What is generative CRM? Generative CRM combines the power of generative AI with CRM data to boost productivity and efficiency of teams. It has the power to execute limitless functions such as responding to queries, generating conversational text, suggesting next steps, drafting emails and more. The beauty of Generative AI is that the more people use it, the smarter and faster it will become. In the coming months and years, Generative CRM will effortlessly perform tedious everyday tasks, freeing up time of your teams so they can focus on more important tasks. With the ability to comb the internet for relevant data in a matter of seconds, it can help draft more meaningful responses thereby significantly boosting the efficiency of teams. How generative CRM can boost productivity, efficiency, and customer relationships People spend hours executing ordinary day to day tasks. They sift through data and information, wrack their brains to come up with new social media ad campaigns, iterate multiple times to create a perfect email pitch for a prospective customer, and engage in a fire fight to resolve issues of dissatisfied customers. What if they had a tool to streamline all of that, irrespective of the industry or department they work in?   Generative AI is on the brink of redefining CRM across companies in the coming years. Let us dive deeper to understand how this new age tech, when combined with your CRM, can help teams become more productive and deliver stunning customer experiences. The employee view If you are a new sales rep, and you have just been assigned a new account, it would take you many hours, perhaps even days to get an overview of the company, catch up on the latest company activities, discover the right contacts, and prepare an introductory email. With Generative AI, all this can be done in a matter of seconds by your CRM. So you can refine that email and connect with the right person sooner than ever. This is the potential of generative CRM. When the power of generative AI combines with your CRM data, it unlocks a never seen before power of your CRM. The view across teams Generative AI is poised to reshape how teams work across departments in the years to come. It will empower enterprises to quickly and effortlessly generate AI-driven content across multiple departments -sales, customer service, marketing, commerce, and IT. Service teams would have the power to create automated, smarter, more personalized chatbots that can engage with customers just the way a human rep would, but much faster.  They would have the ability to anticipate, comprehend and respond to customer requests faster than ever. For marketers, generative CRM can help in quickly creating accurate, compelling product descriptions that are optimized for web search. Here are some key benefits that generative CRM would deliver going forward. Reduce time to value AI has already been around for a while with Salesforce Einstein delivering over 200 billion predictions every day. Today, AI products like ChatGPT and Dall-E are empowering millions of people across industries to work more effectively. Generative AI is a deep tech that will filter out the noise that we encounter on the web. If you can ask the right questions contextually, generative CRM will be smart enough to know what to look for and how to present it to you. Free up humans for high-value work If you are a sales rep, imagine trying to acquire a potentially big new customer. You will have to spend hours sifting through data to strengthen your sales pitch, and by the time you do so, it may end up being archaic. You then comb your network and the prospect website and social media handles to find that perfect person to connect with, only to find that they moved on to another company recently. These repetitive, cyclical and routine tasks to acquire a new customer often waste precious time.  Generative AI can speed up these routine activities to make you far more productive. It will allow you to spend more time to do the real thing, which is building relationships with prospects and customers. AI that you can trust Security and privacy will be a critical aspect of generative CRM. Governed by guidelines that specifically address security and privacy concerns, generative AI will build on long standing principles for trusted AI. While publicly available generative AI tools depend only on publicly available data and information, generative CRM will be grounded on private and secure customer data, while also drawing on publicly available data and information such as social media and corporate websites. The ability to fuse public and private data is what makes generative AI driven CRM a trusted, and impactful experience for customers. Generative AI at Salesforce AI is already an integral part of the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, and its potential is limitless. Salesforce Einstein AI technology delivers over 200 billion predictions on a daily basis across multiple Salesforce’s business apps. This includes: Sales, which utilises AI powered insights, to establish the best next steps so reps can close deals faster. Service, which utilises AI to have bot-based natural conversations and provide the best fit answers, freeing up reps to work on more complex and important tasks. Marketing, which uses AI to better understand customer behaviour and personalize marketing campaigns to boost their efficacy.   Commerce, which utilises AI to deliver personalized buying experiences and smarter ecommerce. With generative AI, businesses can connect with their audiences in completely new, more engaging ways across every interaction. Guidelines for Trusted Generative AI Like they do with all their technology innovations, Salesforce is rooting ethical guidelines across all their products to assist businesses innovate rapidly and responsibly.  With the tremendous potential and challenges emerging in generative AI, Salesforce is building further on their Trusted AI Principles with a new set of guidelines to push for responsible development and deployment of generative AI. Here are 5 such guidelines. Accuracy: Use models to deliver verifiable results allowing customers to train models on their own data. Communicate when authenticity of the AI’s response cannot be established with certainty and enable users to ratify these responses. This can be achieved by citing sources, explaining why the AI gave those responses, underscoring areas to double-check such as stats, dates, and creating checks and balances that prevent certain tasks from being fully automated (like code review before deployment) Safety: Effort should be made to mitigate any bias or harmful output by conducting robustness assessments. The privacy of any personal private information should also be protected by creating guardrails. Honesty: When aggregating data to train and evaluate AI models, the source of data should be respected by ensuring their consent for use. Transparency in communication should be maintained by clearly stating that autonomously generated AI content has been delivered. Empowerment: While in some cases, a fully automated AI driven process may be the best option especially for non-critical, publicly available data, there are cases where AI should augment a human role, especially where human judgment is necessary. One needs to establish the right balance to turbo charge human capabilities and make generative AI solutions accessible to all. Sustainability: In our endeavour to establish more and more accuracy in our models, we should develop most appropriate-sized models wherever possible to reduce our carbon footprint. Summary If you are a Salesforce Consultant, this is an exciting time for you. Generative AI has the power to take CRM to the next level. By following the above guidelines, you can deliver never before seen value to your customers with the power of AI. Girikon is a Certified Salesforce Development Partner delivering value to customers across the globe. To know more about how Generative CRM can work for you, contact us today.

In March 2023, Salesforce launched Einstein GPT, the World’s First Generative AI for CRM. Einstein GPT uses the power of generative AI to deliver personalized content across every Salesforce product, thereby making teams more productive and delivering a better customer experience. Einstein GPT is open and scalable, and supports public and private AI models built specifically for CRM. Einstein GPT is trained on trusted, real-time data and seamlessly integrates the with the OpenAI framework to deliver out-of-the-box generative AI capabilities to Salesforce users. The new ChatGPT app for Slack integrates seamlessly with OpenAI’s deep AI technology to power instant conversations, and provide research and writing assistance. Whether it be sales, service, marketing or commerce, Einstein GPT for Salesforce will transform every customer experience at never seen before scale. In a sense, it opens a new door to the AI future for all Salesforce customers. Salesforce has fused its proprietary AI models with generative AI technology in Einstein GPT that unifies and synchronises all of a company’s customer data. Using Einstein GPT, customers can now easily connect that data to OpenAI’s advanced AI models, or use their own model and natural-language prompts directly within their Salesforce CRM to seamlessly generate content that self-adapts continuously to changing customer needs in real time. For instance, Einstein GPT can create personalized email drafts for sales reps, generate automated and tailored responses for service reps to respond to customer queries more quickly, generate appropriate content for marketers to augment campaign efficacy, and developers can get access to auto-generated code allowing them to build and deploy apps much faster. Going Deeper: Einstein GPT in CRM Salesforce Einstein is already delivering over than 200 billion AI-driven predictions everyday.  Einstein GPT is the next generation of Einstein, and by combining proprietary Salesforce AI models with OpenAI, customers can use natural-language prompts on CRM data to trigger powerful, time-saving automations, and create personalized, AI-generated content. Sales: Auto-generate routine tasks like drafting emails, preparing meeting schedules, and prepping for follow ups. Service: Auto generate articles from case note archives. Auto-generate conversational and personalised chat to smartly engage with customers. Fast track service interactions and enhance the customer experience. Marketing: Dynamically generate personalized and engaging content faster than ever to interact with potential and existing customers across channels. Slack : Get AI-driven customer insights in Slack for eg. smart summaries of sales opportunities and self updating knowledge articles. Developers: Developers can auto generate code by utilising Salesforce’s proprietary language model to ask contextual questions for languages like Apex through an AI chat assistant. Einstein GPT is in-built in Salesforce. Which means you can use your private data to tailor everything it generates suited to your unique business. And since Einstein GPT is available across the entire Salesforce platform, it can improve every single customer experience. Salesforce understands that generative AI encompasses more than just ChatGPT. Einstein GPT  has been designed to allow seamless integrations with other language models. This allows developers to bring their preferred model using normalized APIs and an open network of AI partners. Einstein GPT is designed to empower businesses with path breaking AI capabilities, using your own data and models to drive customer experiences. Embedding AI into the Salesforce platform has delivered huge operational efficiencies for partners and customers.  Generative AI technology has the potential to transform the way companies engage with their customers, deliver powerful experiences, and drive customer retention. Generative AI technology will drive the next generation of customer experience. Einstein GPT for Salesforce Developers As technology innovation progresses, so does the way developers write and analyze code. Generative Artificial Intelligence is perhaps the most exciting development in recent years for code generation and analysis.  This technology has the power to make development faster, more efficient and accurate. Let’s look at how Salesforce AI Research is powering Einstein GPT for developers across the globe and how it will change the way apps are deployed on Salesforce. Generative AI for code (Apex) Code generation involves using machine learning algorithms to analyse large amounts of existing code, and then generate new code based on that analysis. This is particularly useful for tedious tasks, such as drafting emails. One obvious and huge benefit of code generation is that it saves a lot of time for developers. Instead of writing every line of code from ground up, developers can use AI-powered tools to generate most of the required code automatically. Not only does this accelerate the entire development process, it also reduces the chances of human error. Code generation has many benefits, including: Code standardization: Automating generation of repetitive code blocks that guarantees consistency and standardization of code. Accelerated prototyping: Generative AI based code generation accelerates the prototyping process by quickly creating run of the mill code. Codebase becomes more scalable because of standardization. Simplified code: Generative AI automates the creation of repetitive code blocks thereby simplifying it. Code becomes easier to maintain and scale. Salesforce Consultants and Developers can now derive the benefits of Einstein GPT within the IDE experience. With inbuilt natural language processing capability, developers can have auto generated code created for them within the Code Builder as per their specific needs. The machine learning algos that drive the generative AI experience in Einstein GPT are based on Salesforce’s proprietary models and enhanced with best-in-class coding guidelines. Static and dynamic Apex analysis Code analysis is another field where AI is making significant progress. As software development become more and more complex, it becomes increasingly challenging for developers to precisely analyse and understand the code. Salesforce is piloting a new capability this year for Apex analysis. With this feature, developers can quickly and precisely analyse large amounts of Apex code, identify potential defects, runtime and other inefficiencies. This will save Salesforce Partners and developers a substantial amount of time and effort. They would no longer have to manually sift through each line of code to find potential problems. One of the key benefits of AI is that it can identify potential problems easily that developers may miss at runtime. AI-driven code analysis and code generation work synchronously. Using AI powered static and dynamic analysis, patterns in your code base will be fed back into the code generation process in run time, and vice versa. Conclusion AI-driven code generation and analysis is changing the entire development paradigm. And this is just the beginning. Going forward, Salesforce has plans to assist with automated test generation, intelligent code clarification, and more. If you are a Salesforce Consultant, this is an exciting time for you. Generative AI has the power to take CRM to the next level. With Einstein GPT you can get multi-dimensional insights of your CRM data and deliver never before seen value to your customers with the power of AI. Girikon is a Certified Salesforce Development Partner delivering value to customers across the globe. To know more about how Einstein GPT can work for you, contact us today.

Salesforce Lightning, put simply, is next generation CRM.  With Salesforce Lightning, developers can build stunning apps with unprecedented ROI. Lightning is super-fast, extremely powerful, very intuitive and has an abundance of features. It is a lightweight, component-based framework purpose built for accelerated app development. With Lightning, admins and developers can build and deploy apps faster than ever before, and makes business users more productive in every moment. Let’s look at some of the features of Salesforce Lightning that make it so powerful: Kanban View The Kanban view feature is available exclusively in the Salesforce Lightning experience. As was expected, it has become a natural go-to for most Salesforce users. Regular everyday users of Salesforce regard Kanban as their online workspace, and not just another view within Salesforce where data is presented based on selection of filters. For instance, when sales reps open the opportunity list view in Salesforce, they can view active sales opportunities organised by their respective stages in the timeline on a Kanban board. This view displays the opportunities within the selected filter. With this view, sales reps can get a clear view of the stage they are at in the sales process for each and every opportunity. Email Integration for Lightning Lightning does away with the need for shifting back and forth between your email app and Salesforce. Email can now be seamlessly and easily integrated with Salesforce in a single console, thanks to Lightning. Users can easily integrate Outlook, Gmail or other email services and bring together all connected Salesforce data such as call logs and tasks into the email UI. Lightning significantly improves productivity by allowing users to work directly from their email, with all the associated data they need from Salesforce. Salesforce Experience Cloud Communities Salesforce communities has been renamed Salesforce Experience Cloud. It includes tools used by businesses to connect with their customers and partners through shared portals on the Salesforce platform. With Salesforce Lightning, developers can easily create and manage branded community portals. This feature of Salesforce Lightning comes with an inbuilt powerful drag-and-drop interface. With this feature, users can easily add new functionality and content to the platform. With Salesforce Experience Cloud, it is easier than ever before to create content and feature rich community portals with the help of a library of pre-built templates. Salesforce Lightning Dialer Support reps and communication teams need to manage a high call volume to interact with prospects and customers on a regular basis. To be able to do this, their managers need to have information about the calls. In Salesforce Classic, this information is retrieved in real time. Having said that, managing calls would be far more efficient, if the phone functionality existed within Salesforce. The Lightning Dialer comes in-built in Salesforce Lightning, which reduces clicks and makes the whole process of calling and recording more efficient. This is made possible by integrating the Salesforce UI with calling systems. This allows reps to streamline calls and it automatically records the key performance indicators. Salesforce Lightning Paths When reps are working on complex processes in Salesforce, they often need guidance. Salesforce Lightning Paths is a feature specially built for Salesforce users to offer them that guidance to work with complex tasks or opportunities. With the help of this feature, Salesforce users are able to easily navigate through complex processes with the help of recommended pre-determined steps. An Advanced User Interface The Salesforce Lightning user interface is extremely robust and offers remarkably flexibility when compared to Salesforce Classic. The user interface offers easy interoperable code development across devices. It facilitates user productivity and drives work efficiency with much lesser code. Intelligent home pages built from template libraries allow users to track performance to goal, and get real time updates on key accounts. Reports & Dashboards The Salesforce Lightning Experience comes with a complete overhaul of reports and dashboards. They are now much more interactive, easier to navigate through and customise. Sales reps can get more insightful information from interactive charts without having to dive deep into reports. With the Lightning dashboard editor, dashboards can be fully customised with prebuilt components. Reports quality can be augmented and made more insightful without the need of the report builder. With the new Lightning UI, it’s much easier to find reports & dashboards via fully customisable home pages. Activity Timeline In Salesforce Classic, users have the option to view Open Activities which allows them to create tasks & record event. And with Activity History, users can log calls or send emails. In Lightning however, Salesforce has added a functionality that allows users to create the tasks and along with it, it gives you an activity timeline which shows the activities you have already created. With the activity timeline functionality users can view open tasks, scheduled meetings, and more in the activity timeline. Salesforce Einstein Salesforce users are familiar with Salesforce Einstein. This is one of the standout features of Lightning. Salesforce Einstein, an AI based digital data scientist, empowers businesses with the tools and resources to become more predictive about future trends and customer behaviour. Einstein significantly boosts the productivity of sales, service, marketing teams. Live Feeds This is another unique feature in the Salesforce Lightning Experience. When in a group in the Lightning Experience, the Chatter feed is on. Live feeds delivers posts and comments from other users in the group as and when they are posted, keeping you updated in real time about discussions within the group. Lightning App Builder The Lightning App Builder is a drag and drop tool using which you can easily create custom pages within the Lightning experience, giving you all that you need all in one place. With Lightning app builder, you can configure and customize lightning components in create business-specific apps. Lightning Snap-Ins Lightning snap-ins is a key component for Service Cloud users. Snap-ins allows businesses to quickly manage client support directly within their Lightning pages. With Lightning snap-ins service reps can reach out to customers in real time on any device, and deliver personalized service across every touchpoint in the customer journey. Steelbrick Feature Steelbrick is another unique feature built entirely on the Lightning infrastructure. With its  CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) functionality, sales reps can easily create offers and contracts for brands. Also, they can easily get approvals and signatures without ever leaving Salesforce. AppExchange There are a plethora of Lightning-ready third-party apps on the AppExchange. And this number is growing by the day.  All these apps are vetted by Salesforce and are pre-integrated to work seamlessly with the Salesforce platform. With the help of these Lightning-ready apps, you can deliver consistent, personalised experiences to your customers, boost internal productivity and drive RoI. All you need to do is look for ‘Lightning Ready’ apps on AppExchange. The intelligent, intuitive, and future-ready design of Lightning is enabling businesses to improve efficiency and productivity significantly. The stunning UI, intelligent views, integrated reports and dashboards, pick-and-drop functionality, limitless customizability, backed by the power of AI, makes Lightning a compelling choice. As a Salesforce Gold Certified Salesforce Partner, Girikon has helped multiple businesses leverage the Lightning experience to achieve business success. Contact one of our experts today to know more about how we can help you get the most out of Lightning. 

  A summary of Unified Higher Education Marketing Higher Education marketing and communications takes place in a landscape where approximately 75% of campus staff associated with marketing and communications do not report centrally, but typically through a reporting head such as a college dean or department leader. Consequently, this can lead to cascading operational inefficiencies, brand misperception, and an incoherent experience for students, faculty, staff, and supporters. While colleges and universities can adopt several different marketing and communications strategies for various campus functions, one of the critical ones is to unify and centralize specific aspects of marketing and communications. Unfortunately, this approach comes with its inherent challenges and necessitates a high degree of collaboration. Some of those challenges include: Resistance to change: The common perception that the current state is adequate as is, can stall a more unified way of working. Siloed nature of departments: A legacy culture of decentralization makes collaboration and unification more difficult. Shadow technology: Marketing technology tools and solutions implemented without guidance from marketing or IT. Discounting central marketing and communications: When the central department isn’t viewed as a key partner in marketing and communications, departments depend on outside agencies. Moving too quickly: Trying to get too many departments aligned at once can complicate things rather than simplifying. The Benefits of Unified Marketing and Communications There are several benefits associated with a unified approach to higher education marketing and communications that go beyond just a connected experience for students, faculty and staff. These include some key operational efficiencies that save time, augment knowledge and absorption, and distributed costs among departments. As budgets change, marketing teams should be able to show the evident benefits of alignment. Shared Cost: Most colleges and universities have marketing and communications teams working with different technologies. This leads to cost redundancies that aren’t always apparent. Shared Knowledge: When using many different technologies, there are limitations in combining and understanding knowledge to drive innovation. Shared Data: Data is critical to understanding how institutions are engaging with stakeholders in a manner that makes sense for them. Shared Messaging: This constitutes messaging with an appropriate level of personalization. 5 Strategies for Higher Education Marketing and Communications The following five strategies should be embraced to achieve operational efficiencies across campus. 1. Consistent Messaging, Voice, and Tone A central messaging platform is vital. While centralised messaging, voice, and tone is important, it needs to be relevant for various departments across campus, for it to be widely adopted. For messages to resonate amongst the audience, it is essential to understand the overlap of audiences. Media: Media rules of engagement should be established clearly, to ensure consistent messaging across print, social media, web, and email. Brand: Most colleges and universities don’t have the bandwidth to support multiple brands.  It is important to adopt a “branded house” strategy and foster sharing of resources. 2. Segment Constituents Since the pandemic hit us, audience segmentation has been a key topic of discussion for higher education marketers and communicators. However, limited access to all data, especially constituent metadata such as descriptive information, makes audience segmentation and targeted personalization of messaging a challenge. Consequently, engagement is at times carried out using batch wise email blasts. The key points to consider are where the data is, its accessibility, can the preferred marketing and communications platform use it, and can it be segmented prior to launching outbound campaigns. Metadata for Constituents: Full name Address Major Last event attended When they last donated Expected graduation  date Research they engage with Forms submitted across the college/university 3. Support Services It is essential for marketers and communicators to be viewed as a strategic partner and not an someone who are meant to take orders for the rest of campus. Unfortunately, establishing this alignment doesn’t happen organically. It needs complete and mature support services that bring staff together from discrete departments. To begin with, best practises should be documented and made accessible online easily. Also, it must include ongoing training so that departments and staff can fully absorb the brand message, voice, tone. And understand how technology can help them to deliver it to the right audience. Higher Education Institutions that have successfully achieved alignment conduct monthly or quarterly meetings amongst all their campus partners where they share experiences and deliberate on ways to further engagement. Suggested Support Services Include: Brand Assets Library: Includes fonts and typesetting, color palette, graphic elements, email guidelines and templates, social media guidelines, and web standards. Training: Includes onboarding and regular training. Training methodology should balance courses for beginners and advanced ones, to keep all partners engaged. Campus Community: Regular meeting for the central department to share strategy with partners and encourage partners to share their perspectives. Governance Model: Establish the rules of engagement that partners need to follow. In an ideal scenario, the central department for marketing and communications is the owner. Center of Excellence (COE): This is a must when you are managing a central technology platform. It allows campus partners to ask questions and receive guidance and support. Innovation Workshops: Campus partners can learn about new features and functionality about the technology being used and understand how they will be used going forward. Best Practices Sharing: Regular feedback sessions to establish what’s working and what’s not. This opens up opportunities for partners to learn from each other’s mistakes and/or successes. 4. Have a Full Stack MarTech A unified, aligned higher education marketing and communications team is one that drives engagement with the right audience with a robust central MarTech strategy. Higher Educational institutions deploy a huge amount of marketing and communications messaging across multiple digital channels, such as email, SMS, web, ads and social media. While it is important to have a rich set of features and functionality for creating and launching campaigns across channels, the ability to have actionable data and deliver personalization is what is most important. This is where a best-in-class CRM platform for higher education becomes critical to aggregate constituent information, and use that information to segment audiences and deliver a personalized and relevant engagement. 5. Plan Big, Start Small Once you’ve identified your brand messaging platform, and established campus-wide technology, along with complete support systems, the next step is to get campus buy-in to set your plans in motion. Most colleges and universities however, operate on a decentralized model. Unless there’s a clear directive from the top leadership, bringing other departments along would require a consensus. If working with your central team is challenging, other departments may not see the value in aligning with them. Big changes don’t happen overnight, so start with small steps, one at a time. Identify and start with partners that are open to innovation. Do a test pilot, and fine-tune a unified approach. The learnings acquired from early partnerships are key since they form the blueprint that other constituents can follow. Steps To Get Started Identify a large, strategic partner who you think is key to success. Get them on board in the planning phase itself. Onboard one or two smaller departments with whom you have a good rapport. These departments should be aware of the value of alignment and are willing to innovate and learn with you. Keep the rest of the campus apprised of these partnerships. Some may be skeptical, but once they see value in what you have undertaken, they will get on board. Unified higher education marketing and communications can be quite a challenge. It requires a significant amount of effort to ensure alignment across many different departments, but it’s totally worth the effort. Higher Education institutions that follow these marketing and communications strategies can attain higher operational efficiency, a better understanding of the campus-wide marketing technology landscape, and higher engagement from their constituents. Behind every great strategy is a partner that you can trust. You need a certified expert. Learn more about how you can partner with Girikon, a Certified Salesforce Partner, to support your institution’s marketing and communications teams.

At Dreamforce 2022, Salesforce and WhatsApp announced a game changing strategic partnership that would allow Salesforce customers to connect with their customers seamlessly and empower them to deliver new messaging experiences on WhatsApp. With 2 billion users, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app on the planet. And Salesforce is the world’s No 1 CRM platform. And when these two come together, the benefits of both will be amplified. WhatsApp integration with Salesforce boosts customer satisfaction and increases your brand loyalty. The Salesforce-WhatsApp integration is a solution from Salesforce that lays emphasis on delivering an integrated, connected omnichannel experience to its users. WhatsApp business messaging from Salesforce will bring Salesforce’s best-in-class CRM capabilities to deliver convenient, fresh, and personalized experiences to customers worldwide. This seamless integration will transform how brands engage with their customers across marketing, sales, and service interactions. The new integration will empower businesses to customize their experience effortlessly and connect with their customers in a fast, engaging and personal way to promote and sell products and provide support. This would in turn improve brand engagement and loyalty, improve convenience, boost interaction, and augment customer service.   How WhatsApp with Salesforce boosts customer engagement, loyalty and revenue Salesforce’s key Cloud offerings namely Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Service Cloud apps will integrate with WhatsApp to drive promotional and customer service messaging, and sometime soon into the future, integrate conversation based transactional commerce capabilities. This will allow businesses to transform their relationships with their customers across millions of conversations by personalizing the messaging experience for every customer, at scale. This will allow Salesforce customers to engage audiences on WhatsApp, fast track sales, and drive a far more effective and efficient customer service experience. Features of this integration include: Create an end-to-end customer journey: Using Journey Builder and WhatsApp, Salesforce customers can create, exchange, and manage interactions with customers throughout their journey to deliver a seamless customer experience. For instance, customers may receive a reminder message on WhatsApp about an upcoming order delivery in the coming week. As an upsell promo, the message could include a discount coupon of 25% for a related product. The user could then confirm in a single click if they wish to add this new product to their next order. Personalize every interaction with the Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform (CDP): With Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform, Salesforce customers will be able to personalize real time marketing interactions on WhatsApp with first-party customer data. Salesforce based Whatsapp messaging will leverage AI driven insights from across Salesforce and other sources to personalize customer engagement with smart promotions, and recommendations, across every interaction, at scale. Brands can also easily activate audiences directly through the Marketing Cloud CDP, to target high-value segments or new audiences with Click-to-WhatsApp ads on social media to drive customers to a one-to-one messaging experience. Enhance selling and service conversations with automation and AI: With the partnership between Salesforce and WhatsApp, businesses can significantly reduce support wait times and improve overall efficiency with automated personal interactions through messaging on WhatsApp. Salesforce customers using tools like automation and AI-powered chatbots have seen a significant increase in customer satisfaction, agent productivity, customer retention, and case resolution. Enrich customer conversations: Salesforce customers will be able to use customizable templates for messages that include brand media such as product videos and images, or display products and services with interactive textual content that allow consumers to view and buy products through WhatsApp. Customizable buttons allow users to take action with a single tap. Default Privacy and security: Privacy and security is at the heart of WhatsApp. Every WhatsApp message sent between businesses and their customers is protected by the best in class Signal encryption protocol that secures messages before they leave your device How to connect WhatsApp to Salesforce Before your customers can send you messages from WhatsApp, and you can reply from the Salesforce console, you need to have a Salesforce account and a verified Facebook Business Manager account. Along with that, there are some other requirements that you need to fulfill: Have Salesforce Classic or Lightning Experience. Have a Digital Engagement license Have a Service Cloud license Have a Chat user license. Have an approved WhatsApp Business account. To set up your WhatsApp account on Facebook Business Manager, send an email to WhatsAppEnablement@salesforce.com with the subject “WhatsApp Number Setup.” Include the information listed below in the body of your email: Salesforce Org ID. Facebook Business Manager ID. The name associated with your Facebook Business Manager ID. The WhatsApp number The Name and email address associated with the number The company name you want to display on WhatsApp Company description, logo, and website URL (optional) Going to your WhatsApp channel in Lightning Experience Go to Lightning Experience settings. Write “Messaging” in the search bar and select “Messaging Settings.” Go to “Channels,”  and you should automatically see WhatsApp. Automating Customer support with Einstein Bots With this new partnership between Salesforce and WhatsApp, WhatsApp will have access to Einstein Bots. Business teams can program or automate messages on WhatsApp just like on Facebook Messenger or with standard SMS messages.  Einstein Bots is an AI tool from Salesforce designed to create bots to assist customer service teams to manage customer queries and issues. Einstein bots allow you to answer questions on routine cases, while freeing up agents o that they can work on more complex customer issues. In Salesforce, you will need to install your company’s WhatsApp within Einstein Bots. Once you complete that setup, go to the main Bot Builder page and complete the following steps: In the Channel Menu click on “Add” Select WhatsApp in the channel options In the Deployment field select the channel name This functionality will make automating specific answers very straightforward to try to help customers before they even speak to an agent. Customers can make queries over WhatsApp while receiving automated responses in real-time, all leading to significant time saved for the customer support staff. Today customers spend more time than ever on their devices, and they want to interact with brands on the world’s most popular messaging app. Most self-employed professionals are already doing that. And it’s a matter of time before medium-sized and large corporations follow suit. Now brands and enterprises can communicate with their customers over WhatsApp with the following benefits: Implement in real-time. Implement in an organized way. Get access to official support from WhatsApp. Get real time AI driven performance analytics. Get the entire history of customer interactions. Easily map contact center agent traceability. Drive case resolution efficiency and boost productivity. Significantly improve SLAs Automate responses, alerts, and notifications with Einstein Bots. This partnership between Salesforce and WhatsApp is transforming how businesses and brands communicate with their customers to enhance the customer experience through personalization delivering a seamless experience privately and securely. Girikon is a Gold Certified Salesforce Consulting Partner and can help you transform your sales, marketing and customer service activities by integrating the World’s No1 CRM platform with the world’s most powerful messaging platform. Contact us to day to know more.

Salesforce for NonProfits: Products Overview Salesforce offers two solutions for nonprofits: Nonprofit Cloud is a set of tools and technologies that connect nonprofit organizations with their donors and allows them to manage campaigns, monitor volunteers, and all tasks they need to do. Nonprofit Success Pack or NPSP is the foundation of Nonprofit Cloud. NPSP is an app stack that gives nonprofits access to pre-built donor management components in Salesforce and enables them to operate faster and more efficiently in Salesforce. NPSP is founded on a robust, industry standard-data model that allows nonprofits to manage income streams, grants, and programs in a single place. There is also Salesforce.org which is a nonprofit social organization that resells Salesforce licenses to nonprofits at a significantly discounted price. With Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud you can: Significantly boost impact, revenue, and reach. Automate volunteers and staff to launch powerful campaigns at scale. Leverage data intelligence and insights and grow revenue. Expand your community with real-time data. Salesforce Nonprofit Сloud and NPSP allow nonprofits to access various Salesforce apps to seamlessly execute tasks such as obtaining digital signatures, creating web forms, manage projects etc. Other use cases include: Nonprofit Cloud Fundraising. Salesforce comes with tailor made features unique to the fundraising operations. It allows you to launch targeted fundraising campaigns, collaborate with staff and volunteers, and save critical data. Program Management. With NPSP, organizations can manage and monitor their programs easily. With smart tools available within the Salesforce console,  nonprofits can establish which programs are the most successful. Teams can quickly modify the non-performing programs. Engagement. Nonprofits rely on support from all segments of their community such as donors, members and volunteers. They need to communicate their mission to each donor effectively to encourage them to make regular donations. With Nonprofit Cloud, organizations augment awareness, find new donors, and foster long-term relationships. Grant Management. Salesforce is widely used as a grant management solution. Nonprofit Cloud can automate the entire process of giving with pre-built solutions for grants management, donor engagement, and more. However, to get the most out of Salesforce for nonprofits, it may be a wise decision to hire a specialist who could help with the implementation. This is where a Salesforce nonprofit cloud consultant comes in. Why Do You Need a Salesforce Nonprofit Consultant? Salesforce CRM can become a powerful tool for managing all constituents of your operations and fundraising activities if you know how to maximize its potential. Without a planned implementation followed by thorough training of users, Salesforce for Nonprofits could take a heavy toll on your resources, become an impediment to seamless operations, and thereby create a resistance amongst users for proper adoption. Working with a specialist will save you time, money and effort in the long run. Nonprofits have specific needs. That makes it all the more important to know how to use Salesforce correctly to stay on top of your initiatives. A Salesforce nonprofit consultant will help you with that! When you hire a Salesforce Nonprofit Consultant, you’ll get: A dedicated professional who will work diligently to drive adoption. A Salesforce certified partner who will put in the hours to understand the world of nonprofits 360 degree services for Salesforce implementation to drive revenue and engagement A technology implementation and training plan in collaboration with your team at every step; An expert who will train your users to configure the system customised to your needs. Considering the above benefits, it would be a prudent decision to hire a Salesforce consultant. Top 5 Salesforce nonprofit consultant hiring strategies Are you assessing Salesforce to manage your fundraising and outreach initiatives? There is always a temptation to do it yourself thinking once you do it, everything else will fall into place. But without knowing and understanding how to use Salesforce strategically for your nonprofit efforts, you will not be able to drive adoption and significantly limit the utilization of the platform’s capability. Bringing in a Salesforce consultant has several benefits. A Salesforce consultant will guide you on how well you can align Salesforce with your NGO’s overall mission and scale up with your operations. Here are 5 things you should keep in mind when you are looking to hire a nonprofit Salesforce consultant. Create a realistic budget You need to have a clear idea of how much you are willing to spend on a nonprofit Salesforce consultant before you actually set out looking for one. Salesforce consultants are expensive. Many of them have several years of experience in the relevant field and are very good at what they do. While establishing the budget, make sure you have taken into account the following: Salesforce NPSP deployment costs Consultation fees Third party software integration costs Establishing a realistic budget will go a long way in ensuring an effective Salesforce implementation. Establish a clear understanding of How a Salesforce consultant brings value You don’t hire a Salesforce consultant only to implement Salesforce for nonprofit in your NGO. A Salesforce consultant brings value to your organization in many ways outside of your Salesforce project. It is important to understand the potential value in this partnership and what skills, knowledge and experience you are looking for before hiring a consultant. Here are some pointers to establish that understanding. Current technology needs: Is your existing technology framework delivering the desired results? If not, what is the gap and how do you intend to fill that gap with Salesforce? How will this impact the existing systems that you are currently using? Which of those systems don’t bring any value to your efforts and need to be cast aside immediately? Salesforce Goals: What are your goals while implementing Salesforce in your organization? Which aspects if your operations do you wish to manage with Salesforce such as fundraising activities, events, marketing and promotional activities, team collaboration etc? Look for a Salesforce consultant with relevant experience. You must keep relevant experience in mind once you start looking for a Salesforce consultant. Most consultants will have details of their work experience on their website, along with case studies and portfolios. That should get you started to identify the relevant ones. Ensure that you have answers to the following: What are their areas of expertise with respect to technology? What nonprofit projects have they worked on, what was the engagement like and for how long, what were the outcomes? What is their project experience on Salesforce apart from nonprofits? Know More About Their Processes Once you have shortlisted potential Salesforce consultants, meet with them in person and understand who they are how they work. Understanding their solution implementation methodology will help you assess whether or not it aligns with your processes and objectives. Ensure that you have clarity on the following points: How do they intend to capture your nonprofit’s current processes and Salesforce requirements? How will they plan the Salesforce implementation? What would be the dependencies and constraints of the implementation? How soon can they start with the implementation after getting done with the planning? How would they define the success metrics? What is their methodology to prevent delays, if any? What would be their training methodology? Make sure they are willing for a long-term relationship It’s very important for you to establish how long is this partnership going to last? Once you have detailed discussions about the project and your expectations, ask them for a project timeline and assess the potential of a long-term relationship with you as your organization grows. Make sure you get answers to these questions: Will they be providing support if there are any additional projects? Will they provide long term support? What is their preferred mode of communication? – phones, emails, text chat or in person meetings? Girikon is a Gold Certified Salesforce Implementation partner with over a decade of Salesforce experience. Our team of experts can help nonprofit organizations implement the right solution that benefits all constituents. We have extensive experience in Salesforce consulting, customization and deployment. Our rich experience across multiple industries allows us to get a deep understanding of your unique project requirements. Our global delivery capability will ensure you get value for the money you spend. We can also assist you with: Grounds up Salesforce implementation Migration from any existing system to Salesforce Re-implementation or optimization of Salesforce Migration to Salesforce Lightning from Salesforce Classic Contact us today.

Customer Relationship Management Software, widely referred to as CRM software, is playing a vital role today across enterprises of various sizes. By aggregating and managing customer data, Salesforce CRM enables enterprises to manage a wide range of key business functions such as lead generation and conversion, sales and marketing, tracking customer engagement and automating workflows. As enterprises are able to streamline their business processes with CRM software, each of these individually separate functions and activities are now better streamlines and integrated, resulting in higher levels of customer satisfaction. Implementing a Salesforce CRM within your organization can be a bit of a challenge. Although Salesforce CRM is the world’s most advanced and innovative CRM platform, there are always implementation and migrations challenges associated with working with a new system, as your team migrates key information to the new platform and adapts to work with it. This transition however, can be simplified significantly if you have a dedicated Salesforce Consultant to help your teams adapt to this new system. What is a Salesforce consultant? A Salesforce Consultant can help you overcome limitations, unlock the Salesforce CRM platform’s full potential, and augment Salesforce’s out-of-the-box functionality. A Salesforce consultant is an experienced professional with significant expertise implementing the Salesforce CRM platform. And because this is their area of expertise, they would be more than likely to stay up-to-date with the latest product updates and tools, to enable them to deliver agile implementation and drive productivity. Salesforce Consulting goes beyond the basic implementation of the Salesforce CRM platform. Third party integrations, creating custom apps, and leveraging the platform’s full capabilities and driving adoption of your users are also some of their key responsibilities. Almost any business in any industry can take advantage of these customizations, from nonprofits to manufacturing, financial services to healthcare, and more. Why should you hire a Salesforce consultant? Hiring a Salesforce consultant can help you maximise the potential of the CRM platform. You would be able to connect with and understand your customers better, and deliver personalized experiences for your clients and prospects. As an organization, you’ll also be better prepared to provide agile support to your customers. And you will be able to track the entire customer experience and improve further. Before we go into what are the roles of a Salesforce Consultant, let us understand some of the constraints they have to work with. Salesforce CRM implementation is a resource-dependent process. Therefore, the consultant must address the resource needs associated with is before going ahead with implementing a solution. 1. Workforce Constraints The Salesforce consultant needs to be aware of the workforce constraints that exist in the organization. The organization and the consultant must arrive at a common understanding or how much of the organizational workforce can be used to implement the solution. Conversely, the solution has to be designed keeping the workforce size in mind. The consultant needs to understand the work responsibilities of each staff member so that an optimum solution can be developed. Workforce availability constraints must also be considered during the implementation, training, and go-live processes. 2. Time Constraint Every technology solution is designed for under a specified timeline and for a specific purpose that must be fulfilled at the earliest. The CRM solution has to be designed based on the established timeline with all checks and balances in place to address any schedule deviations at key milestones. One of the key challenges for the consultant is to stick to the timelines so that the implementation is relevant and useful. The implementation should not add delays to the existing schedules. In fact, it should optimize the existing schedules to augment efficiency. 3. Skill Constraints The Salesforce Consultant needs to have a good understanding of the gap between the desired skill set and the existing skill set of the workforce. Not only should the CRM solution be usable by the workforce, but it should also trim the gaps in sills for better productivity. Th user experience should be such that it is easy and effective. Roles of a Salesforce Consultant The Salesforce CRM platform is a suite of complex tools and features and tools if properly implemented can maximum profits. It comes with a high degree of flexibility to ensure alignment with almost any business requirement. It is the prerogative of a Salesforce Consultant to be aware of the scope of customization so that the implementation is smooth and effective. Having said that, the organization needs to first identify which of its business processes it wants to customise and/or optimize in Salesforce. Here are some of the key roles and responsibilities of a Salesforce Consultant for an effective CRM implementation. 1. Relationship Management The Salesforce Consultant has a key role to play in the client company equation. The Salesforce consultant brings a certain value to the organization that can potentially be extended to their clients. Salesforce Consulting can help evolve the sales process and affect the clients for the better. Clients are the key touchpoints for an organization since they generate revenues. The relationship between the organization and its clients is a make-or-break deal. It is vital to create and maintain a relationship of mutual trust and business ethics for long term growth. A Salesforce Consultant can utilise specific features of the Salesforce CRM platform to generate more sales opportunities. One of the key responsibilities of the Salesforce consultant is to develop a deep understanding of the client-company relationships and advise the company on how to augment that relationship further. With the powerful Salesforce CRM platform, the Salesforce consultant creates more efficient business process to drive productivity. It allows the client to feel that he is an equal partner in the process of change. In fact, in several cases, the Salesforce consultant is the first point of contact for customers. 2. Organize meetings and keeping the teams updated The Salesforce consulting partner is a key contact point for clients and client companies. Even though organizations prefer automation and intelligent, innovative, feature-rich systems, they want to meet and discuss with someone who has a good understanding of what all the CRM platform can do and how those features can be extended to its users. The Salesforce Consultant should organize meetings with clients and share status updates of how the implementation and adoption is going. While it is easy to provide status updates on multiple projects in a single dashboard, a consultant ensures accurate, consistent and periodic sharing of updates with the users. 3. Building and deploying Salesforce The primary role of a Salesforce consultant is to build and deploy a Salesforce CRM solution that is customized for the company and its clients.  The Salesforce Consultant has to ensure that all business processes that have been discussed and agreed upon by the company have been implemented. 4. Providing training and support Like any other enterprise platform, Salesforce updates its platform thrice a year to make it more available to its users. However, most businesses find it a daunting task to keep up with these upgrades, or they don’t know which upgrades will have deliver the greatest benefits to them. A Salesforce Consultant will help you with that. They will help you in understanding which updates will benefit your organization the most and boost productivity based on your unique needs. This assistance also needs to extend to your staff. Not only do you need a user friendly and efficient system, but you also want your staff to know how to access the information they need to fulfil their work responsibilities. They should feel fully capable to navigate and use the CRM platform. Your consultant will provide the necessary training to boost user adoption and productivity on the platform, empowering them to close deals faster and also acquire more customers. A thorough Salesforce implementation, training and adoption program across your organization is the foundation of a customer-centric business. Finally, you will discover that greater the support you get from your consultant, the lesser the number of queries you have about the platform. The consultant can provide you with the necessary help and support, which means having to submit lesser help tickets. You have your own in-house expert who can all answer your questions related to the CRM platform and provide the necessary training as and when problems arise. Hiring a qualified Salesforce consultant creates a more seamless experience for everyone in your organization. If your business could do with more customers, working with a Certified Salesforce consultant might be the key to tapping into that potential market. Turn to Girikon to implement a solution that can help you drive growth for you. With a large pool of certified professionals, and a global delivery model, Girikon makes it easy for you to focus on what you want to do – deliver customer delight.