Insurance companies face mounting pressure to use AI for a competitive advantage, but choosing between Microsoft Dynamics 365 vs. Salesforce can be challenging. This comprehensive comparison examines how both platforms deliver AI-powered capabilities across claims, underwriting, customer service and sales.

In brief:

• For insurers, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce use multiple AI-powered tools to drive faster claims, smarter underwriting, and better customer service — but they are not the same.
• Microsoft Dynamics 365 integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft tools, which is ideal for midmarket insurers.
• Salesforce offers various clouds that can help insurers, especially its Financial Services Cloud (FSC), which provides industry-specific data models that address the unique needs of brokerages and agents.
• Dynamics 365 is typically more affordable and easier to implement for Microsoft-centric organizations, while Salesforce FSC can be a good fit for those organizations already using Salesforce core functionality.
• Choose your platform based on integration needs, scalability, cost and long-term business goals.

It’s not a surprise that artificial intelligence (AI) is now a deciding factor when considering new platforms and integrations for your insurance firm. Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce both use AI to create opportunities to process claims faster, deliver smarter underwriting strategies, provide more proactive customer service, and target sales efforts.

So, which should you choose? It comes down to knowing your business goals. Both Dynamics 365 and Salesforce are widely used and adopted platforms, but they take different approaches. Below, we examine the key differences, strengths and weaknesses, and total cost of ownership between the two.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 vs. Salesforce For Insurance Companies

Both Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce use AI to deliver predictive insights and enable proactive decision-making for insurers. That’s why we encourage a platform-agnostic approach.

“The technology to me is less important. It’s really about doing it the right way and recognizing nothing is perfect. You can be very successful with either of them,” says Sean Neben, Centric Consulting national insurance practice lead.

Here’s how both platforms use AI:

• Claims Processing and Underwriting: While not dedicated functionalities of Dynamics 365 or Salesforce, the two platforms’ AI capabilities can be configured to detect patterns that may signal fraud, prioritize incoming claims automatically, analyze risk with higher accuracy, and make policy approvals faster and smoother for agents and customers.
• Customer Service: AI chatbots provide real-time support for everyday customer inquiries. Smart routing ensures that complex issues are directed to the correct department quickly.
• Sales and Marketing: AI creates more streamlined lead scoring. For example, it can recommend the best action for a sales team to take and provide insights that can increase retention rates.

However, for insurers, each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses. Now that you know how AI works in each, let’s dive into the strengths and weaknesses.

Microsoft Dynamics 365: AI in a Unified Ecosystem

Microsoft applications are built to interconnect seamlessly across the entire suite of the software giant’s application offerings. Microsoft Modern Workplace applications such as SharePoint, Outlook and Teams can easily integrate with Dynamics 365, Azure AI and the Power Platform to build a free-flowing environment where your insurance data and insights can move between platforms.

Microsoft practitioners refer to this fluid and — pardon the pun — dynamic ecosystem as Dataverse. The Dataverse is the key to Microsoft’s broad appeal and market dominance because it combines comprehensive support of numerous apps with low-code apps, especially Power Platform.

“Microsoft tends to be less expensive and better suited to the middle market insurer because everything in the Microsoft ecosystem generally works together,” Centric architect Carmen Calderon says. “For example, you might work with Dynamics 365 and Power Automate to build robotic process automation. It will all work together across your Microsoft platforms.”

Strengths of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Insurance Companies

Microsoft Dynamics 365 includes three important business applications that help insurance companies make even greater use of AI, build 360-degree customer profiles, and create workflows for various insurance sectors. Together, they make Microsoft products even more powerful, and they simplify vendor management and ensure all components seamlessly integrate.

These applications are:

• Copilot: An embedded virtual assistant that uses AI to provide summaries, draft emails, and discover data insights directly within the user’s workflow
• Customer Insights: Provides a 360-degree view of the customer to increase engagement
• Industry Accelerators: These ready-to-go solution packages help insurers build out specific sectors (property/casualty, life/annuity, health and so on) more efficiently using crucial components and workflows

Who Is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Best For?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is ideal for insurance agencies familiar with Microsoft products that want to integrate all their management processes from start to finish in one centralized location. Microsoft Dynamics 365 also enables users to build their own systems to organize data, create focused datasets, and generate reports.

Salesforce: AI-First With a Deep Industry Focus

The Salesforce platform takes an innovative, direct approach to AI with its embedded Agentforce and Einstein AI, which are designed to make every client-facing and support function more intelligent and more predictive. AI agents can be designed to help internal associates streamline their daily operations or proactively handle customer service interactions.

Strengths of Salesforce for Insurance Companies

Salesforce has its own suite of tools that work together to blend AI, powerful customer relationship management, chatbots, prebuilt modules and more. This suite includes:

• Einstein Lead Scoring and Next Best Action: Prioritize lists and intelligent recommendations to guide outreach
• Einstein Bots: Offer advanced self-service capabilities to handle customer queries efficiently
• Financial Services Cloud (FSC): Operates with prebuilt workflows and data models specifically for the insurance and financial services industries, with flexible and extensive customization options
• AppExchange Marketplace: An extensive ecosystem of third-party apps and integrations
• Customer 360 Data Model: Creates a unified, single view of the customer across all Salesforce clouds and connected systems
• Additional Clouds That Can Benefit Insurers: In addition to FSC, specifically built for insurers, organizations can use Agentforce Marketing, Salesforce Data Cloud and Tableau

Centric’s Columbus Salesforce team lead Betsy Stokes explains Salesforce’s capabilities: “Generally, Salesforce will be more expensive. However, there’s more to consider than just upfront costs when making a technology platform decision.”

For instance, for organizations already using Salesforce Sales or Service Cloud, upgrading to Financial Services Cloud can make a lot of sense.

“Salesforce FSC’s prebuilt and configurable data models, workflows, compliance tools, and analytics are specifically focused on the insurance industry,” Stokes adds. “Salesforce FSC can speed up implementation, training and OCM time.”

Who Is Salesforce Best For?

Salesforce is best suited for insurers already using other Salesforce technologies, needing third-party integrations, or wanting industry-specific data models and workflows out of the box. Salesforce is extremely customizable, but this customization sometimes comes with a steep learning curve.

When it comes to Microsoft Dynamics 365 versus Salesforce, it’s more important to focus on the right platform for your budget, goals and business.

A Checklist for Making the Right Choice for Your Insurance Firm

Choosing the right ecosystem of tools sets up your innovation journey over the years, so it’s a huge step to decide on the right platform. When making a new platform decision, consider integrations, scalability, pricing, security and compliance:

• Integration: Analyze your current tech stack and weigh the pros and cons. For example, integrating with other Microsoft products will create cohesiveness, while Salesforce offers vast application programming interface (API) support and the third-party AppExchange marketplace for building integrations with other systems.
• Scalability and Flexibility: Both platforms are scalable and flexible. However, for a large corporation seeking a unified system that combines various tools, Dynamics 365 excels in handling complex operations and scaling effectively. Alternatively, while Salesforce is also flexible, its core focus has been on customer and client management and its Customer 360 data model.
• Cost: Look beyond the initial fees and consider the costs associated with setup, training, integration and implementation partners.
• Security and Compliance: Both platforms feature standard security measures and robust data-handling practices to meet various regulatory requirements. Microsoft offers stringent security and offers compliance certifications, while Salesforce emphasizes data privacy and transparent security practices.

Now that we’ve shared a quick checklist for making the right choice between Dynamics 365 and Salesforce, it’s time to align your platform choice with your business goals.

How to Align Your Platform Choice With Business Goals

Ultimately, the decision between Microsoft and Salesforce isn’t which platform is “better” in general but which one best fits your needs.

• Are you already invested in Microsoft? If so, Microsoft Dynamics 365 might be the more natural fit.
• Do you need a platform that prioritizes customer relationship management (CRM)? Do you want full customization and extensive integrations with third-party tools? If so, Salesforce might work better.

Evaluate your current systems and capabilities, and start with small pilot programs to assess fit. Consider the future of your insurance firm as well: Are you planning for a significant stage of growth? Are you expanding into new regions or sectors? Are you firmly betting on autonomous AI agents?

You want a platform that grows seamlessly with your business without breaking the bank along the way. It’s important to choose a platform that works now and in the future.

Choose an Experienced Partner

Technical implementations can be difficult to manage. Work with a partner who has navigated each platform integration within your industry multiple times.

Centric supports insurance firms with both Dynamics 365 and Salesforce migrations and implementations. Our expert team can perform assessments, support your buying process, and even train and enable your internal teams.

Plus, we’re learning across industries when it comes to what works and what doesn’t. We bring years of strategic and tactical solution experience across Microsoft and Salesforce to bring business and technology together to future-proof your business with AI.

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