Case Study: Salesforce Financial Services Cloud

Household 360 View

State Farm associates take a holistic approach to serving customers, often working at the household level rather than with individuals. A single household might involve multiple policies, billing responsibilities, and members across different life stages. Without a unified household view in Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC), associates struggled to efficiently understand customer needs, resolve service issues, and identify cross-sell opportunities.

Our goal was to design a 360° household view within FSC that simplified daily workflows, strengthened relationships, and set the foundation for long-term customer service excellence.

Duration 1 Year

Role

UX Designer

Information Architect

Cross Collaborators

UX Researchers, Product Managers, Technology Leads, Business Analysts, UX Designers of other product teams

Tools

Sketch/Invision, Freehand, Axure RP Pro

Problem Statement

Myself, my spouse, my three children, my brother, a house, two cars, a motorcycle, and a boat.

Understanding Household Complexity

What things do I have? Who do I live with? Who am I responsible for? Who is responsible for me?

Households weren’t always a simple nuclear family. Research revealed complex and changing dynamics:

Families living together but managing separate finances
Students away at college but covered under family policies
Roommates sharing an address but not products
Couples paying parents’ insurance bills

These situations made it hard for associates to quickly see who was connected to whom, which products they held, and where responsibilities lay.

On top of that, the workflow for quoting and binding policies or even reviewing a previously started quote required sales associates to jump between multiple systems. This meant navigating across different browsers, leading to a disjointed experience, inefficiency, and a higher risk of errors due to manual data entry.

The challenge was twofold:

Create a flexible household model that reflected real-life complexity.
Streamline fragmented processes into a single, intuitive FSC experience, reducing system-hopping and manual work.

Research & Discovery

I collaborated closely with a senior UX researcher who led interviews with 10 Sales and Service Associates. Together, we translated findings into actionable design insights.

Key user needs included:

Quickly access complete household information at a glance
Update household members or details as situations change
Understand relationships between people, products, billing, and claims
Complete sales and service tasks efficiently without switching systems
Minimize errors caused by duplicate or manual data entry

Define - Participatory Design Workshop

To align business and technology stakeholders, we ran a participatory design workshop. which helped surface both user pain points and innovative ideas.

Assumption Smash

During the workshop, attendees shared what they knew or believed, and then the group sorted through it to distinguish what’s certain vs. what still needs to be confirmed.

Interviews - 10 Sales and Service Associates
Post up - Collected user needs, pain points, and ideas on the household view
Affinity Mapping - make sense of post-up notes and group them to identify patterns
Flip it - Attendees turn their fears for the household view into hopes
Brain Writing - Brainstorming and building ideas through collaboration
Design in 5 (Storyboarding) - Rapid design the ideas generated from brain writing and identify 1 big idea
NUF Test - NUF test quantified each idea by rating each idea on 0-10 scale into 3 categories, New, Userful, and Feasible. This resulted in identifying the ideas that are short term and long term

By the end, we identified short-term MVP features that Salesforce teams could build quickly, while also outlining a vision for the ideal household experience.

Compilation of all workshop attendees' knowledge and decoded which were facts and which needed validation

Information Architecture

To ensure the Household view was intuitive and aligned with agent priorities, I led few IA activities that combined quantitative input, early ideation, and detailed audits
Together, these IA efforts informed the final structure of the Household dashboard making sure the right information appeared in the right place, in the right order, and with clear relationships between people, products, and events.

Agents prioritized Household information

“What matters most?” - Content Prioritization Survey Results

A survey with agents helped identify the order in which Household information was most valuable.

Results showed “People” and “Household Address” were top priorities, followed by “Products,” “Direct Mail History,” and “Chatter.” These insights shaped the navigation structure and information hierarchy.

“What’s really available?” - Information Audit & Field Mapping

This mapping exercise exposed redundancies, inconsistencies, and missing fields critical to supporting the Household view.

By aligning data objects and terminology across systems, we built the foundation for a consistent end-user experience.

A detailed audit compared existing data fields across Salesforce FSC, internal legacy systems, and customer-facing channels.

"How might it fit together?" - Early Concept Sketching

I captured user needs, data objects, and workflow pain points through quick paper sketches.

These early explorations helped visualize how different pieces of household data such as policies, billing, or claims might relate to each other and highlighted gaps in the current model.

Early sketches visualized

Ideation & Constraints

While user researchers and I were busy analyzing Household information to create ideal experience, product teams were building minimum marketable release(MMR) screens along with Salesforce architects on CRM using Salesforce FSC's out-of-the-box(OOTB) package. This required me to strike a balance between MMR delivery and long term vision.

UX Designer Teams responsibility

Provide UX guidance for MMR delivery
Continue designing toward the long-term vision (a scalable, intuitive household view that could evolve with customer needs)

Product Teams Involved:

Household Accounts
Policy Details
Billing
Claims

Design

I created wireframes that clarified how household data and workflows should be organized and surfaced. The prototype included:

Household Members Listing: Summary of all members, policies, and claims in one place
Product Listing & Detail Views: Household product listing and drill-down into an individual’s products, billing, and outstanding tasks
Household Actions: Integrated processes such as adding a vehicle, paying household bills, or updating member details without switching systems

This design gave associates clarity on what had happened, what was happening now, and what actions were upcoming across the household, all within Salesforce FSC.

Household Members

Household Insurance Products

Insurance Product Details

Billing at a Glance

Billing Summary

Billing details and using existing payment flow in an iFrame inside sales cloud

Prototype & Test

I built test scenarios, validated them with the product managers of each team and created prototype using Axure RP Pro that clarified how household data and workflows should be organized and surfaced.

We tested clickable Axure prototype across three scenarios:

Adding a vehicle
Paying a household bill
Managing member transactions

Associates found the direction promising, confirming that the household view reduced context switching and simplified tasks. Feedback also highlighted areas to further streamline navigation and clarify household roles, which informed MVP adjustments.

Outcome

The design effort delivered a Salesforce FSC Household MMR vision that gave associates a functional 360° view of households while consolidating processes into a single system.

Impact

Reduced the need to switch between multiple systems and browsers
Minimized manual entry errors and process inefficiencies
Improved speed and accuracy for quoting, binding, and servicing tasks
Enabled associates to confidently manage complex household structures
Established a scalable foundation for future integration with products, billing, and claims

Final Thoughts

For State Farm, this was a step toward delivering remarkable customer service through Salesforce FSC, while giving associates the tools to work faster, smarter, and with fewer errors.

That said, full integration came with challenges. Salesforce CRM works best when data resides within the Salesforce cloud, but many insurance products were still spread across legacy systems and platforms. Achieving the vision also required close collaboration across product teams to ensure their systems could communicate effectively with Salesforce.

From the associates’ perspective, demonstrating the ideal flow was key. It gave product teams a clear picture of what was needed to make the experience real and I succeeded in doing that

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