What are the important questions you need to ask yourself before setting up or managing an existing in-house Salesforce Development Services team? Here are some questions I have heard from discussions with colleagues and customer during my time managing software businesses. It is common across all software applications and industries where organisations are always looking for cost effective development service solutions which delivers a quality result.
• What is the experience level requirement for technical staff and what industry should they have worked in prior to joining the team?
• How do I train these resources and keep them producing quality outcomes?
• Would I require specialist consultants’ roles such as Architects, Business Analysts, Senior Developers, application Developers, UI/UX developer, Scrum masters or testers? The list goes on!
• How many of each resource would service our organisational needs?
• Can I employ graduates from a local university or even outsource this whole services?
• What is the best approach? How do I establish a function which services the organisation’s needs and provide a quality outcome for the business?
Many organisations who require Salesforce Developers or Consultants usually start with the employment of a Certified Salesforce Consultant usually a Salesforce Administrator or Salesforce App developer to configure and/or make changes to the Salesforce product(s) that are in use. The company often believes that they will avoid paying hefty premiums of in-demand Salesforce Consultants on an adhoc or regular basis from the larger consulting firms. Yes, in the short-term organisations do achieve the peace of mind of having an in-house team and substantial cost advantages.
The downside is that in-house teams’ members often require the appropriate level of professional development and training to keep abreast of technology changes, new products, new features and releases. In-house staff also often require clear progression paths and motivation to stay at the organisation. Retention is sometimes very challenging when the organisation’s Salesforce Consulting Services is not a core business offerings.
There are many challenges facing organisations who have made the decision to setup a Salesforce Consulting Services or Salesforce Development Services Team as part of the IT department, PMO or standalone. I personally have fielded these questions and challenges coming from my colleagues across a variety of industries, prospects and clients. Girikon believes it has developed a cost-effective offering which will answer every question above and provide you with the peace of mind, quality of service and have testimonials from a wide variety of organisations to prove their method works.
Now let’s look at the options……
Imagine you had access to a range of Salesforce Consultants including Architects, Salesforce Developers and Salesforce Administrators working within your time-zone onsite and/or offshore to ensure all your Salesforce Development needs are all addressed.
All your Salesforce consultants are certified and with a wide range and relevant experience levels and offer up to 50% of the cost of an inhouse team. Girikon believes local presence is essential when dealing with complex software packages and business critical systems. Girikon is fast becoming global with offices in the USA and now in Australia/New Zealand and Development Centre in India.
Girikon’s Salesforce Consulting Services in USA and Australia provide a reach and local presence to organisations around the globe and are anticipating further growth in the future with offices planned in the UK/Europe as the next frontier.
Girikon are Salesforce Experts and an excellent choice to be your Salesforce Development Partner. Girikon, a Software Development Company will meet your requirements with a variety of additional services such as Salesforce Implementation, Salesforce Support and Services including customization and Salesforce Integration.
Also, as a Salesforce Implementation Partner, our experienced and Certified Salesforce Developers, Administrators and Architects are available onshore and offshore. We ensure the Offshore Salesforce Development for your implementation or business as usual is made simple, less time-consuming and comparatively Cost-Effective.
Girikon’s delivery models provide the flexibility to establish a balanced onshore/offshore model with proven agile development processes. Our Salesforce Development Company provides the assurance of a high accelerated delivery timelines driving huge reductions in Time-to-Market and costs.
The questions posed at the start of this article are all relevant and important when you are deciding to establish an in-house Salesforce team, determining what the team would look like including optional questions to reduce overheads.
Girikon’s offering above addresses all the questions including our Salesforce Consultants experience levels, industry exposure, commitment to continuous improvement include training, have a variety of roles deployed within reasonable timeframes and more cost effective than graduate programs and pure outsourcing models. More importantly Girikon have a proven approach and model that has and will continue to address our partner’s needs.
Find out more at https://www.girikon.com/offshore-salesforce-development/. Please share your feedback for this article, in case you need Salesforce Consultant, Salesforce Implementation Partner or Salesforce Development Services then please feel free to reach out to us at sales@girikon.com
How imperative is it to get the right level of Support for your third-party software? What level and type of Support do you need to underpin your whole business?
There are a few options including setting up an internal support team, relying on the third party software provider for all levels of support which could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars or engage a specialised support partner with the same level of knowledge and experience as third party software provider with added benefit of in depth industry experience and spends time with their customers to understand the business and its processes. Below I will examine the options and provide some examples where a Salesforce Support Services partner such as Girikon could be the answer to all your support needs.
Internal Support Teams
Internal support teams often struggle to keep up with internal stakeholder demands and in some instances lack the capacity and capability to deal with issues, defects and enhancement requests from their third party software providers.
Setting up an internal Support teams can sometimes be a long and tedious process. Firstly, the organisation needs to determine an appropriate support framework to underpin the business including the level of support to be provided, providing an effective interface between the organisation and the third-party provider and setting up the capability and systems to underpin the internal support structure.
Once the support framework is designed, suitable and capable operational staff are required to implement. This will include selecting the right candidates, assessing appropriate skill sets, training regimes, familiarisation and understanding the business and what is unique about the business.
In some cases, organisations setup internal support teams with ease. This is due to effective planning and experience in house. Girikon offer these type of organisations with highly skilled, certified and experienced Salesforce Consultants to work collaboratively with internal Support teams at cost effective rates with the flexibility of onshore or offshore models to suit.
Software Support Providers
Entering an annual support contract from the organisation’s 3rd party software provider such as Salesforce can sometimes be costly and gives the organisation access to a level of support which may or not suit the organisation’s needs.
In some cases, the software provider’s support team resources often differ from the project team who successfully managed the software implementation. How often do we encounter a sub-standard handover from Implementation to BAU where there is little to no documentation or the lack of enough training to support staff? In these instances, there is a requirement for Subject Matter Experts (SME) to be internally selected to champion the software support, acting as the interface between internal stakeholders and the software provider and in some cases triaging issues coming through from internally stakeholders. SME must then in turn determine if the issues are appropriate to log, the priority of issues and follow through on service levels.
Usually the SMEs are employed to do a specific role outside of support in the organisation and taking up the SME title is usually casual or part time due to many reasons including showing a level of interest, being a conscientious employee, the employee’s technical abilities or just being thrust into a position due to resource constraints.
When an organisation chooses to proceed with the option for 3rd Party Software support it is important to ensure that all business processes are well documented and how the software is used including who will be completing updates after every upgrade, a support process is established to ensure all responsibilities are known and communicated to all stakeholders. This will ensure the unnecessary pressure is not placed internally on SMEs and the level of support and service is in line with the organisation’s expectations.
In some cases, organisations work through the Support process early in the journey with their 3rd party software providers and have a well-established support framework to underpin the organisation’s operations.
Girikon offers an alternative to this type of support service for organisations using Salesforce. Girikon will spend time understanding your business processes, document required artefacts to ensure knowledge about the business is not lost. Girikon’s end to end Salesforce support process includes a robust support model, best practice framework and highly skilled, certified and experienced Salesforce Consultants to deploy immediately. Girikon works with your staff at cost effective rates with the flexibility of onshore or offshore models to suit any size business.
Specialised Salesforce Support Services Partner
When it comes to Salesforce Support Girikon offers a cost advantage by using both onshore and offshore resourcing model blended to ensure maximum efficiencies. Girikon’s quality is guaranteed, extensive experience across industries and Salesforce products and most importantly customer testimonials to provide a level of confidence to all stakeholders. As a Salesforce Implementation Partner we focus primarily on providing the highest of service to our customers;
• Through Girikon’s on-shore presence it takes the time to understand the business, the processes and the culture of the organisation
• Girikon’s Salesforce Consultants design a bespoke support solution to ensure maximum effectiveness in set up and BAU.
• Girikon a Salesforce Consulting Partnerunderstands the importance of providing consistency through the implementation and go live period and prefers to be involved early in the project to ensure this consistency.
• Girikon provides Salesforce Supports across time zone which is ideal for globally diverse companies
If you are searching for a Cost-Effective Salesforce Support Services, your search can end here!
Find out more at https://www.girikon.com/salesforce-support/. Please share your feedback for this article, in case you need Salesforce Consultant, Salesforce Implementation Partner or Salesforce Development Services then please feel free to reach out to us at sales@girikon.com
A popular term that we constantly hear today in the tech marker is Cloud Computing. Salesforce is one of the technologies that is dominating among all the the cloud computing solutions.
In this blog, I ( A Salesforce Consultant) will give a brief introduction of Salesforce and will answer few questions: Why Salesforce? What is Salesforce? What are the services offered by the Salesforce?
Why Salesforce?
1.People who are using Salesforce say it’s unique for three major reasons:
• Fast: If we talk about the legacy CRM system, it takes year to deploy. But Salesforce provides you a fastest path from Idea to App. You need not to think about the infrastructure but building your app.
• Easy: In easy to use category Salesforce is the Boss. You need to spend more time on developing rather than figuring it out.
• Effective: The ability of customizing Salesforce to meet your business needs, consumers find it very effective.
2. Salesforce is handy, it is there on cloud, a device and internet connection and your team is good to go.
3. As compared to other CRM’s, Salesforce is easy to integrate. You can integrate Salesforce to your Outlook as well as your accounting software.
4. Salesforce is highly scalable to your growth.
5. Salesforce is for all, even the startups and small businesses can use Salesforce.
Salesforce is affordable considering its vast variety of services.
What is Salesforce?
I hope I have answered the above question well, why should we use Salesforce. Now it’s the time to discuss what is Salesforce?
Salesforce.com is a company and Salesforce is a technology. Salesforce.com started as SAAS (Software as a Service) CRM Company. Along with various software solutions, now Salesforce.com provide a platform named Force.com for the developers for building and distributing custom software (PAAS).
Salesforce is the technology which works on Multitenant Architecture, that describes multiple users can share the common access to the software instance. On Salesforce platform, software and infrastructure upgrade happen automatically. So your organization need not to worry about managing technology, rather focus on innovation.
What are the Services offered by the Salesforce?
The importance of Salesforce in Cloud Computing market cannot be understood completely, without knowing about the wide variety of products and services that Salesforce offer. Below are the cloud services that are offered by Salesforce:
• Salesforce Sales Cloud
• Salesforce Service Cloud
• Salesforce Community Cloud
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Salesforce Commerce Cloud
• Salesforce Analytics Cloud
• Salesforce App Cloud
• Salesforce IOT Cloud
I tried to touch the basic technical aspects of Salesforce in this article. We as an organization and Salesforce implementation partner provide Salesforce development services in all the major areas.
The success of any software implementation depends on the user adoption rate. In any organization, a new system is implemented for the betterment of its employees as the new system eliminate some or all redundant process, manual efforts.
Well, it is not necessary that the newly implemented system does the above-mentioned work. In short, it helps in boosting the employees’ efficiency.
The same goes for Salesforce Implementation . If your employees’ are not used to Salesforce environment, then it will be quite difficult for the users to adopt the system and work on it on the daily basis.
“There are innumerable reasons determining why users are not adopting a new system. In the below segment we will be discussing those factors and solution for solving them and getting more and more users onboard.
Training Sessions for the End Users:
It is important to provide full-fledged training, especially to the immediate end users before switching to a new Salesforce solution. Video, tutorial, live demo, webinars on UAT Mode proves to be quite beneficial and helps a lot in adapting.
One can also provide customized training for different users depending on their permission, groups. When the employees attend the training, they share their doubts, feedback about the solution which in turn helps in making the solution even better for the employees.
Prepare the End-users:
It is important to keep your users notified that a new system will be introduced to them for their daily work. You can do this 1 month or 15 days prior to the implementation depending upon the system.
You can start with pamphlets, newsletters, etc., and as the implementation day approaches you can organize one to one training so that user adoption is smooth and the user will also not find that hard to settle with the new system.
User Manual for the users:
It is a good practice to provide User Documentation of newly developed system so that the end users can refer that document whenever they get stuck. User manual with system images gives more clarity and helps the end users to find the solution easily.
Realize your users the need of new system:
It is vital to explain the need for introducing a new Salesforce solution to the end users and what benefit can one achieve from the new solution so that the adoption is less complex.
Implement the new system in sync with the existing business flow so that the users can understand it and find it not hard to adapt it.
Provide support to the end users after implementation:
After the implementation, provide hands-on training to the users and resolve all the queries asked by the users. Sometime, a user may get confused by seeing new user interface may end up asking minor questions. All you have to do is be patient and answer all the questions asked and show them how to achieve it.
That’s all for this article, in case you need a Salesforce Consultant , Salesforce Implementation Partner or Salesforce Development Services then please feel free to reach out to us at sales@girikon.com
Girikon is a one-stop destination for Salesforce Development related work having its offices in USA, Australia and India
In the early 90s and 2000s, customer service was about face to face communication, emails, and telephone contact. After the arrival of the Internet of Things (IoT), the face of customer service changed for good.
Let’s get into the nitty-gritty detail to know what Internet of Things (IoT) is. Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical devices, vehicles, home appliances, and other software items which are connected to the internet and enables these devices to connect, collect and behave as per the surrounding environments using embedded sensors, processors and communication hardware.
With the evolution of CRM, smartphones and cloud-based application Internet of Things is growing and becoming stronger day by day.
Haven’t we all imagined a smart home where lights are turned on automatically as you enter home. At morning when you get up, your favorite music starts and an automatic kitchen where the coffee pot starts brewing when you come out of the washroom.
The above things seemed like a science fantasy movie a few years back but thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT), now these all are possible. All the home appliances, smart devices are connected and communicate with each other which makes this wonder happen.
If the Internet of Things (IoT) add magic into your day to day life then just imagine the benefits it will bring into the customer service sector. According to a report of Gartner, 8.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2017, up 31 percent from 2016, and will reach 20.4 billion by 2020.
IoT also makes machine smart. Smart products can identify faults, communicate with the technical support and initiate actions to resolve them. All this happens before your customer is even aware of the issue.
With the help of Salesforce IoT, your support team can easily track the actual usage and new opportunities emerge from that data. Before that, you have to find out useful IoT data for your business. Now with the help of Salesforce IoT, you can actually create program based on your own idea with minimal coding in the Lightning Platform.
After implementing IoT for your business, it is really important to organize and manage volumes of data. A small volume of data can be managed easily but if you have a large volume of data we have another solution called Einstein.
Einstein will assist you with data on how to manage it and based on the activities and trends. For example, it will assign data to the team to solve an issue, flag them as per the requirement.
That’s all folks for today. That’s all for this article, in case you require Salesforce Implementation Partners or Salesforce IoT expert, then please feel free to reach out to us at sales@girikon.com
With the progression in technology, business practices are shifting more towards automation.
#1 CRM, Salesforce is also packed with automated marketing component named Salesforce Marketing Cloud which is a platform for marketers that allows them to create and manage relationships with customers.
The Marketing Cloud consolidates integrated solutions for customer journey management, email, mobile, social media, web personalization, advertising, content creation, content management and data analysis. The business user can make predictive analytics to help make decisions such as, which is the best communication channel as per user response. It is endowed with a component called Journey Builder that helps marketers tailor campaigns to customer behavior and specifications, demographics and transmission channel choices.
The business user can take benefit of event-driven triggers to initiate actions like when a customer joins any new program, a trigger runs in the background to send a welcome message, other events could trigger data updates in the customer contact record.
The Marketing Cloud is also connected to Salesforce.com’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud , which concedes coordination that produces a unified experience and prevents customers from being reached separately by marketers from all three groups.
The key characteristics of the Marketing Cloud include
➤ Messaging(Email / SMS) at every step of the customer journey, keeping the customer updated and involved within the process.
➤ Drag-and-drop segmentation makes the job easy for all type of users.
➤ 1:1 content personalization ensures customer specific content.
➤ CRM and cross-channel integration with external platforms make process management sound.
➤ A/B and random-split testing.
➤ Lead capture automatically via various sources capturing relevant details.
➤ Comprehensive, real-time tracking and reporting of the Organization progress.
➤ Pre-built templates and themes for better customer engagement.
Practicing Marketing cloud to manage marketing tasks takes organization brand to a different level, we as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Partner ensures following best practices to achieve the maximum throughput.
Salesforce Community Cloud
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October 22, 2018
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Uditi Jain
Salesforce Community – A branded space for your employees, customers, and partners to connect.
Different business encounters different problems and consequently in order to fulfil the varied business requirement we need a hundred different solutions.
Salesforce is the most commonly used CRM tool around the globe, introduction to the community helps business users collaborate among staff, funders, members, volunteers and other supporters. The launch of such platform has made business users connected with all the customers on a single place as per their shared interest. Some businesses have also adopted this platform as a standalone platform in managing their client relationship.
What is Salesforce Community Cloud?
Community Cloud is a social platform from Salesforce.com that is designed to connect and facilitate communication among an organization’s employees, partners and customers.
For example, if your customer wants to know how many different products are there for choice, he doesn’t have to wait for your team to respond, he can see all the list on the community portal. If the company had a million customers and had to face a million requests a month its satisfying to present the customer with an updated database.
The solution to the problem is given by Salesforce in form of Community cloud that gives all the customers access to the Salesforce data so that they themselves can reach the product list and can also filter them as per their significance.
Apart from this, the business user can manage the access level of all the customers as per their association with the business. This is all taken charge by the Salesforce in order to maintain specific information visible to the users as there may be millions of customers and all they have the different type of involvement with the business.
It is an awesome way to share information, collaborate internally on projects/tasks, or communicate with customers in a more personalized way. Salesforce community cloud is accessible with Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer editions of Salesforce.
Communities can serve a business by,
1. Driving more sales by connecting your team with your distributors, resellers, and suppliers.>
2. Delivering world-class service by giving customers one spot to get all their solutions within least time.
3. Managing social listening, content, engagement, and workflow in one place.
The use of community cloud may vary business by business, however, in the nutshell, it’s a way to share information accumulated in Salesforce without building costly users. There are many features on the community cloud and many tricks on how it can help drive your business smoothly.
Communities allow creating user ID and Passwords, or access for the users. However, instead of manually creating access, a business can leverage Salesforce’s Social Sign-on features. This allows access to the community through different social networks like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google, or even leverage Salesforce, Amazon, or even Azure Active Directory to permit login. Salesforce also supports OpenID Connect standard.
It also has some pre-built templates for business use and also gives the advantage to create front-end templates for community portal. For most simple use-cases, the user can customize it little for specific needs. However, giving it better look and feel business users prefer designing it via custom Visualforce force pages.
The custom template allows the customized way to log-on users to the community. The login and logout screen can be customized to match your website or brand UI. It also enables users to register themselves for a community through self-registration pages.
We as a Salesforce Consulting Partners has observed how our clients get profited after practising Community.