Orchestrating 200 insurance assessors with Salesforce Field Service

Cincotti & Company SpA is the operational backbone of Italian insurance claims. Around 200 external periti assicurativi cover the peninsula, from flood damage in Venice to factory fires in Milan. Some have been doing this for thirty years. None of them are employees. They are independent professionals who pick their own routes and defend their own reputations, and they came to Cincotti because Cincotti brought them work without treating them like couriers.

The office side of that operation had barely changed since the nineties. Claims arrived by fax, email and phone. Dispatch was one manager who knew, more or less, which perito was in which province that week, and rang around until someone said yes. Reports came back as PDF attachments buried in Outlook. Insurance companies asked for status updates and got "I will check and call you back". The periti finished a day of visits and then, at home in the evening, spent another two hours reconstructing the report from photos, handwritten notes and memory.

Nobody in the building thought this was fine. Everybody had grown up with it.

The trigger was the insurers. Generali, UnipolSai and the rest were pushing all their loss adjusters onto API-based status updates, with SLA penalties written into the new contracts. Cincotti had no way to track an SLA it could not see. IVASS on the compliance side had started asking for audit trails that did not exist. The head of operations had already tried to fix scheduling twice with spreadsheets, and both attempts had died the same way.

Underneath that, five insurers meant five different integration formats: modern REST with OAuth for one, SOAP-XML for another, a proprietary schema for the third, and one insurer still emailing CSV files over SFTP. Nothing shared a definition of "claim type", nothing shared a status vocabulary. The pattern was clear: without a single operational spine, Cincotti was going to start losing contracts inside a year.

The hard part was never technical. It was convincing a 58-year-old perito in Calabria that an app on his phone would make his life better, not worse. We got that wrong at first. Our early demos led with dispatch and efficiency, and the room went cold every time.

We rebuilt the pitch around one word: protection. The photos with GPS and timestamp are not so the office knows where you are. They are so that when a claimant disputes your visit six months later, you have proof. When an insurer questions the assessment, the photo trail is on your side, not theirs. That reframe did more work than any feature we shipped.

Adoption also needed a physical scaffolding. We recruited twenty younger periti as Digital Champions, each responsible for around ten colleagues, with weekly check-ins for the first six weeks. Voice-to-text was tuned on Italian insurance terminology so periti who did not want to type on a small screen could dictate the report in the car after a visit. Within two months, several of the loudest initial sceptics were the ones training their peers.

The Insurance Gateway is the piece that runs everything. Inbound adapters translate each insurer's format into a canonical claim model of 47 fields covering every claim type in the book. Outbound adapters translate the other way, with retry logic and dead-letter queuing so no update goes missing. Every message is logged for IVASS audit.

On top of that sits Salesforce Field Service and Service Cloud, configured with 20 service territories aligned to Italian administrative boundaries and five skill families (property, industrial, natural events, business interruption, liability). The scheduling policy uses soft boundaries: prefer a local perito, allow cross-region for urgent claims. The mobile app is offline-first because half the incidents are in places with no signal. It captures photos with GPS and timestamp automatically, drafts the report by voice, and pre-fills the fields the insurer needs while the perito is still on site.

Technologies involved: Salesforce Field Service, Service Cloud, the Insurance Gateway middleware, REST and SOAP adapters, an IVASS audit layer, and a Salesforce mobile app with voice-to-text.

The end-of-day report went from around 90 minutes to zero, because the app pre-fills the report during the visit rather than after it. That single change is what "no more lost evenings" actually means, and it is the change the periti themselves talk about first.

Six months after launch, Cincotti was handling substantially more claims with the same office staff, because the dispatcher was no longer working the phones for two hours a morning. Time from claim received to first visit dropped from just over four days to roughly one day, because assignment stopped waiting for a human to have the right conversation. Same-day report submission became the norm rather than the exception, because the report was written on site.

The knock-on effect nobody expected was the network growing. The perito roster expanded from around 180 to around 220, because word travelled that Cincotti was now easier to work with than the alternatives. The system built to "control" the network ended up recruiting for it.

The next block of work is an agentic mobile app for the periti themselves. Same guided flow, but the assistant sits inside the report and asks the right questions in the right order for each claim type, drafts the narrative from the photos and voice notes, and hands the perito a report to check rather than one to write.