State Farm is a Trailblazer | Salesforce

And to talk more about this incredible division at State Farm, I would love to welcome up to the stage Katinka Bryson from State Farm. Thanks for being here, Katinka.

Thank you. It's wonderful to be here. Thank you.

You're pro number three.

Yes. Third time here at Dreamforce, so. And every time seems to get better and better, more exciting. I have a better idea of now where to go and how to navigate now that I've been here a few times.

Yesterday we were talking about this concept of unification and why it's so important. It was clearly a big theme here in the keynote today. What does unified insurance, unified financial services mean to you and State Farm?

Sure. So unifying the customer experience and driving customer loyalty are at the heart of so much of what we're doing at State Farm today. Now, before I jump in and share maybe a few examples of what we're doing, I thought I might share a little bit about State Farm because I think for, for some of our customers, we may not be a familiar brand. So State farm was founded 96 years ago. We're ranked number 34 on the Fortune 500. This year we service about 83 million policies and accounts across the United States through a network. And Erin referred to this, a network of 19,000 state farm agents that are sprinkled across the large and small communities across the country. And so I'd summarize that to share with you, Rohit, that we are big, we are old, and it is complicated. And so the decades of complexity that you described earlier are very real to us. So as I share these examples of what we're doing, I would add that, keep that in mind that this hasn't always been easy and it requires significant focus and commitment to making some tough decisions as we go. So the first thing we've done in the last 18 months, we launched and activated about 90,000 of our customer facing associates on the Salesforce CRM platform. A significant accomplishment. Again, many difficult decisions have to be made in order to make that happen. And significant change adoption challenges had to be taken head on because as you may imagine, those 90,000 customer facing associates had a CRM platform in place and they were happy. Now though, after being able to get to this point and launching, I would say that they now understand and see the benefits of a modern contemporary CRM platform and what it can do for them, for our customers going forward. So we're excited. It's early in our journey. We have a lot more work, work to do going forward, but it certainly has put us in A great position. I'll add a couple more things quickly. Another one is while we're modernizing the CRM platform, we are also modernizing a lot of the business processes. So those legacy processes and legacy technology systems in the background that relate to administering or providing administration to the policy services and how we handle our claims, how we present new products and services to our customers. So a lot of work going on in regards to those legacy systems as well. And then thirdly, we are also building and evolving our digital tools at State Farm to create better experiences for our customers from a digital standpoint. And I know you've got an experience along those lines.

I was telling you this last night. We had a little fender bender in the house. And what I loved was it wasn't me, it was actually my dad, but I knew everything. I thought it was really cool that as part of being in the family, the policy, I knew everything that was happening. Why is that so important when you've got so many customers and scale, why are you so focused on digital?

Well, I think Aaron described it really well. For us, that's a lot about or it's all about that unifying of a customer experience to make it convenient for you or for one of our customers to understand where they stand in the example of a claim. Experience is just so important to us and that connection to our customer is what builds that loyalty. So I'll share with you that the demo that Erin described this morning in part is under development. Part of it has been implemented and part of it certainly is aspirational. But all of it is a great example of the evolution of those digital tools to create those experiences for our customers that keep us connected to them. But what I've described, by and large has been technology related. Right? And I would tell you that alone, that technology doesn't really get us where we want to be. If you combine that technology along with the local personal relationships that our local State Farm agents create for our customers, you can see how uniquely positioned State Farm really is to unifying the experience and driving that customer loyalty.

So one more question before I let you go. I mean, you said up front, you guys have been around for nearly 100 years. How are you staying agile to keep innovating?

Yes. Great challenge to us. Again, the decades of complexity don't make that easy. But we are committed to innovating and we are committed to finding new and better ways to do the things that we do. We are very involved in research. So you think of the automated or connected vehicle technology and we've made a decision to embrace disruption and empower our workforce to be prepared for what comes and certainly to continue to challenge ourselves around innovation. And look, as I said, to not sit still and look for ways to continue to keep ourselves relevant. And so much of that is about the culture that we create at State Farm. And I think you saw our CEO Michael Tipstrord, speak to that. It's a real core belief and value of his that we stay current, stay relevant, and work hard to understand and constantly lead from the customer's perspective.

Well, Katinka, we love working with you. We love the partnership. Thank you for joining us here at Dreamforce.

Thank you. Rohit.