Why Salesforce (CRM) Is Investing In Hearsay Systems

By Amit Chowdhry ● Jul 29, 2020
  • Salesforce.com, Inc. (NYSE: CRM) and Hearsay Systems have announced a strategic partnership and investment from Salesforce Ventures. These are the details.

Salesforce.com, Inc. (NYSE: CRM) and Hearsay Systems have announced a strategic partnership and investment from Salesforce Ventures. This relationship comes at a time when there is an increased demand for stronger product integrations thus allowing advisor-client interactions to be automatically captured in Salesforce’s CRM system.

Hearsay Systems is a trusted leader in compliant digital communications for the financial services industry. And the deeper partnership with Salesforce will provide compliance at scale for heavily regulated financial services firms to deliver a human client experience across digital channels. Using Salesforce, Hearsay will continue to reinvent the advisor-client experience in wealth management, home lending, property and casualty, and life insurance by allowing advisors and agents to authentically and intelligently grow business relationships by proactively guiding and capturing the last mile of digital communications.

Traditional in-person meetings have been put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic. So advisors and agents need to connect quickly and compliantly with clients during a period of economic uncertainty. Hearsay has seen a 50% surge in texting volume between advisors and clients over its platform since the start of the pandemic.

Through its partnership with Salesforce, Hearsay provides compliance at scale to enable firms to deliver a rich human-client experience across digital channels. The demand for compliant last-mile digital communication channels for financial firms is surging due to the new socially distanced reality.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Hearsay has seen 3X product utilization for 2020 compared to 2019 year-to-date. And along with increased usage of these digital communication channels, the demand for integrations of CRM and other core systems with last-mile client engagement has nearly doubled. These integrations resulted in up to 10x volume of last-mile activities captured in CRM thus providing critical context to inform the next best actions.

Hearsay serves over 170,000 advisors and agents at the world’s largest financial services firms, including Allstate, Ameriprise, Farmers Insurance, HSBC, Morgan Stanley, Northwestern Mutual, and Prudential. And the partnership will encompass stronger product integrations thus allowing insights from advisor activities to be captured in Salesforce.

This provides visibility into omnichannel advisor-client conversations that are happening in the field across compliant text messaging, mobile calls, social media, and advisor websites.

Built on the Salesforce Platform, Hearsay for Salesforce is currently available via the Salesforce AppExchange

KEY QUOTES:

“The first phase of digital for banks and insurers was automated engagement– mobile apps and push notifications, email automation, ad targeting. Now, especially in the pandemic, financial services customers are demanding authentic engagement with their financial advisors, bankers, and insurance agents. Customers want the speed and convenience of digital combined with the empathy and trust of their relationship manager. Salesforce’s 360-degree view of the customer, workflow, and analytics plus Hearsay’s compliant last-mile engagement together deliver the human client experience at scale which advisors and customers want and need now more than ever.”

— Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay Systems

“Customers are increasingly navigating their lives through seamless digital experiences, and the interactions with their financial services partner should be no different. Fidelity is glad to leverage Hearsay’s platform to enhance our customer focus by simplifying communications through text messaging, which will integrate with our Salesforce CRM. Digitally-driven capabilities like these give our advisors more time to spend on what’s most important, serving their clients.”

— David Dintenfass, Chief Marketing Officer at Fidelity Investments

“Our advisors think deeply about the needs of our clients and help them make complex financial decisions. They act as approachable authorities and are a trusted partner. To do this well they need connectivity and consistent communication with our clients. Enabling our advisors with the right communication tools, from first interaction to the last mile, with seamless CRM integration is essential for success. A technology-enabled advisor is the future, and key to realizing Prudential’s purpose to help clients do better in an ever-changing world.”

— Naveen Agarwal, Chief Marketing Officer, Prudential

“Hearsay’s last-mile customer engagement platform is a natural addition to our Salesforce applications. With a growing set of regulations introduced across industries, organizations need to ensure that their sales, service, and marketing teams follow compliant communications with customers. With Hearsay, we are excited to deliver these enhanced capabilities to Salesforce customers.”

— Bill Patterson, EVP and General Manager of Salesforce CRM Applications