Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe entity relationship diagram notation.
- Understand the key considerations for reviewing the data model.
Prerequisites
Before you start this module, consider the recommended prerequisite to best prepare you to learn.
Recommended
Completion of this module:
- Financial Services Cloud Data Modeling to understand how to structure your financial services data with objects, fields, and relationships.
Introduction
As an insurance provider, you have your hands full: You need to track your agents, your policyholders, and the insurance coverage you provide for your clients and their assets. The insurance business is a complex enterprise because of what you need to insure. You can’t assume anything or take anything for granted. In fact, you must record and track every single aspect of the business, because it’s not just money at stake, but human life itself. This is why a thoughtful and comprehensive insurance data model is an essential success enabler.
The Insurance Data Model
In this module, you learn how the insurance data model empowers you to track the key information related to your business and the activities of important users like your sales and service reps.
The insurance data model helps bring all the information related to insurance policies and claim summaries to Salesforce, so you have a 360-degree view of your policyholders. In the diagram, policyholders and agents can contact the call center of the insurance carrier for many reasons, so the customer data has to be accurate and comprehensive. For instance, they may need help getting a quote or they may have questions about their coverage. With Salesforce Customer 360, agents have all the information they need to resolve policyholder and agent queries by phone, text, chat, and more. Behind the scenes, the insurance data model makes all this possible.
Built-in collaboration with Salesforce partners and customers, the insurance data model provides out-of-the-box functionality to organize your data in Salesforce. It enables insurance companies of all sizes to connect with their clients, sales reps, and service agents. And it helps independent insurance agencies and brokerages track policies and claims on behalf of their customers.
Think of the data model as a huge pantry with loads of different things inside. But in the data model pantry, all your ingredients are perfectly organized. This way, when you need something, you know exactly where and how to find it. Now who wouldn’t want a pantry like this?
Before the insurance data model, admins had to spend several months—and devote heavy IT resources—getting their pantry in order. They needed to create similar data architectures by hand and from scratch because no standard was available. Now, with the insurance data model, an admin can get up and running in half the time it normally takes to set up a traditional Salesforce deployment. Pretty amazing.
We go into more detail about the insurance data model in the next unit. For now, know that this data model uses standard Salesforce objects and standard Insurance objects to track all kinds of connections. These tracked and organized connections make it simple to find the information you need in Salesforce.
Let’s say that you want a consolidated view of all the insurance policies related to a particular household. You can use the insurance data model to easily create this view.
But wait, there’s more! The insurance data model also keeps track of a client’s premium payment history and all claims made against a policy. Want to know everyone who’s authorized to sell collision insurance? Want to find out what happened to the eye witness of an accident scene? You can do all this and more with the insurance data model.
While the model gives you objects and fields out of the box, it also lets you define the relationships between different sets of data. It’s not a one-size-fits-all data model. Instead, it’s flexible and helps you manage enterprises, both large and small, based on business requirements. Multiple clouds can implement the insurance data model. Both Financial Services Cloud and Health Cloud can take advantage of the same awesome and flexible solution.
We know that, at a glance, the insurance data model can seem a bit overwhelming. So let’s follow the staff at Cumulus Insurance, a nationwide insurance company that’s working to optimize its digital-transformation journey.
Cumulus Insurance provides a variety of insurance offerings, like group health benefits and auto insurance. Since it’s a commercial insurance company, Cumulus uses Financial Services Cloud to support the business. This is just one implementation scenario.
Entity Relationship Diagram Notation
An entity relationship diagram (ERD) or model is a visible representation of an information system. An ERD depicts the relationships among people, objects, places, concepts, and events in a system. The diagrams are logical models that don’t necessarily reflect the precise underlying data model. ERDs use consistent shapes and notation. Let’s define some of the core components.
Entity
This icon denotes an entity.
A box with rounded corners represents an entity in the diagram. Entity boxes may also list one or more attributes of the entity.
Subtype
This icon denotes a subtype.
A subtype of an entity is a subset of its occurrences represented within a supertype entity. Subtype entities define attributes and relationships specific to each subtype.
One or More
This icon denotes one or more occurences.
A crow’s foot indicates that one or more entity occurrences on the divergent endcan relate to each occurrence on the other end.
One and Only One
This icon denotes one and only one occurrence.
The lack of a crow’s foot on one end indicates that only one entity occurrence on that end can relate to each occurrence on the other end.
Recursive Relationship
This icon denotes a recursive relationship.
A recursive relationship is one between two occurrences of the same entity. A curved relationship line connecting an entity to itself denotes a recursive relationship. The line has a crow’s foot on one end, representing “child of”, and the end without a crow’s foot means “parent of”.
User-Key Relationship
This icon denotes a user-key relationship.
A bar across the crow's foot end of a relationship means that it participates in the user primary key of the entity on that side. A required user-key relationship is arguably the strongest of relationships.
Key Considerations
Data model objects associate with each other in numerous ways. Objects represent database tables that contain data. A record describes a particular occurrence of an object or a row in a database table, like in the following example.
| Object | |
|---|---|
| Record 1 | Record 1 Attribute |
| Record 2 | Record 2 Attribute |
What’s important to keep in mind is that not all scenarios require all associations. It depends on the scale of business, the operations you want to perform, and the kind of products or services you address. Business architects at Cumulus can keep the insurance operation flexible by choosing the object associations that work best for Cumulus.
The architects consider a few points before working with the data model.
- Comprehensiveness: An insurance policy has many stakeholders beyond just the policyholder. The policy can even cover casual bystanders, such as witnesses to a road accident. This means the data model must work for all insurance scenarios.
- A 360-degree view: Agents at Cumulus need ways to organically grow the business and excel at their jobs. The data model must give agents a 360-degree view of policyholders. Insights resulting from this can drive upselling and cross-selling opportunities for agents, and more.
- Agile: The data model must account for the complex ways in which people engage with risk protection. A client may want insurance for some of their assets but not others. Even when all assets are insured, they may want different types of coverage for specific assets, all under the same policy.
- Customer-centric: For an insurance sales agent, nothing is more valuable than being able to tie their sales pitch to a big event in their client’s life. And that’s the power behind the Salesforce Insurance solution. Utilize these capabilities to deliver details of clients’ life events to agents in a seamless manner to maximize new business potential.
Realizing the significant task at hand, Cumulus reaches out to a star consultant, Justus Pardo, to start their journey with the Salesforce insurance data model.
Cumulus struggles to adapt and deliver new products in their current legacy systems because the architecture behind the products is too complex and unorganized. They need an army of developers to create and change the products, policies, and processes.
They hope Justus can organize clusters of data to work cohesively. They have no doubt that with this insurance data model, Justus can help Cumulus, sales agents, and service reps achieve maximum business efficiency. Who knows, Cumulus may even become the new industry leader.
Resources
- Video: Salesforce Insurance Innovation for Financial Services Cloud Demo
- Salesforce Site: Insurance CRM Solutions
- Trailhead: Insurance Agent Console for Sales and Service
- Salesforce Developers: Object Basics
