Technology has made its way into every aspect of our lives and the higher education sector isn’t any different. Today higher education institutes irrespective of their sizes and affiliations are striving to provide superior student experience by empowering them to become forerunners of the future. While higher education institutes are utilizing innovative technology solutions to fulfill the long-lasting commitment made to every single student, yet most of these solutions leveraged by the institutes manage to partially fulfill the commitments made.  This is because the solutions utilized by these establishments are greatly siloed and thus fail to create a single perspective of the entire student journey right from admissions to student accomplishment and progression. Apart from this, increased student expectation for a more personalized and connected experience has put immense pressure on higher education institutes to provide students with a positive experience. This is where the Salesforce education cloud comes to picture.  As a cloud-based solution, the Salesforce education cloud empowers institutions to deal with most pressing challenges across their campus while drive student success across the entire life cycle i.e. from prospect to alumni. With a wide array of features, the education cloud by Salesforce has become the number one CRM for providers of higher education. Here’s what makes this platform a go-to choice CRM for higher education institutes:   Hassle-free Admission Process: This cloud solution helps institutions connect with prospective students who are seriously looking for a well-suited university and course. Institutions build brand awareness and campaigns to attract students besides leveraging the data of various applicants by maintaining a database at a single location. This not just provides a holistic view of the prospective students but also acts as a platform to provide personalized services to the students.  Convenient Student Experience: The CRM enables institutions to address specific challenges faced by students’ w.r.t to educational decisions while providing seamless service to enhance standard success. Apart from this, institutions have the option to communicate with the students via their preferred mode of communication. Finally, institutions can provide their students with access to lucrative career opportunities through the regular job posting, handling career fairs while staying connected with the alumni network.  Data Architecture: The education data architecture (EDA), which lays at the very foundation of the Salesforce education cloud enables the usage of standard objects that can be used to manage student relationships, co-curricular and more. The EDA can be customized as per the specific requirement of the institution, which further is made simpler by eliminating the need for coding. In fact, modules, custom fields, and objects, etc. can be created using a drag and drop functionality. Apart from this, EDA also updates itself on a weekly and biweekly basis and can be tailored as per the specific needs of the users through the App Exchange. It is also supported by a diverse community known as the Trailblazer community, where users collaborate and share their ideas.  Advisory Services: One of the significant benefits of using the Salesforce Education cloud is the provision of SAL (Salesforce Advisor Link) solution, which allows students to seek advice on career-related queries. Students can set up appointments with the advisors via mobile application as these appointments integrate easily with the advisors’ calendar. The CRM also integrates office management software that manages appointments and walk-ins. Quick Wrap-up:  As an innovative platform, the Salesforce Education Cloud is equally beneficial to the institutions, students, and alumni alike. Together with a robust and useful education data architecture (EDA) and advisory link, this powerful platform stands tall among all other available education CRM system. If you are keen on implementing this cloud solution, it’s in your best interest to engage the services of a reliable Salesforce implementation partner .

Every year Salesforce makes three new releases at regular intervals i.e. the summer, winter, and spring. This year, Salesforce summer release which was scheduled to be released in the month of May 2020 got delayed due to the on-going COVID-19 pandemic and has now been released in June. In this article, we will take a look at some of the standard new features offered by the new release. To know more about the releases, it’s prudent to partner with a reliable Salesforce consultant. Trigger a Flow for Performing Actions: Every time a record is created or updated, the trigger of a Flow that can perform actions for e.g. sending an email after the changes are made to the database. The record-changed flows can be used to make before-save updates and after-save actions. You can replace processes and also make changes in the processes that were created in the process builder Run Flows that Evade User Permission: This feature allows guest users to produce or edit records that they don’t have access to by fixing your flow to run without sharing. Within such a setting, the flows running ignore the field and object-level security, default settings, rule sharing, teams, manual sharing, and territories. Properly Manage Community Pages: With an improved community page Menu, navigating to and editing your pages becomes easier. To see the folder where a page resides, it’s important to search for that page and select it from the search results. Work Item Status for Determining Agent Capacity: This feature helps in determining agent capacity more accurately basis the status of work accepted rather than earlier methods of using open tabs. The tasks allocated to agents continue to remain assigned and reflected even when they are unavailable until the time the task is reassigned or completed. Debug faster and more Flows: The need for manually reverting changes made to the database when you debug an auto-launched flow is now no longer required. You can save yourself the trouble by using the rollback mode in Flow Builder. The debug option in Flow Builder can be used as it includes the Lookup screen component allowing you to set record variables easily.  Conclusion: These are a few of the many Summer 20 release features. If you too are looking to implement any of the summer ’20 Release features, you must consider partnering with a Salesforce implementation partner with extensive knowledge, in-depth experience, and proven results in achieving customer success.    

Maintaining effective customer relationships is the cornerstone of every business undertaking. In fact, it has become a key determiner of success for organizations. Today, forward-thinking organizations are leveraging robust technology solutions like Salesforce to provide superior service to their customers. As a cloud-based CRM, Salesforce helps organizations to accelerate their sales, grow customer loyalty, and augment their marketing capabilities. Most interestingly, it provides teams across an organization the ability to access the latest customer details for streamlining business processes and creating quality services and solutions. But, for this to happen, organizations require developing a Salesforce integration strategy to ensure that it partners or connects with other important systems, applications, and services. Successful third party integration is critical to turn it into a valuable business tool. The process of integration is beneficial both for users, as well as the Salesforce platform. Besides helping the platform to expand its services, integration services help in improving the operational functionality of the platform, which ultimately allows organizations to increase their customer base. It makes sense to engage with a reliable Salesforce consulting partner to know more about Salesforce integration services. What is the Need for Integration?  Today, several businesses have realized the significance of integrating their Salesforce platform with other systems and are thus trying to develop point-to-point connections with adjacent systems. However, such integrations aren’t sustainable as there are several touchpoints, which, when integrated with Salesforce, can provide value to an organization such as developing partner ecosystems, dealing with legacy systems, and more. All these will help in uncovering new opportunities to add value to your customers etc. Considering the variety of Salesforce integration needs, the integration process might become challenging and can be addressed using common integrating patterns. Common Salesforce Integration Patterns Enlisted below are some of the most commonly incorporated integration patterns that can be used to facilitate seamless third-party integrations: Migration Pattern: Data migration involves moving a data set from one system to the other. The migration pattern involved in integration allows developers to create migration services that are automated and allow the developed functionality to be shared across all the teams in an organization. Developers have the option to set configuration parameters to get access to API calls. This will provide seamless migration of Salesforce data in and out of the platform either basis as and when required via API or on command basis. Developers can also develop reusable services for facilitating periodic migrations while saving considerable time for the users. Data migration pattern can be utilized for other Salesforce integration such as data migration from legacy systems to Salesforce, Consolidating CRM systems, creating data back-up for customers, and more. The migration pattern is particularly useful while handling vast volumes of data. Broadcast Pattern: It is a one-way synchronization process that helps users to move data from the source location to multiple systems in real-time. As compared to the traditional 1:1 relationship, this pattern implies 1: many connections. Unlike the migration pattern, the broadcast pattern is more efficient as it functions on a transactional basis and facilitates faster processing of data, besides keeping it secure and up-to-date across all the platforms it has been shared across. It is recommended to ensure the reliability of this pattern as it lacks human supervision, and the majority of processes are initiated through push-notifications that are pre-scheduled. Aggregation Pattern: In contrast to the broadcast pattern, the aggregation pattern helps in migrating data from multiple sources to a single destination system. This pattern does away with the hassle of running various integrations regularly besides ensuring more reliability and data security. The template created due to aggregation patterns can be used by users to merge multiple data sets for creating reports in different file formats. Some of the most important uses of the aggregation pattern include: Creation of orchestration API that pulls data from multiple sources and processes it into a single response. Creation of a central data repository that could be used for compliance and auditing purposes. Bi-directional Sync Pattern: This pattern brings together multiple data sets across the different systems, causing them to act as a single system while allowing them to acknowledge the presence of other data sets that are being transmitted. This integration pattern comes in handy when different systems are required to accomplish other functions along with their specific tasks in the same data set. The usage of this integration pattern allows users to have a real-time view of the transmitted across the systems. Some of the use cases of this system include: Integrating multiple systems to Salesforce that leads to improved operational efficiency. Streamlined quote to cash while serving as a system of records for data that requires to be synchronized. Co-relation Pattern: While this pattern is quite similar to the bi-directional sync pattern, it differs in the fact that it singles out data sets that intersect with each other and provides bi-directional synchronization of scoped data provided that data occurs in the system naturally. This will lead to the creation of new records if they are found in all other systems apart from the concerned one. This pattern only synchronizes objects as long as they are present in both systems naturally and doesn’t discern the origin of the data object. This integration pattern is useful in cases when two systems wish to share data only if both the systems have records that represent the same contacts or objects. The Bottom Line:  Clearly, there are numerous benefits of Salesforce integration for managing data within enterprises. However, to get started using these patterns, you must get in touch with an experienced Salesforce implementation partner who can help you make the right choice. So, develop long-term and strong customer relationships by gaining a unified view of your customers through Salesforce integration.

Data loss poses a severe threat to businesses of all sizes. When sensitive data is compromised or stolen, the financial health, productivity, and reputation of a company take a hit. As data volume is increasing exponentially, opportunities for thefts and breach of proprietary information are rising significantly. While businesses are adopting strategies to prevent the loss of their confidential data, it isn’t entirely possible to avoid the same. While organizations using robust CRM systems like ‘Salesforce’ might develop a false sense of security as they store their data in the cloud, yet these systems aren’t prone to outages. While Salesforce till now provided data back-up recovery services for retrieving lost data, especially in scenarios such as ‘data import’, which might at times go wrong. However, Salesforce is about to cancel its data recovery services by the end of July 2020.  What makes Salesforce retire from their data recovery services?  Salesforce doesn’t consider their data recovery service worthy enough to be continued due to the time and cost involved in retrieving the data. Apart from this, some data cannot be recovered using Salesforce data recovery services, and an excellent example of it is the metadata. In fact, only data as old as three months can be recovered and is recommended as a last resort that, too while recovering large quantities of data. While the Salesforce recovery process requires you to pay a hefty rate of $10,000, it takes several weeks before you receive the CSV file much before you restore data to your org. What’s more bothersome is that Salesforce doesn’t assure of complete retrieval of data. With such poor services, Salesforce finally decided to call off its data recovery services without any replacement.   Alternatives to data recovery services by Salesforce  Salesforce provides three out-of-the-box options that require manual intervention: Data Loader: Using Dataloader, you will be able to export all your data manually. With a developer by your side, you will be able to automate the export process easily. Data Export Wizard: This function enables you to program a downloadable copy of your data. Once the back-up is ready, you will be notified regarding the downloading of the files via email. This allows you with 48 hours to download all the data before they expire.  Reports: The reporting function, just like Data Loader, can be used to export your data. However, running extensive reports can be taxing and time-consuming.  What is the Best Fit? In such a situation, the best approach is to use third-party applications that are available on AppExchange for data recovery and back-up. However, it would help if you looked out for features like multiple snapshots of data, comparison between production and sandboxes, and data hosting solution coupled with a mechanism for querying data. Since, the Salesforce platform is designed to facilitate integration with third-party tools; it provides for a back-up data solution.  Conclusion:   While it isn’t easy to prevent data loss, the good news is that it is easy to avoid the loss of Salesforce data with a robust disaster recovery strategy. Though Salesforce intends to back out from their data recovery services, it certainly provides for a back-up solution.  Girikon – a reputed name in the Salesforce consulting space offers wide array of IT services that can be leveraged by organizations across different sectors to fulfill their specific business needs.

Today, technology is evolving at a very high pace and Salesforce continues to be at the forefront of such a change. Over the years, this robust and innovative CRM system has been constantly introducing cutting-edge features, which has re-shaped the way businesses across the globe interact with their clients. Recently, Salesforce introduced Lightning Experience (LEX) – its newest user interface that offers a cleaner and visually appealing interface, easy navigation and many more benefits over its ‘Classic’ counterpart.  While it might be tempting to leap to the Lightning platform right away, it’s equally important to understand the benefits and limitations that the shift might bring to your organization. It’s in your interest to ask yourself the following questions before making a shift.  Are You Ready for the Change?  Users need to understand the pros and cons of adopting or making a shift to a new system. While some users might be apprehensive of making a shift as they might get accustomed to the look, feel, flow and form of Salesforce classic, those who are planning to leap should have in place a change management strategy. This will help them deal with the roadblocks that might arise during the transition and will provide them with a structured approach for supporting the shift from Classic to LEX (Lightning Experience). In fact, the sole objective of change management is to make the transition to LEX as smooth, easy and transparent as possible. Businesses can also seek the support and guidance of a Salesforce implementation partner to ensure a smooth transition.  Will LEX fulfill the needs of my Users?   It is important to ensure that the new system can fulfill the needs of every user group. This would require every user to have the necessary tools required to stay put with the new system (LEX) rather than getting back to Salesforce classic. While LEX allows customization of several features such as content density, page layout, new connectivity tools and accessibility for different user groups, there are some features that aren’t supported in LEX. It is therefore important to run ‘Lightning Readiness’ check to analyze what all are LEX ready and what all aren’t. The ‘Lightning readiness check’ should be followed by the discovery phase to understand how users are utilizing the tools available to them. The discovery phase should include a key step i.e. the technology assessment stage, which is usually conducted by a Salesforce expert who can use LEX for a couple of weeks and create an existing state of the business processes that too for multiple user groups. This will further help in developing key functionality plans, technology requirements, and wish lists, which can be used to build UX design for ensuring LEX usability. Ultimately, the design for each user group can be created. This will allow users to visually view the benefits or the change that will affect them.   How exactly will you track LEX ROI?  It is important to educate your stakeholders regarding the benefits and the potential LEX offers in generating significant ROI for organizations. According to a survey conducted in 2017, organizations leveraging LEX have enjoyed a 15 to 20 percent growth in ROI. In fact, there are several ways businesses can utilize LEX to achieve their objectives.   The Bottom Line:   In a nutshell, we can infer that though the Lightning experience offers an array of better features over its classic counterpart, it’s important to weigh in the pros and cons of the new system before making a shift. By gathering apt answers to the aforementioned questions, businesses can expect a significant rise in ROI, ensure seamless adoption and eventually enjoy increased productivity from users. If you are still on the fence, you must get in touch with an experienced Salesforce consultant who can aptly guide you throughout your Salesforce journey.    

Superior customer service lies at the heart of every business undertaking. Today, every customer looks forward to a frictionless and Omnichannel experience from their service providers. So, when customers face any type of friction during routine activity, not just their perception about the organization changes but the brand value of the institution too takes a hit. The banking and the financial sector is under tremendous pressure to fulfill the growing expectations of both customers, as well as its employees. This is because of the legacy systems, outdated processes and changing regulatory requirements that have pressurized banks and financial institutions to balance the provision of personalized customer service with the rising cost involved in meeting their rising expectations.   According to a survey conducted by Finextra and Pega, 90% of premium corporate clients consider switching financial institutions for superior servicing.   To eliminate friction across all touchpoints in the customer journey, banks would require having in place a system that not just does away with the loopholes of the traditional legacy system but is also optimized to provide efficient, personalized and high-end services. Blockchain – A distributed ledger technology has the potential to address the pain points of the banking and finance sector by helping streamline processes and removing inefficiencies. In fact, progressive organizations are adopting this innovative technology solution for overhauling their fractured processes and systems.   How Does Blockchain Benefit the Banking Sector?  Over the past few years, this innovative technology solution has drawn a lot of attention from investors and other banking experts thereby propelling its popularity beyond the Bitcoin fanatics. So, what is so unique about Blockchain that has taken the banking and finance sector by storm? The features of decentralization, immutability, transparency, etc. make it an extremely secure, transparent, and an impossible to alter platform. The consensus mechanism offered by the ‘smart contract’ functionality of this robust platform provides a way for different actors or parties that are a part of the Blockchain, to reach a state of an agreement without the need for an intermediary. By providing access to a ledger that isn’t administered by anyone, Blockchain can provide a wide array of financial services i.e. from record-keeping, third-party transactions, cross-border payments to back-end operations, audit and regulatory compliance in the most secure, transparent and efficient way.  While Blockchain offers endless possibilities for the Banking sector, the challenge for the financial firms lies in identifying the right use case as per their business needs. In other words, the journey of introducing Blockchain into your business model is indeed a challenge? Since the functioning of Blockchain is powered by data (usually stored in multiple places and formats by legacy business networks) it’s prudent to move the company’s database onto a Blockchain. This brings together data from the company’s databases, as well as other parallel systems including its partners’ data.  With this, all the parties will have instant access to a single source of truth (data and other important information) about a particular business process.   How Does Blockchain-powered Salesforce CRM Transform the Financial Sector?  While a robust CRM system like Salesforce offers a centralized location for storing data that comes from multiple sources, combining it with an innovative technology solution like Blockchain can help financial institutions significantly improve their workflows and build reliable partner networks that extend the CRM. Besides extending its’ capabilities of transparency, trust and traceability in every single customer interaction, a Blockchain-powered solution can help break down data silos and business boundaries.    The recently launched Blockchain initiative by Salesforce is the first and one of its kind Blockchain integrated into CRM. Powered by Salesforce Lightning and built using Hyperledger fabric, this low-code platform extends the capabilities of the Salesforce CRM by helping businesses build trusted partner networks that share substantiated and distributed data. Allowing developers to build DAAPS or Blockchain applications with simple clicks and no code, Salesforce powered Blockchain platform can help financial institutions understand their pain points while ascertaining opportunities to advance their business models. In a nutshell, it provides the trust and transparency that the financial sector requires to share with their customers, as well as themselves.   The Road Ahead:  Though banks and financial institutions are under strict regulatory pressure, more and more financial institutions are leveraging the tremendous potential of Blockchain technology to streamline it for transparent, reliable and accessible financial transactions. When integrated with a robust CRM platform like Salesforce, businesses can create new processes and models that can help them accelerate business speed and agility. As a forward looking financial organization, you can draw benefits from a Blockchain powered Salesforce platform by partnering with a reliable Salesforce consulting company.  

In today’s competitive business landscape, banks and other financial service companies have to deal with rapidly evolving customer requirements. Today, with new entrants and consumer technologies simplifying the way people save and invest their money, the demand for the digitalized financial transaction along with high-touch and personalized experiences have increased manifold. To remain competitive, bankers and wealth managers require delivering smart and tailored experiences, which is significant for building best-in-class customer relationships. While these customer-facing organizations have always understood the importance of providing superior customer service, they struggle to manually sew up and make sense of customer data from disparate sources. This calls the need to have in place a robust and intelligent system that can help organizations meet the growing expectations of customers for speed and personalization. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud – a financial software used for wealth management could be leveraged by organizations for enjoying a customized CRM experience. Now, with the addition of Einstein Analytics to the financial service cloud, bankers and wealth managers have access to AI-powered insights that have helped them strengthen client relationships and grow their business.  Let’s take a quick at the amazing features that Einstein Analytics powered financial services cloud offers: Actionable Insights Enabled by AI: With this, financial services professionals can get predictive guidance which is built-into routine client engagement. For instance, financial consultants can now receive updates about clients who are likely to grow their assets. This helps them to focus their attention on retaining such clients that too in a smart way. In-built Industry Dashboards: These are built-in to help with data collection regarding the financial activities of clients. The pre-built templates help wealth advisors and retail bankers to gather quick insights using analytics rather than depending on a data scientist to share daily insights around common KPI’s. Now, retail bankers and wealth consultants can draw insights by directly accessing the dashboards, which in turn helps them in identifying opportunities, as well as threats.  Customizable Platform: To get a complete view of the financial goals and needs of their customers, users have the option to build custom apps and connect them to data from external sources.   Built-in Compliance: With an Einstein analytics powered financial services platform in place, users can expect data to be hosted in a secure, trusted and compliant cloud-based platform. This comprises of privacy, security, and other tools that are configured to fulfill compliance requirements.  How Does Einstein Powered Financial Cloud Services Help Fintech Companies?  Get Rid of Loopholes of Legacy Systems: Financial services organizations often face challenges fulfilling the expectations of their customers using their legacy systems that are outdated and inefficient. With all the useful features and customizations, the Salesforce financial cloud lends organizations the power to connect all the internal systems and push all the vital data to a single place i.e. the dashboard.   Better Engagement with Customers: To fulfill the growing requirement of their clients, financial service organizations require having a clear and comprehensive picture of their accounts, financial goals, etc. This becomes possible with Einstein powered Salesforce Financial service cloud, which besides fetching crucial client data from different systems and gathering in a single place i.e. the dashboard offers real-time recommendations. With a clear view of their customers, financial services organizations are better positioned to fulfill the expectations of their customers. Better Compliance: The financial service industry deals with the constant pressure of being compliant. Packed with compliance features, the Salesforce financial services cloud paves way for hassle-free client communication, transparent collaboration, and simple to build internal processes. All this helps in saving a lot of precious time. Quick Wrap Up: The introduction of new capabilities i.e. Einstein Analytics into its financial services cloud has taken its performance a notch higher. With such updated features, wealth managers and bankers can leverage predictive analytics to remain more strategic about how they manage their book of business, as well as client relationships. So if you are a financial service organization looking to create a long-lasting professional relationship with your clients, it’s important that you partner with a Salesforce consulting company to avail robust CRM functions. Girikon – a Salesforce consulting partner offers reliable Salesforce consulting, Salesforce support and Salesforce implementation services to businesses across the globe. As a reputed Salesforce consulting company, Girikon offers robust solutions that can transform the way organizations conduct their business.