Has it ever been more important to have Salesforce working for you?
Like so many others I am working from home during what is unprecedented times. How long we are going to have to work like this is still very unclear.
I’ve had a number of customers during the last week speak with me about the importance that technology has become on their ability to run their business. Video conferencing technology, cloud file sharing and of course Salesforce.
Just yesterday I spoke with a customer who said to me that he was heading back to his home country Germany to be with his elderly family. He’d thought through how to manage his business remotely and Salesforce was at the centre of this. This business was a construction business where they had many jobs on the go at once. With dispersed workers and disconnected systems, the complexity of running the business remotely became very challenging.
With that, we talked about how we could get some quick win with the Salesforce investment that he had already made. How do we deploy functionality quickly that wouldn’t represent a massive change that could be disrupting further a volatile situation?
After reviewing their current Salesforce system we prioritised four areas that we could quickly ramp up to give him what he needs.
Mobile
With a little bit of configuration, we could rapidly build an easy to use interface that could be rolled out to employees. Providing communication, collaboration as well as on-site checks. In his own words “the activity that was happening in the field was based on trust and manual oversight” Whilst this capability has always been available to the customer. It wasn’t apart of the initial scope of their Salesforce project and in fact, wasn’t even a consideration. By rapidly building a couple of custom objects and extending that functionality on to an easy to use interface. The customer could capture the information he needed to run his business from anywhere.
Connected Systems
The next area that we prioritised was around giving employees access to information that sat in another system. Namely inventory and finance – the customer’s main pain point was tracking very expensive inventory. Also de-risking their job by knowing whether customers were up to date with their payments.
Using a great integration tool called Zapier. We quickly connected his system with prebuilt integrations that have workflow functions, formatting and a great support community. Integration used to be quite a scary word that represented an expensive exercise. With tools like Zapier you consume data and expose it into other systems very quickly giving all employees using Salesforce access to information they otherwise wouldn’t see.
Guided Learning
With the ability to train people in person, not an option now. We turned to one of Salesforce’s newest features In-App Guidance. Salesforce now has guidance in your app to get your users’ attention. You can use prompts to onboard and train users, highlight configuration changes and news, introduce new features. You get to write the content, pick the target audience, and specify where it appears and for how long. Coupled with some custom videos and remote training it will give the customer confidence that his team will know how to use the new technology.
Analytics and Insights
The final area is leveraging Analytics and Insights. From rep productivity to asset management giving this customer insights into all the key performance metrics of the business gave him the confidence to work remotely. When you can’t be with your business Salesforce can provide you insights on the key performance metrics if you capture and measure them.
The above are some very practical examples of things that can be quickly deployed in order to assist the remote worker. In most cases its simply deploying technology you’re already paying for.