Today, organizations, irrespective of their size and business domain, prefer to use robust CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software to manage customer relationships and their business processes. However, they are also using several other apps, which can help them reap several benefits that can help them attain their business goals quickly and efficiently when integrated with their CRM. As leaders in the CRM space, Salesforce integration holds significance.
Today, several organizations across the globe are leveraging this CRM to ease business operations and provide better service to their customers. Salesforce integration allows easy management and execution of these activities through third-party apps. Several such business beneficial apps are available on the Salesforce AppExchange platform. Users can easily download and configure these applications to streamline their business operations. Salesforce integration services helps CRM users or employees switch between Salesforce and other apps to access all functionalities of the third-party app.
Listed below are some of the benefits of Salesforce integration:
Easy Access to Data: Through the integration of apps, it’s easy to access the data of other apps. With access to meaningful data, actionable insights can be derived, which in turn can allow you to make better business decisions.
Enhanced Productivity: Since data processing can be done in several ways, it can be used by different systems that are related. Compared to the manual compilation of data, automated data processing can significantly reduce errors, allowing you to get error-free results.
Meaningful Insights: Managers are empowered to make informed and intelligent business decisions as they access managed and meaningful reports.
Automated Workflow: Businesses can quickly achieve their goals through point and click automation of workflow as apps and integrated systems function collaboratively.
Things to Consider Before Salesforce Integration:
Frequency of Data Transfer between Systems: Once the data that needs to be transferred is extracted, it’s essential to know the time required for data movement between systems to understand the frequency and speed of synchronization and the direction of data movement.
Identify the Integration Type: In the case of a real-time system, the information is updated as soon as a record is created. However, batch integration might not occur on an immediate basis but occurs at a particular time. So, for any integration project, knowing the type and frequency of the same is essential.
Integration Fields: Finally, identify the fields that need to be integrated and mapped with other fields. Schema or structure may be required to understand the relationship between two fields or objects.
Quick Wrap-up:
Every business has to follow multiple steps to ensure successful integration. The Salesforce owed AppExchange platform offers several Apps that provide successful integration. Through well-planned and tactical processes, organizations can enjoy several benefits. Keeping at bay the aspects that can lead to unsuccessful integration makes it possible to reap multiple business benefits. It is essential to connect with a reliable Salesforce consulting partner to ensure successful Salesforce integration.
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud lets Bankers, Insurers and Advisors build trust by unifying the customer experience to grow their business and deepen customer engagement. Financial services managers can accelerate digital transformation by delivering a personalised service that customers expect. Get a single view of each customer’s activity across channels, geographies, and lines of business, both consumer and commercial. Now everyone across your financial institution, can visualize customer relationships and associated key information in one place, to drive trusted customer interactions. Provide your customers with a consistent and engaging experience across channels.
Salesforce Financial Service Cloud makes it easy for your customers to connect with you from anywhere at any time with customizable communities. It allows you to manage goals, cases, policies, and documents in a unified platform to create a single source of truth for your customers. By identifying live events and areas of opportunity to drive contextual action for investments, lending, mortgage, and insurance right out of the box, the Customer360 platform empowers you to build trusted customer relationships for your financial institution.
Deliver experiences that drive client loyalty.
Scale-up your business.
Deliver personalized advice from any time, anywhere with smart customer insights and engagement tools. Delight clients at opportune moments by collaborating with them on their financial goals.
Benefit from greater and clearer visibility into existing household opportunities and get a holistic view of all financial assets. Track referrals from Centers of Influence, and transform your client base into a potent referral network.
Work smarter and maximize work efficiency
Manage compliance with confidence.
Instantly access all of your client data at one central location. Free up time spent on routine administrative tasks and invest more time in fostering client relationships. With a device-friendly custom app, advisors can maximize every hour on the go.
Drive collaboration across the entire organization. Get secure access to client and household profiles and manage compliance. And get instant visibility on client interactions and information shared with them.
Let’s look at some of the core benefits delivered by Salesforce Experience Cloud:
Lead Tracking
Financial Services Cloud allows you to keep a close watch over leads and referrals. It comes with productivity-enhancing tools and integrated apps that help your teams keep track of all opportunities from generation to conversion.
Activity Tracking
Financial Services Cloud eliminates communication gaps amongst team members. It automates critical tasks to meet the specific goals which can be auto-assigned to appropriate team members based on their profile. As a business owner, it will give you a bird's eye view of progress.
Advisor Analytics
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is powered with the Lighting Dashboard that is designed to assist financial advisors to make smart and informed decisions for their clients, driving growth. Users can effortlessly customize their dashboards to deliver relevant snapshots for assisted decision-making.
Unified Data Model
With Financial Services Cloud, financial advisors can effortlessly manage their customer's data model, household models, individual data model account, or personal account data model, all on a single unified platform.
Turbocharge Customer Care
One of the most powerful benefits of Salesforce Experience Cloud is its intuitive customer care. Customers always expect more, including advice, prompt query resolution, open communication, and more. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud allows companies to meet all these expectations. Experience Cloud keeps a track of all of the customer's activities, visualizes customer relationships, streamlines coordination among stakeholders, and delivers complete transparency.
Enhance Engagement
Salesforce Experience Cloud enriches the engagement amongst all business cycle constituents – customers, advisors, partners, employees. It unlocks new opportunities and augments the whole digital experience. By leveraging the power of AI, Salesforce Experience Cloud delivers reliable and trustworthy analytics, empowering companies to make swift, informed, intelligent decisions.
Conclusion
Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is a powerful tool for wealth managers, bankers, insurance advisors, and business and IT executives. It empowers them to make faster and smarter decisions thereby driving up productivity. In simple terms, it allows you to stay ahead of the curve. So if you are in the business of financial services, and want to turbocharge your productivity and growth, talk to a Salesforce Consultant today and begin your new journey.
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In today’s digital era, businesses across different industry verticals are leveraging technology solutions to manage their business processes and streamline operations, and the financial services industry isn’t any exception. The shift towards digitization has pushed the financial services sector to accelerate its processes by leveraging robust technologies and adopting digital transformation initiatives such as cashless payments.
According to a survey conducted by Gartner, around 67% of senior finance leaders advocate the need for digitalization and focus on the optimization of finance technology.
Apart from this, other disruptive technologies such as Robotic process automation; Artificial intelligence, cloud services, and other financial business models have made their way. One such technology solution is the financial services cloud by Salesforce that provides tailored services to enterprises. The Salesforce financial services cloud has helped wealth management stakeholders ensure enhanced customer satisfaction through accelerated digital transformation. It is essential to seek Salesforce support to know more about this robust platform.
What is Financial Services Cloud?
The Financial service cloud is a platform provided by Salesforce and is available in the Lightning Experience. The platform is designed to create long-term customer relations while helping financial consultants offer high-end services. The cloud platform runs in a secure environment and can be leveraged by organizations to manage the assets and liabilities of their customers besides the accounts of investment and wealth management firms.
The platform is ideal for small and large enterprises as it allows financial advisors to deliver high-end solutions and technologies with tailor-made services. The platform is endowed with advanced features that enable consultants to spend less time gathering doing mundane tasks and focus on providing high-end assistance. The Financial service cloud encompasses several sub-verticals such as banking, mortgage, insurance, wealth management, and more.
Features Offered by Financial Service Cloud:
Enables Commercial Banking: Salesforce Financial Service Cloud facilitates commercial banking visibility in various aspects of wealth and finance, making it easy for consultants and relationship managers to make business-to-business referrals. This feature provides relationship managers with a customized layout that offers an optimum display of data and permission sets to access the Commercial Banking application. This allows relationship managers to manage their mortgage reports, referrals, treasury management, etc., more efficiently.
Helps Achieve Compliance: The Cloud infrastructure has helped organizations monitor customer relationships while following every interaction with a customer data model at the heart of the financial services cloud, which helps achieve compliance. The robust cloud solution helps the clients find new customers, grow their accounts, and close deals quicker while ensuring the security of client data and assessable client interactions across several channels.
Provides Better Visibility: Companies can access client profiles to view client interactions and the information shared. With this, the wealth ecosystem of the clients and their families can be accessed, allowing financial consultants to grow their business across multiple channels. This insight provides relationship managers a better know how of the personal and financial product needs of the customers and how it can be used to achieve their goals.
Enables Data Security: Before adopting new technology, organizations must fortify the security infrastructure. The Salesforce financial service cloud ensures robust security infrastructure for clients who have to undergo stringent security checks, inspections, and audits at regular intervals.
The Bottom Line:
Salesforce financial cloud built on the Salesforce CRM platform has revolutionized the wealth management ecosystem. The robust cloud solution enables the wealth management team members to access information drawn from various sources, including the financial interactions of clients. This provides companies with a 360-degree view of the client. So, if you wish to deploy Salesforce financial cloud for wealth management, you must partner with a certified Salesforce consultant.
Salesforce is a leading name in the CRM space due to the wide array of features, functionalities, and components offered by it. Regardless of their size and business domain, businesses across the globe are leveraging this robust platform to resolve their unique business while enjoying operational efficiency. However, implementing Salesforce is easier said than done as user adoption problems arise due to cultural change in the organization. It is worth partnering with a certified Salesforce consultant if you wish to ensure a seamless implementation journey.
Let's discuss in detail the common Salesforce adoption problems and ways to tackle them:
Resistance to Change: Employees usually show resistance when they are expected to handle a newly implemented system, primarily when they haven't dealt with the same beforehand. It is essential to understand the reasons behind this resistance, which mainly includes the absence of understanding and training. Before embracing Salesforce, abundant training and support should be provided to the users.
Data Inconsistency: Several users associate their CRM with different users, which may impede their data inconsistency. It's suggested to use Salesforce as the center of all their data and acquit themselves with different frameworks from that point onwards. It is crucial to note that old, fragmented and obsolete data decreases the legitimacy of their Salesforce reports and frameworks and drives sales reps crazy.
Complicated Entries: It becomes difficult for Salesforce users to work on long page layouts and unwanted fields as long page layouts require too much scrolling. At the same time, too many areas contribute to insufficient data. It is essential to keep it short and straightforward to ensure that users can gather data without hassle.
Absence of meaningful reports and dashboards: Salesforce reserves a vast amount of data, and it can be leveraged to generate actionable insights. However, users tend to lose interest if the reports generated are vague, which drastically impacts the adoption rate.
Not Leveraging the Complete Potential of Salesforce Workflows: Not utilizing Salesforce workflows is a common blunder, which Salesforce users usually commit as Salesforce workflows can help increase productivity by sending reminders for renewal, auto emails, notifications regarding stale opportunities, and more.
How to Tackle Issues Related to Adoption?
Begin with a Pilot Project: It's essential to do a pilot project before implementing a system. In this way, testing can be performed, gaps can be identified, and user's requirements and practical issues can be understood. To run a pilot project, it's important to select a user group and provide them with the necessary training materials to run the platform effectively.
Understand End-user Requirement: To implement Salesforce successfully, it is important to loop in the Sales team and discuss with them the dashboards, reports, features, and functionalities. By considering their viewpoint, it will be easy to streamline Salesforce configuration while increasing the user adoption rate. It is crucial to articulate the arrangement and set their expectations from day one. Users need to focus on a strategy that not just fits all the requirements of the stakeholders but is also consistent with their workforce.
Training: Quality training should be provided to users to understand the basic motive behind implementing Salesforce and how it can benefit them. With proper training, users can tackle errors that might arise during the Salesforce journey.
Quick Wrap-up:
In a nutshell, it can be inferred that the success and failure of a newly implemented system depend mainly on how well users are accustomed to its' usage. The better the users are adapted to the system, the greater are the chances of achieving higher ROI. By partnering with one of the best Salesforce consulting companies, organizations can ensure a greater adoption rate.
As a cloud-based platform, Salesforce continues to rein the CRM space as it occupies a market share of around 20 percent. It is indeed the most popular and widely adopted CRM system due to the vast array of valuable features and functionalities offered by the platform. What makes it unique and one of the most preferred platforms is the release of new products and features year after year.
With several new releases and acquisitions back and forth, Salesforce has come a long way. With such an evolution, users of Salesforce technology should learn to stay ahead of the curve. Instead, customers need to understand how they can use technology to increase business ROI, which significantly impacts the bottom line.
Listed below are some great features that can help organizations optimize their Salesforce implementation for mitigating costs incurred due to customer and employee churn. It is always a good option to seek support from a reliable Salesforce consultant to know more about these features:
Lightning Page Performance: This powerful feature allows users to deal with inconsistent lightning pages that aren’t optimized while working in a Salesforce org. The Lightning page performance is built natively into the Lightning App Builder responsible for doing all the analysis. This feature provides analysis about the performance of the pages on desktop/ mobile while providing tips to enhance performance and user experience. By benefitting from the Lightning Page Performance and optimizing the placement of the lightning component, end users can accomplish their duties much quickly and efficiently while dealing with the urge of distractions while opening multiple pages to fulfill their daily tasks.
In-App Guidance: This feature assists employees with reminders, tips, and gradual walk-throughs to help them navigate the system appropriately. This feature can be configured to display a floating message or a prompt message in the utility bar. To measure the effectiveness of your implementation, data about the interaction of employees about guidance messages is recorded. This feature provides resources to users even before they recognize the need, thereby increasing the company’s ROI. This not just saves time but also improves efficiency. With supporting resources, and efficient workflows, employee morale is increased, and productivity is optimized.
Salesforce Survey: For an organization to improve their ROI, they need to understand where the opportunities for enhancement are. Shortcomings usually exist in lengthy sales processes, product-related issues, slow response time, and more. However, identifying the bottom of the matter is necessary for implementing change. To understand customer experience regarding their products and services, organizations can directly gather customer feedback by using Salesforce surveys. This feature is endowed with a wide array of functionalities and the ability to automate the sending of the survey, customize email templates, and more. By gathering and analyzing survey results, organizations can better serve their customers.
Social Studio: This feature is leveraged by organizations to connect with prospects and customers on social channels such as Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, and more. Eventually, this feature connects the sales, marketing, and service teams with their customers, enabling employees to develop meaningful relationships with customers and communicate with them on a common platform used both inside and outside of the workplace.
Social Studio allows organizations to identify what prospects/ customers are speaking about the company, respond and track prospects as leads, and much more.
With Social Studio, data-driven insights can be gained, which provides a deeper picture into how your customers engage with your social strategy, which can lead to enhanced lead generation and sales opportunities with the likelihood of maximum closure.
Final Words:
Businesses are seeking ways to save time and money by removing operational bottlenecks. The cost incurred as a result of employee and customer churn as a result of poor customer experiences can be alleviated by optimizing Salesforce and making the most of all the great features. To know more about these robust features, make sure you get in touch with one of the best Salesforce partners.
Ever since its’ inception Salesforce has made several new acquisitions. With every new acquisition, the company is improving its performance. Its compatibility with the AI platform i.e. Salesforce Einstein is due to the 12 acquisitions that it made in the year 2016. All the acquisitions made by the company till date has made it compatible with all the latest technologies and applications, platforms, and business types. It is in your interest to partner with one of the best Salesforce consulting partners to know more about Salesforce and its collaborations.
Let’s take a look at some of the most successful and popular acquisitions made by Salesforce:
ExactTarget: This tool was acquired by Salesforce to expand its pre-sales and marketing department services. This robust application has become a popular business tool as it is comprehensive and can provide them with email marketing services. In fact, this tool empowers the core marketing functionalities of Salesforce and improves its marketing suite. The complete product suite can simplify many operations such as SMS, emails, digital advertising and more.
MuleSoft: The in-built API’s of this tool can be leveraged by organizations to build application network. Users of this tool can converse and exchange data with each other. Though, this acquisition had been one of the most expensive acquisitions, it provided Salesforce with a new direction by allowing it to provide enterprise-level solution to its users. The middleware connectivity offered by Mulesoft APIs helps enterprise to migrate to the cloud. This robust tool can provide organizations a complete view of their integration.
Tableau: The acquisition of this Seattle based company has been one of the most significant acquisitions as it has helped improve organizational performance considerably. Tableau is a robust and one of the best data visualization tools that has turned out to be extremely profitable for both companies. This acquisition has helped Salesforce users get access to user database of Tableau. With the help of Tableau, Salesforce users can know about their ambitious customers, which in turn can help them make intelligent decisions.
Quip: This document management tool is used to gather, amalgamate, and store documents and spreadsheets thereby improving efficiency. Though, document processing tools like spreadsheets aren’t preferred any more, users are familiar with them. Salesforce CRM spreadsheets can be stored on the cloud. Quip is able to provide bi-directional collaboration of document together with synchronized data from Salesforce. Quip users can send videos, texts, and images apart from simple documents.
Bonobo: This tool can help users to gain deep insights about customers in form of texts, support calls, speech and other modes of communication. Bonobo was acquired by Salesforce to support Einstein, which is an AI powered platform that uses its self-learning capabilities to support various business operations.
Griddable: This powerful tool helps in seamless integration of data across all cloud platforms of Salesforce. The tool offers users of Salesforce to get a grid view of data while ensuring smooth and quick migration of data. Salesforce users can access data from different sources and use it as and when required. With such availability of data, Salesforce has become a reliable CRM that can enable users to gather data from different sources and make the most of it.
Quick Wrap-up:
These are few of the many acquisitions made by Salesforce that are not just popular but also some of the most used ones. However, the list continues to grow as Salesforce is trying to team up with many more brands to provide better services to its existing customer base. To know more about the acquisitions made by Salesforce and the benefits that can be leveraged out of them, it’s prudent to seek Salesforce support from a reliable service provider.
In today’s era of cutthroat competition, conducting your business in a way that yields the desired outcome isn’t easy. This is primarily because customers have become more informed and expect personalized and timely interaction with your brand. Consequently, marketers should also be ready for change.
According to an IDC study commissioned by Salesforce, about 65% of B2B buyers engage with vendors only after they have made a purchase decision and 83% of them are willing to hear only from those that are relevant and contextual.
While marketers and sales reps make every effort to turn prospects into sales opportunities, yet they do not want to appear as spammers who would spend an entire day cold calling. Rather their goal is to build a strong relationship with them, which would help them to close sales deals quickly. However, personalizing every interaction across a long sales cycle can be daunting and thus requires having in place a well-thought-out lead nurturing strategy.
Given the fact that the average buyer’s journey is complex, and the content (problem awareness, solution consideration, and decision regarding solution purchase) that helps them to move down the sales funnel should be perfectly timed and polished, it’s practically impossible to cut it using random emails. Automating lead nurturing allows for the methodical tracing of lead engagements with appropriate content and accurate pinpointing of that lead’s stage in the sales cycle.
So, if your business is struggling to nurture leads consistently then Salesforce offers the perfect solution to manage your leads and support your sales team in multiple ways. It makes sense to get in touch with a reliable Salesforce partner if you wish to seek assistance for the automation of your lead nurturing process.
Organize Lead Information: Information gets scattered and leads might not be handled properly without a robust system in place. By installing a cloud-based CRM like Salesforce, managing lead information becomes easy. You can enter the contact details of your leads, keep a track of their calls, and emails while schedule follow-ups to fulfill business needs. You can also modify several data entry features to meet your business needs.
Access: Even if your lead information is well organized, it won’t be of much use if your team can’t access it. Since, Salesforce is a cloud-based platform, it helps your team to share, view, and update information at any point in time.
Track: While it is important to access and organize lead information, it isn’t of any use if you aren’t able to track your leads. In fact, it is crucial to have details regarding leads that are qualified and where they are positioned in the lead nurturing process for driving sales and upholding best practices. Salesforce with its features allows you to categorize lead status and convert qualified leads to contacts.
Quick Wrap-up:
It’s important to include lead nurturing within your sales and marketing strategy. However, it’s important to utilize automation resources for nurturing your leads especially if you are scaling up your business to ensure you’re connecting with your audience at every step of the buying process. To know more about the benefits of using Salesforce for nurturing your leads, it’s prudent to partner with an experienced Salesforce consultant.