In today’s digital era, online shopping has become the norm. In fact, the past few years have seen an exponential rise in the number of consumers opting for online shopping rather than shopping from brick and mortar outlets. This shift in consumer buying behavior can be attributed to the advancement in technology, as well as easy and secure payment methods.
As consumers are cognizing the benefits of digitization, the trend for E-commerce or online shopping has eventually caught pace. So much so that merchants who fail to mark an online business presence run the risk of either being left out or trail behind. While online platforms have proved to be beneficial for both customers, as well as marketers, marketers struggle to deal with challenges such as generating traffic, capturing potential leads, retaining existing customers and more.
What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud?
Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a part of the Salesforce CRM platform that helps marketers to provide a superior experience to their customers across all channels as it offers solutions for marketing, customer service, and more.
The Salesforce Einstein powered platform due to its AI capability has helped marketers sustain market competition by helping them understand the buying behavior, preferences, search pattern, and engaging experience across all channels.
Benefits of Salesforce Commerce Cloud
Predictive intelligence platform with in-built Salesforce Einstein does away the need for spending time and money on searching a compatible Analytics platform for your e-commerce platform. Some of the
key benefits of having Salesforce Einstein integrated include the following:
It suggests the most relevant products to customers by decoding their search and search pattern.
For every user, it has a separate/unique suggestion based on their search patterns.
It helps in identifying upselling and reselling opportunities.
It provides data-driven real-time insights of each customer.
Increase footfall
It helps at every stage in the sales process. It helps in boosting up the traffic by improving the page rank, faster SEO page optimization, build traffic with the help of its inbuilt mechanisms. It eventually helps organizations generate more revenue and save the extra bucks.
Single Channel
It has helped merchants manage their orders, inventory, marketing, sales, etc. all on the same platform.
Earlier merchants used to use separate tools to manage Orders, Inventory, Marketing, Sales, etc. Now, these can be managed on a single platform. This has helped merchants save money and increase revenue significantly.
Mobile Experience
These days most of the customers prefer to do shopping over mobiles and tablets rather than via computers and laptops, which allows them to shop while on the go. Salesforce Commerce Cloud is mobile-friendly, and it allows merchants and customers to buy, sell, and manage through their mobile phones.
Enhance Marketing
With the help of Salesforce Commerce Cloud, merchants are able to do marketing like never before. They are not just able to pitch the right products to customers but they are able to pitch them at the right price and at the right time.
It even enables merchants to customize the search query for their products based on the customer intent search which will eventually make their product more visible. It even helps merchants manage sales campaigns, email marketing, etc. at the same place.
Customer Support
It provides 24/7 support to merchants and customers alike. It keeps on providing patches, new features, and security upgrades that make it more reliable and future-ready.
Conclusion
Considering the different aspects like marketing, inventory, campaigns, revenue, etc. it manages, it won’t be wrong to say that it is one of the most impactful software’s present out there for any business.
It does not just help merchants to identify the requirement of the customers but even help them identify the right audience for their different products. It even helps merchants to set future goals with the help of its predictive analytics. It is a one-stop solution for merchants to increase their reach from a few hundred people to millions of people all across the globe.
About Girikon
Girikon is a reputed provider of a wide array of Salesforce consulting, Salesforce implementation, and Salesforce support services. As a Salesforce consulting partner, Girikon strives to offer high-end services to its global clientele.
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.
All through these years, Salesforce users have been leveraging out-of-the-box operational reports, and dashboards to monitor their data, comprehend performance and share results. However, with customer data growing exponentially with every passing day, exploring data manually has become a huge challenge. To address this challenge, Salesforce has come up with its AI (Artificial intelligence) powered advanced analytics solution i.e. Salesforce Einstein Analytics.
Einstein Analytics is a next-generation business intelligence software designed to provide answers to complex issues at lightning speed. It’s intuitive, empowering, and built for mobile. It leads to decisions, discussions, and transactions that are driven by insight, instead of instinct. Einstein Analytics can help you to provide analytics experiences in sales, service, marketing, and IT business so that the users can take action quickly without getting bogged down by complex dashboards.
Einstein Analytics helps to explore the large data sets quickly and easily by providing AI-powered advanced analytics, right within Salesforce. It helps Manage datasets, query data with SAQL (Salesforce Analytics Query Language), and customize dashboards, all programmatically.
Einstein Analytics allows you to:
Connect to your CRM directly and execute on insights directly in Chatter.
Analyze millions of rows of data automatically & get predictive analytics with Einstein Discovery.
Explore data & automates action with prebuilt apps.
Has similar functionalities on mobile, be it Android or iOS.
Einstein Analytics vs Reports & Dashboards
Reports and Dashboards look and behave like Einstein Analytics, but provide very different functionality. It provides an instant snapshot of the metrics that matter to your business, including team performance, lead volume, and conversion rates.
Einstein Analytics is your Data Scientist. It extends beyond Reports and Dashboards to give you all insights into your pipeline, end-to-end customer insight, and historical analytics to help you plan your next best step.
How Can we use Einstein Analytics in Salesforce?
If you are using any Salesforce product like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, you still need to purchase licenses for Einstein Analytics. There are 2 types of Einstein Analytics license: Einstein Analytics Growth and Einstein Analytics Plus.
Users’ permissions are defined on their Salesforce user record, granted via a Salesforce permission set. You can access Einstein Analytics via the Analytics tab or the Analytics Studio app (from the App Launcher).
All through these years, Salesforce users have been leveraging out-of-the-box operational reports, and dashboards to monitor their data, comprehend performance and share results. However, with customer data growing exponentially with every passing day, exploring data manually has become a huge challenge. To address this challenge, Salesforce has come up with its AI (Artificial intelligence) powered advanced analytics solution i.e. Salesforce Einstein Analytics.
Einstein Analytics is a next-generation business intelligence software designed to provide answers to complex issues at lightning speed. It’s intuitive, empowering, and built for mobile. It leads to decisions, discussions, and transactions that are driven by insight, instead of instinct. Einstein Analytics can help you to provide analytics experiences in sales, service, marketing, and IT business so that the users can take action quickly without getting bogged down by complex dashboards.
Einstein Analytics helps to explore the large data sets quickly and easily by providing AI-powered advanced analytics, right within Salesforce. It helps Manage datasets, query data with SAQL (Salesforce Analytics Query Language), and customize dashboards, all programmatically.
Einstein Analytics allows you to:
Connect to your CRM directly and execute on insights directly in Chatter.
Analyze millions of rows of data automatically & get predictive analytics with Einstein Discovery.
Explore data & automates action with prebuilt apps.
Has similar functionalities on mobile, be it Android or iOS.
Einstein Analytics vs Reports & Dashboards
Reports and Dashboards look and behave like Einstein Analytics, but provide very different functionality. It provides an instant snapshot of the metrics that matter to your business, including team performance, lead volume, and conversion rates.
Einstein Analytics is your Data Scientist. It extends beyond Reports and Dashboards to give you all insights into your pipeline, end-to-end customer insight, and historical analytics to help you plan your next best step.
How Can we use Einstein Analytics in Salesforce?
If you are using any Salesforce product like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, you still need to purchase licenses for Einstein Analytics. There are 2 types of Einstein Analytics license: Einstein Analytics Growth and Einstein Analytics Plus.
Users’ permissions are defined on their Salesforce user record, granted via a Salesforce permission set. You can access Einstein Analytics via the Analytics tab or the Analytics Studio app (from the App Launcher).
All through these years, Salesforce users have been leveraging out-of-the-box operational reports, and dashboards to monitor their data, comprehend performance and share results. However, with customer data growing exponentially with every passing day, exploring data manually has become a huge challenge. To address this challenge, Salesforce has come up with its AI (Artificial intelligence) powered advanced analytics solution i.e. Salesforce Einstein Analytics.
Einstein Analytics is a next-generation business intelligence software designed to provide answers to complex issues at lightning speed. It’s intuitive, empowering, and built for mobile. It leads to decisions, discussions, and transactions that are driven by insight, instead of instinct. Einstein Analytics can help you to provide analytics experiences in sales, service, marketing, and IT business so that the users can take action quickly without getting bogged down by complex dashboards.
Einstein Analytics helps to explore the large data sets quickly and easily by providing AI-powered advanced analytics, right within Salesforce. It helps Manage datasets, query data with SAQL (Salesforce Analytics Query Language), and customize dashboards, all programmatically.
Einstein Analytics allows you to:
Connect to your CRM directly and execute on insights directly in Chatter.
Analyze millions of rows of data automatically & get predictive analytics with Einstein Discovery.
Explore data & automates action with prebuilt apps.
Has similar functionalities on mobile, be it Android or iOS.
Einstein Analytics vs Reports & Dashboards
Reports and Dashboards look and behave like Einstein Analytics, but provide very different functionality. It provides an instant snapshot of the metrics that matter to your business, including team performance, lead volume, and conversion rates.
Einstein Analytics is your Data Scientist. It extends beyond Reports and Dashboards to give you all insights into your pipeline, end-to-end customer insight, and historical analytics to help you plan your next best step.
How Can we use Einstein Analytics in Salesforce?
If you are using any Salesforce product like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, you still need to purchase licenses for Einstein Analytics. There are 2 types of Einstein Analytics license: Einstein Analytics Growth and Einstein Analytics Plus.
Users’ permissions are defined on their Salesforce user record, granted via a Salesforce permission set. You can access Einstein Analytics via the Analytics tab or the Analytics Studio app (from the App Launcher).
Conclusion
Salesforce Einstein Analytics gives the power to harness raw data for real business solutions that make a huge difference. Salesforce customers report tells that Einstein Analytics has boosted their individual and team productivity levels, saving them an average of 10-11 hours per month per IT/sales/operations resource. And the longer they use Einstein Analytics, the more productivity continues to increase.
If you wish to implement Einstein Analytics and avail the above-mentioned exciting benefits, you can consider partnering with a Salesforce implementation partner.
About Girikon
Girikon is a reputed IT consulting company with offices across the USA, UK, Australia, and India. Over the years the company has become one of the established players in the area of Salesforce consulting, Salesforce implementation and Salesforce support space.
Sales Analysis Provides Logical Answers to your Question
For every organization, the sales function continues to be the most important function as it plays a significant role in building trust between a customer and a business entity. Organizations usually spend enormously in sales-related activities to gain edge over their competitors. However, sales related business decisions taken on others advice or by own “gut feeling” could be quite risky that too when a large amount of money is at stake.
Sales Analysis is the process which is used to understand, identify and predict sales trend. It leverages the historic data to determine the failure/success of the previous sales drive and helps in identifying the area of improvement. With sales analysis organizations no longer need to take decisions based on their gut feelings as it provides logical answers to their sales-related queries.
Importance of Sales Analytics:
There are several benefits of incorporating Sales Analytics into the Sales function. Let’s take a quick look at some of them.
Fill the gaps: By Analyzing their available data, organizations can figure out where they may have missed out on the opportunity of converting a prospect to a customer. This will eventually help organizations fill the gaps in the sales process, as well as the gaps in their products.
Organizations should analyze their product and understand what their competitors are doing to remain competitive, what’s not working for you and how can you fill in the gaps.
Increase Retention Rate: If organizations can figure out why any deal got closed, then they can keep their customers happy and build a strong relationship with them. It is important to understand the need of the customers so that organizations can upsell and cross-sell other products to the existing customers, which significantly adds to the revenue. In addition, by looking at the purchasing patterns of your existing customers you can recommend what customers can buy next, based on what these customers have bought in the past.
Accurate Sales Forecasting One of the most obvious and important feature of Sales Analysis is the ability to predict the future sales based on the available data. Unlike setting up goals based on the “gut feeling”, historic data gives you an accurate, realistic picture of how much your organization should be able to earn within a specified time period.
Competitor Sales Analysis In industries like automobiles, sales made by all the organizations are made available on the public platforms. Organizations can use their competitor’s data to see which product of their competitor is selling the most. They can even get the answer to the question like where and why a particular competitor’s product is selling the most. Based on their analysis they can revamp their product lineup, product pricing, introduce new product etc.
Future Decision Making Organizations can even make future decisions like whether an organization need to introduce new products or discontinue any existing product. It even help organizations effectively manage inventory, marketing activities, sales offer roll-out time, manufacturing process etc.
More efficient Marketing Sales Analysis helps organizations identify market opportunities and trends to support product marketing. If an organization is planning to launch a new product then it is very important to know the answer of below questions When should the product be launched? Q2. Where should the organization launch the product? Q3. How should it be marketed? Q4. Who is the target audience? All the above questions can be answered by using sales analysis. By having answers to all the above question, organizations can launch their product at the right time and can target the right audience, which will help them have a good sales number.
Type of Analysis Sales Analysis could be done in many different ways based on the available data with the organization. Common types of Sales Analysis performed are mentioned below:
Product-wise Analysis Organizations can use product-wise analysis to identify which product is selling most and during which time of the year. For example, winter clothes are sold most between November – January whereas summer clothes are sold most between May – September. Based on this analysis, organization can manage the new product launch date, inventory etc.
Forecast vs Achievement analysis With the help of Forecast Analysis, organizations can see whether they are able to meet their monthly/weekly/quarterly targets or not. They can even identify how much they should be looking for in the month/week/quarter. Based on their analysis they can make required changes in order to meet the desired organizational targets.
Periodic Analysis Periodic sales analysis are the ones which help organizations compare two or more different time period sales. Organizations can analyze the data and see which decisions of the organization has helped them in boosting up the sales and which decisions have led to dip in sales.
Conclusion
To sum up, Sales Analysis is something which will help you identify the gaps not just in the organization’s sales process but even in other areas as well, like gaps in product, release of the product etc. It even provides a logical solution to fill the gaps in order to increase the sales and reduce the losses.
It enables organizations to take decision based on the facts rather than on their “gut feeling”. On being leveraged appropriately, Sales Analytics can help organizations deal with all the roadblocks, which they might encounter during their Sales journey.
About Girikon
As a global provider of end-to-end IT services, Girikon boasts of a team of certified, and experienced Salesforce consultants, administrators and developers who have the knack for catering to the customer requirement in the most efficient way.
Businesses run on documents and trust. Conga Composer – a salesforce app automates the tedious business process and provides actionable insights, so that customers can focus on what matters.
Conga composer- a robust Salesforce application allows businesses to create error-free, sophisticated and template digital documents directly from Salesforce that too within seconds. This leads to increased productivity and engaged customers.
What is Conga Composer?
Conga Composer is a Salesforce app which makes it easy for Salesforce users to create sophisticated documents and reports using any data in Salesforce with only a few clicks. It can automatically populate richly-formatted templates with data from any standard or custom object in Salesforce.
By leveraging this app, organizations can allow end-users to make selections, such as which template to use for the final merged files, or can pre-select templates and other options and run the solution entirely in the background. Its key features are:
A separate conga license needs to be purchased for each user.
Reports can be generated via button on page lay-out or link on the home page
Conga reports can be created through S/F report or SQL queries
Reports can be created in different formats:
MS Word
MS Excel
MS PowerPoint
PDF
Email
HTML Email
Conga Composer can be leveraged to create sophisticated and accurate digital documents using pre-built templates and populated with data from Salesforce automatically. The tool also helps organizations send consistent and personalized documents that not just promotes their brand but also delights their customers. You can generate any document like: ✔ Quotes ✔ Proposals ✔SOW (Statement of Work) ✔ Invoices/receipts ✔ Contracts ✔ Work orders ✔ Reports & charts ✔ And more!
Why to Integrate with Salesforce?
Composer can use data from any Salesforces’ Standard or Custom Objects or even from external database and can directly populate into your document.
It can generate documents in multiple formats as mentioned above.
It creates customized, personalized, and on-time reports and documents with delivery-ease for every scenario.
It can store documents wherever you want them to be kept.
It can easily create accurate, consistent, pixel perfect documents.
It can automate documents, presentation and reports.
It is lightning ready
You can fetch almost 50 other objects, additional data in Salesforce using Salesforce reports or SOQL queries.
Users can create documents from their browser or mobile devices.
Conga Composer allows multiple options for downloading, storing and delivering the documents:
Downloaded immediately
Saves directly in Salesforce or Google drive
Emailed automatically
Sent for E-signature
Technical Insights
Conga Composer can be installed from Salesforce App Exchange but before that you need to Configure Composer as a Connected App, Enable Remote Sites, and Assign Licenses before building solutions. In order to install, you must have one of the below mentioned Salesforce editions:
Performance/Unlimited
Enterprise
Professional
Developer
You can use Queries, as well as Salesforce reports to create the document. Conga queries contain a SOQL Select statement which is specially built to work in combination with Conga Composer and Conga Mail Merge.
You can configure Conga Composer in a Sandbox: You can configure the SF instance so that if you later generate a Sandbox from the production, Conga automatically transfers the license information to the Sandbox. This is recommended for any organization using Sandboxes.
Note: Configuring Conga Composer Settings in a production instance will only affect new sandboxes, and does not have any influence on existing, refreshed sandboxes.
It is lightning ready and for that we need to make sure that we are on the updated Conga version, else the Conga Composer using Salesforce reports will not work in Lightning experience. In that case we must replace Salesforce reports with Conga Queries as a data source for your Composer solutions. It is recommended that we replace all reports with queries as soon as possible.
Add-on to Composer
Apart from Composer, there are some add-on apps too using which you can extend the efficiency of Conga Composer.
Conga Batch
Conga Batch or Conductor saves your time and effort when sending out your documents. You can consolidate, schedule and deliver the documents you create. You just need to choose how you want to launch and send, whether automatically or on-demand. It can consolidate up to 50 records or files for immediate download. Then, distribute as email attachments, eSignature documents, or other common Salesforce record attachments. You can launch it from a button on a list view, page layout, or Batch record. Instead, you can schedule delivery at any interval: hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly.
Conga ActionGrid
Conga ActionGrid turns reports into actionable grids so that productivity can be increased, as well as user experience and user-adoption rates can be improved. Its powerful interface enables users to understand and digest their data quickly, to filter and group, to see relationships, and to take action quickly.
Edit fields directly in Salesforce like you would in Excel and add records without opening additional forms
Allows more advanced filtering
It requires additional license like conductor
Mass update up to 50 Million rows of data
History tracking can be enabled
Add information in bulk; copy and paste from a spreadsheet into Conga ActionGrid
Create user-based controls and permissions so that the security can be maintained
Conga Sign
Conga Sign is an easy-to-use, modern eSignature solution built for Salesforce. It
creates personalized documents in Salesforce
delivers structured, templated communication to any eSignature signer-inside or outside of Salesforce
Automates the contract experience with timely reminders, automated eSignature
Tracks the status of eSignature activity
Conga Contracts
Conga Contracts streamlines and accelerates contract negotiations so that the deals can be closed faster without leaving Salesforce.
Simplify and accelerate the entire contract lifecycle
Streamlines and accelerates contract negotiations
Close deals faster with automated contract creation, controlled negotiations and streamlined reporting
Effortlessly bridge the gap between CPQ and eSignature with an end-to-end solution
Being built on Salesforce Lightning, it allows to be business-ready quicker than most CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) solutions in the market
Wrap-up:
Using Conga Composer, you can deliver your documents in almost any format and by any method, and store those documents anywhere you want. You can provide your teams the power to create documents and reports whenever they need. You can automate the process, schedule documents or trigger to shorten business cycles. By getting rid of all the roadblocks, you can pave way for increased business efficiency, productivity and more happy customers.
About Girikon
Girikon – A reputed name in the IT service space offers Salesforce consulting and Salesforce implementation services to clients across different domains and industry verticals. As a Salesforce consulting partner they follow industry best practices to deliver quality services and solutions.
Are you struggling to fit your migrated data into your target Salesforce environment?
Is there a need for creating multiple fields?
Don’t want to lose the data but don’t have the fields to migrate it to?
If the answers to most or all of your questions is ‘yes’, then this article can help you achieve all the above without creating any new fields and without suffering any data loss.
Where can you use this technique?
Lack of fields on the Target as compared to the Source environment
Data model does not match between the two environments
Do not want to create new fields in the Target environment
Do not have a separate custom object to hold the data
Figure 1 Salesforce data model not matching
How to achieve this?
We will extract all the data from the source environment and insert it into the Description field of the Target environment using TALEND.
Assumptions
We have migrated the data of Productsobject (OpportunityLineItem) from Source org.into a Description field (Special_Instruction__c) of Opportunity object in Target org.
We are using Excel to extract data from Source environment and a Salesforce connection to push the data on the Target environment. We can also create a Salesforce connection for both the environments (Recommended way).
Process
Step 1: Create a Salesforce connection.
For this you need 3 parameters:
Username
Password
Security Token
Figure 2 Create a Salesforce connection
You need to enter all the credentials for the Source environment.
Note:If you are connecting to a UAT environment be sure to change the URL in the tSalesforceConnection component.
Step 2:In this step we need to extract the data from both the source files.
Figure 3 Job Design in TALEND
To achieve the above process first you need two files:
Source File:In this file you need all the Product data (Opportunity Line Item data) along with the OpportunityId
Target File:In this file you need the Opportunity Id from the Target
Step 3:In this step we need to:
Insert the two files into the tMap
Apply an inner join between the two files.
Concatenate all the product data into a single variable and add a null check to all the fields before inserting them into variables.
Insert the variable into the Opportunity field.
Figure 4 tMap Design in TALEND
In this method we have added “|” to separate the data you can choose another symbol as per your convenience.
Note: Select the same selections in the tMap as highlighted above.
Step 4: After all the description is concatenated add a tDenormalize to concatenate the records with the same Opportunity Id based on the Description field.
Step 5:In this step use a tSalesforceOutput component to update the description field for the respective opportunity.
Finally attaching the complete job for reference.
More ways to implement the above approach:
Extracting data from Salesforce rather than Excel
Using other objects like Account, Contact etc.
Pushing data into Salesforce with Excel
Merging Product Data with Billing data
Conclusion
In a nutshell, we can say that whether your migration is for small or large data, you need to process your data in an efficient way. In your data migration journey, Talend can be your partner for ensuring hassle-free migration.
About Girikon
Girikon – a global provider of quality IT services houses a team of skilled Salesforce professionals including Salesforce consultants, administrators and developers.
In today’s competitive business landscape maintaining positive customer relationships while ensuring business growth has become a challenge. To cater to the needs of your customers in the best possible way, it’s important to understand the behavior, preferences, and the pain points of your customers. This would help you drive ‘customer success’ and take it to the next level.
What is customer success?
When customers achieve desired results or value post interactions with your organization then customer success is achieved. It is contrary to customer support, where you or your customer support team manages to merely resolve the issues, which customers might have come up with. Rather customer success is all about a proactive approach of reaching out to customers, anticipating problems even before they happen, and providing with an appropriate solution by stepping into their shoes.
A customer success manager forms a direct relationship with the customers provides them with value-added services. This helps customers to grow and achieve their goals while building a strong relationship with the business.
Why do we Need a CSM (Customer Success Manager)?
The role of a CSM within a business environment cannot be denied. They act as a bridge between the organization and the customers. Besides having in-depth knowledge of their customer’s business, a good customer success manager should have excellent communication skills, which allows them to comprehend and communicate common customer behaviors to the sales, marketing, and product teams.
Another important quality, which a customer success manager should possess, is an in-depth understanding of your product. This would help them keep their customers updated about the product including their expiration dates, renewal dates, new product versions, and more. This is particularly important to retain your customers and earn their loyalty.
Within a business environment, a customer success manager should have know-how about their offerings and provide a solution that will satisfy customers and provide them with the desired outcome. However, delivering an impactful solution to your customers requires gaining insights from data gathered from multiple touchpoints.
How Salesforce can help?
Salesforce is a cloud-based CRM which can be leveraged to seek support in the following areas:
Subscription Management
Gartner predicts that by 2020 over 80% of software vendors will change their business model from traditional license and maintenance to subscription-based services. Since Salesforce is cloud-based and 100% mobile compatible, you can access it anytime and from anywhere. With the help of dashboards, you can manage all of your subscriptions in real-time. Returning customers are always the most valuable assets for an organization and you as a customer success manager need to put forth your best foot to show them how much they mean to you. And since subscription-based business is the next big thing, Salesforce subscription management can turn out to be a deciding factor in Customer Success.
Salesforce Communities
Community Cloud is a Salesforce platform that can be used for connecting with customers, partners and employees. We can easily communicate with internal users and portal users, and external users.Using Salesforce Communities, you can:
Drive more sales by connecting your employees with distributors and suppliers
Deliver a great service by giving the customers one place to get answers
Automated Proposal Generation
CPQ (Configure, Price, and Quote) software can help streamline the CPQ process so that sales reps can focus on other sales activities. They can automate the proposals and generate quotes so that they don’t have to do it manually all the time, which can save time and they can concentrate ontheir customers easily. CPQ produces accurate and highly configured sales quotes for customers, which allows them to not only sell more, but sell faster as it speeds up and automates the sales cycle.
Contract Management & Renewals
Opportunity object (with a customer “Renewal” record type) can be used to track renewals. With this, you can leverage Sales Cloud functionalities like pipeline, stages, reporting, etc. for your Customer Success team. This will allow you to build dashboards which will be useful in tracking renewal rate, churn rate, monthly recurring revenue etc.Sales Cloud can automate workflows for recurring actions, such as contract renewals and management approvals, which can further provide insights that help in maximizing productivity and profitability.
Automation
You can automate recurring and repetitive tasks using Salesforce. Workflow speeds up the work by automating email responses, field updates, and task assignments. You don’t want to contact your customers every time you need to renew their subscriptions, and neither the customers want the same. Also, remembering all the critical dates like Renewal date and Billing date is a headache. With Trigger and Workflows, you can create automation rules to automatically create and send out bills and email timely which makes things easy for you, as well as your customers.
Support Management
Salesforceresolves cases faster with visibility of all cases and a record of every customer interaction — all on a streamlined dashboard. It streamlines the pipeline for better customer service. Every interaction with customers via phone, voicemail, email or anything else about a case appears in the case history.
Automated Data Load
CSM’s can use Data Loader for the bulk import or export of data. They can use it to insert, update, delete, or export data into Salesforce so that your customers don’t have to do it manually. This eliminates the chances of errors or issues like data loss, data duplicity or any invalid data.
Reports and Dashboards
CSM’s can make informed decisions with real-time reports. Reports and Dashboards provide your team with deep insights of the customer and his business.
The report is a list of data generated based on the pre-defined criteria. It has access to Salesforce data and can be used to display in terms of rows and columns whereas a dashboard is the graphical representation of the data generated by reports. CSM’s can create dashboards for each customer-facing and can view and analyze key data and trends across their customer base and get a better understanding of customer portfolio.
Activities and Meetings
With Salesforce, you are able to get a 360-degree view of your customers along with each and every interaction you have had with them. It can capture all the activities so the entire team has visibility into the customer’s account. You can capture all the information via “Log a Call” or “Log a Meeting” feature in Salesforce which is very useful in tracking the Activities. You can even set an Activity Reminder as well to remind you about any activity scheduled.
Quick Wrap-up:
Customer Success Managers can use Salesforce to help customers achieve business value faster and work more effectively than ever before. By leveraging Salesforce, CSM’s can stay close to the customers and help them achieve the desired outcome and that too with a positive experience. In a nutshell, Salesforce plays an instrumental role in taking organizational success a notch higher by helping their customer achieve success in their endeavors.
About Girikon
As providers of high-quality Salesforce consulting services, Girikon houses a team of experienced and certified Salesforce professionals including Salesforce consultants, and developers.