolkit makes it ideal for rapid iteration of internal Salesforce teams. This is critical to support our client base of insurance agencies, carriers, and MGAs/MGUs who each have their own use cases for our products. We wanted flexibility, but we also wanted to move quickly. Build tools from scratch that require heavy code and a lot of engineering just to get to basic functions have not been in the best interest of our customers.
Salesforce has a number of tools that make it possible to create a lot of product functionality without a single line of native code. This no-code or low-code approach makes it easy to customize our user experience, so we can give our customers something that best suits them and their specific needs without taking years to build a single functionality or limited single use.
Being able to build our product in blocks that can be changed and rearranged from scratch was essential to being able to scale quickly, and to get to know our customers at whatever scale they are too.
Connect and share apps
Being built on the Force.com platform means we automatically take advantage of Salesforce’s powerful suite of APIs, as well as our ability to use standard connectors in many of the ETL solutions on the market. Patterns that are critical to AgentSync’s ability to connect our products to other platforms already built in, even to applications unrelated to Salesforce.
Even easier is the integration with other AppExchange applications. When an application is in the Salesforce AppExchange, we know that it will be easy for us to integrate with it because it speaks the same language, and we know that it will share Salesforce’s high standards of security. This easy out-of-the-box connection allows us to find partnerships that expand the capabilities of our products to meet our customers’ needs.
For example, when a customer is looking for a background check solution, we can point to VerifiedFirst in AppExchange and know, not only will it meet our customers’ needs, but it will meet our security standards, and we can exchange data to provide more insights into both tools that benefit our customers.
We know we can’t solve every piece of the puzzle. There are a lot of needs for anyone in the insurance job, and AppExchange lets us go out and find ways to quickly solve customer needs, helping us focus on our speed, service, and tools.
Trusted user experience
We built AgentSync using the backbone of Salesforce because the bottom line for us is a secure customer-centric experience, and Salesforce has helped us make that happen. With their tools, our products can be highly configurable without the additional costs and time spent by an engineering team writing a lot of code. And every time Salesforce upgrades its infrastructure, we and our customers automatically benefit.
In the insurance industry, many of our clients also have more custom built in-house processes and tools. By using the Salesforce-enabled low-code or no-token approach when we can, we can focus more of our engineering efforts on carrier and agency tools that are necessarily customized.
Ultimately, we want to help our customers transform their operations to be more efficient, less time consuming, and more people friendly, and Salesforce allows us to deliver that better than if we built our code from scratch.
No matter what’s in your current technology suite, to see how AgentSync’s Manage product can help you achieve your transformation, We lost.
