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Common Mistakes While Doing Salesforce Implementation | Encaptechno

8 Common Salesforce Implementation Mistakes

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Common Mistakes While Doing Salesforce Implementation | Encaptechno

 

Salesforce is one of the most effective tools that comes with the potential to revamp and clarify a business process. However, this does not mean just ending up purchasing the software because one has to implement the software correctly as well. Salesforce integration requires the support of experienced consultants.

By bringing Salesforce into your business, you can easily avoid common mistakes that otherwise cost you more time, money, and sanity. Hence, salesforce implementation must be done strategically. To make sure that you avoid the Salesforce implementation mistakes, you must take guidance at each step so that you can get a clean and accessible interface that extends across industries and companies of different sizes.

With so many companies using Salesforce, it is not amusing to know that some organizations fight constantly to achieve the results that they need in a fixed time frame. The difficulty of implementation is dependent on the company size, business needs, and industry types. Salesforce implementation is a delicate process and must be handled by someone who is an experienced Salesforce consultant.

Hiring Salesforce consulting services helps to avoid common mistakes that can happen otherwise while the Salesforce implementation goes on.

1. Not Assessing Cost of Implementation

Not Assessing Cost of Implementation

It is not a big deal for a company to get ahead of itself when it comes to implementing new technology. Most companies commit to a solution and are excited to get going for achieving game-changing business outcomes with the new Salesforce integration.

The anticipation to have an old system changed with a new functionality adds support efficiency and accuracy that can get everyone’s hopes high. That said, a mistake that many teams make is that they experience high levels of stress when it comes to assessing the cost of a solution or functionality while breezing over the process.

The costs come in many different ways when it comes to Salesforce implementations and they include budget, time, and complexity. When organizations do not seek outside support, they lack clarity around the real costs of an implementation that can affect a project’s success.

The timelines and processes must be developed way ahead of time when the implementation takes place so that stress and unforeseen costs can be avoided. Whether they are in your budget, timeline, or project success, all costs must be avoided.

2. Not Choosing the Right Implementation Partner


Often, organizations realize that Salesforce implementation cannot be done internally. This is even when the company has been using an old version of it and wishes to install an upgrade. When a company decides to make a purchase or even add something to the Salesforce CRM, it is important that the work is done by experts for getting the desired results. 

The bidding process for finding the right partner and mostly a Salesforce consulting service can often be lengthy and does not even always result in the right choice in case the details are not focused on or the sales pitch is not accepted.

Major problems can play out when it comes to Salesforce implementation. Hence choosing the wrong partner can add to the trouble. Make sure that the consultant that you choose is capable of assisting and leading. The developers must be highly skilled and familiar with the SDFC or they should be learning it.

As important contributors to a successful implementation, it is important the developers and consultants are immensely skilled in the implementation process and have the skills needed to guide a Salesforce initiative. Make sure that you conduct a detailed RFP process that is a lot more of a negotiation than just a presentation.

In addition, also ensure that innovation is led internally and created by the partner while not seeking any input or guidance. While choosing the right partner, you should know that the price is not a good reflection of skill while also collecting references and success stories from organizations that have worked with your partner.

You can also test the Salesforce consultant on their ability to commit to the timelines. Build a relationship of trust and respect for maintaining open communication. Also, focus on proposing contractual guarantees for work that is completed to a standard.

3. Complicating the Requirements


Jumping into Salesforce integration can be a very interesting process but it is important to remember that it is also full of demands. Salesforce offers immense benefits but it still has its limitations. There are so many times when companies require customizations or even extend complicated requests that Salesforce cannot deliver.

Customizations and requests can often lead to serious problems during implementation and user adoption. One of the major complaints during the implementation process is the need for necessary customizations. Since customizations need expert knowledge, one must be able to communicate the amended costs.

The bugs that do not get fixed as a result of customizations can impact user buy-in as most users struggle to use the system just as intended. Migrating the customizations from a previous CRM can generate limited functionalities. This is something that must be communicated during the planning phase and reflected on the scope and timeline of Salesforce implementation.

Often, complicated requirements and customizations are not so simple to avoid but this is not something that always indicates Salesforce implementation as a disaster. However, it definitely indicates the need for a strong business liaison or analyst who can advise appropriately.

4. Ignoring Integration and Data Migration


In Salesforce implementations, many new features come to the forefront of a team’s focus while leaving data migration and integrations on one side. The truth is that if data integration and migration are not prioritized from the beginning then they can get left behind while causing delays.

Integration with different running systems or platforms can be tricky and must be approached with knowledge, experience, and foresight. The integration specialists are necessary and they should be considered during early assessments only.

In addition, data migration must also be considered in the earlier stages when it comes to Salesforce implementation. Without any doubt, there will be a varied quality of data and the duplication of data should be addressed way before implementation for achieving the best results. To make this process a success, one person or a team must be responsible for data maintenance.

5. No Internal Buy-In


No Internal Buy-In
At the time you are getting into the Salesforce integration, it is often easy to overlook an important element and that is users. Many companies make the Salesforce implementation mistake of keeping the users at the end and lacking in substance to generate the internal buy-in to the new or upgraded platform.

User adoption is really important for the success of Salesforce implementation and must be taken seriously from the very beginning. A dedicated effort should be made to promote internal buy-ins by identifying the internal leaders who can easily promote Salesforce and drive the go-live results.

You must also seek user motivations, needs, and other struggles needed for incorporating core features into the project plan. It is also important to measure adoption among the user’s past implementation while conducting key user training. A big concern with Salesforce implementation is the usage of the platform among company users.

In case the system fails to work as it was intended or is full of errors then it can be a real problem for user adoption. You must ensure that users are a core consideration all through implementation so that the best results can be closed out.

Given the challenges of Salesforce implementation, the work must be planned well. With the rising demand for different Salesforce specializations, there are many end-users who seek the support of experts. Companies offering experienced Salesforce consulting services are able to assist organizations, avoid mistakes, and drive successful implementations while finding exciting work at leading organizations.

6. Data Clean-Up

Data Clean-Up
Another one of the Salesforce implementation mistakes is forgetting the data clean-up. Many times, the only focus is on new features while leaving integration and data clean-up as a low-priority activity. In reality, this may have the potential of causing delays in the implementation process.

Including corrupt data can often lead to incorrect insights and even wrong forecasts. This has the potential of creating inefficiencies in the process of sales and eventually lead to the underperformance of the sales team.

That said, working with a Salesforce expert can always ensure data clean-up and data auditing right before Salesforce implementation is achieved at par.

7. Lack of Training


A successful Salesforce implementation process is dependent on user adoption. Salesforce is a powerful platform but the users cannot capitalize on features if they do not know how to use the system efficiently. Users must gain a good understanding of all features.

Insufficient Salesforce knowledge is like no knowledge. It results in the underutilization of the platform while learning the successful techniques leads to satisfaction and rewards. Salesforce CRM may look like an easy platform to many but the truth is that there are some features that are challenging for the team members to operate.

Hence, it is necessary that adequate arrangements are made to train the employees so that make the best use of the Salesforce CRM. In case you make the mistake of ignoring the training aspect and assuming that the employees will get familiar with the platform once the implementation is done then you are making a mistake.

The truth is that the team members need their own time when it comes to getting comfortable with the features of the platform. This is common when you are migrating from one version of Salesforce to another one. Make sure that you offer accurate theoretical and practical training to the sales team while handling the Salesforce CRM.

8. Lack of Focus

Lack of Focus
You must know the answer to why you wish to implement Salesforce because if you are unclear about that then your ability to pick the right implementation partner will be clouded. You will not even have the right answers to the questions about the main factors or what you want from your CRM in the future.

If you want to have an easy time convincing your executive team to give you the budget for a tool then you must be sure about why you want to use it in the first place. The clearer you are about “Why?”, the easier it will be to gain maximum benefits out of Salesforce.

Conclusion


Taking the decision to invest in Salesforce is a big step for a business. You must ensure that you have proper knowledge along with the right support, data, and training needed to benefit from the usage of a tool.

At Encaptechno, we offer expert Salesforce implementation services that enable our customers to use CRM well. These implementation services can help you in making sure that there are no mistakes made and that you get the maximum benefits out of the implementation process.

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Integrating SF with Ecommerce Business | Encaptechno

Benefits of Integrating Salesforce with your Ecommerce Business

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Integrating SF with Ecommerce Business | Encaptechno
Ecommerce customers across B2B and B2C industries demand a connected and unified shopping experience. This also means that they want seamless handoffs between different channels and websites, along with personalized engagements based on previous interactions that happen with a brand.

Most customers feel that these connected processes are important when it comes to choosing a business in the competitive eCommerce landscape. Therefore, all businesses that are hoping to attract the present connected shoppers must unify experiences across all the touchpoints. With Salesforce integration, customers can get a truly cohesive retail experience along their journeys from discovery to delivery and what lies beyond.

A unified customer experience can also provide brands with a clear understanding of customer activity and how it may relate to retail inventory, products, and promotions. Any e-commerce platform that supports excellent user experience design can make the online store of a brand easy to navigate and explore.

The product recommendations and smart search powered by artificial intelligence can inspire millions of shoppers to purchase. Brands can also maximize their conversion rates with e-commerce optimizations such as checkouts without the need for an account sign-up requirement and automated price adjustments for sales and promotions which eliminates sticker shock at checkout.

Salesforce Makes E-commerce Integration Simple


Things are changing quickly in the retail world and the way in which a brand embraces this evolving landscape and connects with today’s customers starts with e-commerce integration. Modern shoppers expect to buy anywhere and fulfill anywhere experience along with an ability to interact with a brand on any channel.

Businesses should look for a way that enables the customers to engage seamlessly as they move across their preferred channels including, social, mobile, and in person. For delivering this kind of customer experience, an online e-commerce business should be integrated with marketing, fulfillment, inventory management, and back-end accounting systems. Most of the legacy commerce platforms cannot handle this kind of e-commerce integration.

The traditional systems were not really designed for a retail online integration nor can they keep up with the pace of innovation that is needed to stay competitive. This is why omnichannel solutions such as e-commerce integration are making innovation easy and many retailers are turning to Salesforce.

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides both B2B and B2C businesses a world-class platform for e-commerce integration. It has a cloud-based and multi-tenant architecture that delivers scalable, reliable, and security-based systems that merchants need for competing in a quickly changing retail environment. The Commerce Cloud enables to unify buying experiences all across channels while streamlining all operations from discovery and purchase to fulfillment and beyond. Using the Commerce Cloud, it becomes easy to integrate e-commerce behind the scenes with unified information across stores, interactions, customers, orders, products, inventory, pricing, etc. This easy e-commerce integration also connects in-store mobile channels and enables them to leverage core e-commerce capabilities and services such as transaction management and merchandising.

With true e-commerce integration, retailers can stay connected to customers anywhere they shop and innovate across the entire customer experience quickly without any problems. The capability of Salesforce for e-commerce integration combines digital commerce, store operations, order management, and AI-powered personalization into a single and unified commerce platform. With Salesforce, e-commerce businesses can do the following things.

  • They can deliver a strategic and personalized shopping experience at each step and on any device.
  • Businesses can roll out continuous innovations with any kind of dependencies, disruptions, and delays.
  • Businesses can launch new websites in weeks and new promotions within minutes.
  • Salesforce makes it possible to unify digital commerce with store operations, order management, and more.
  • It becomes possible to offload IT operations for a unified cloud that is scalable, robust, and stable.
  • Salesforce helps in maximizing productivity with centralized site management and automated tasks.
  • It is possible to explore new regions easily and go global in record time.

Retail Operation Standards


A business must run its retail e-commerce platform with the care and attention that is demanded by a flagship retail location. Online stores have become the primary way in which customers interact with a brand while becoming the new storefront window display. Just as it is with a storefront window display, e-commerce businesses must showcase new products regularly.

Most customers expect to see new merchandise anytime they visit a site of a store. Everyday inventory updates are a must as today’s customers crave fresh product offerings more frequently than ever before. With an intelligent e-commerce platform, businesses can aggregate average customer visit frequency and stagger product launches for meeting the pace of high-value shoppers.

Business owners have to understand that e-commerce is essentially a competition between businesses and it is important for brands to understand what the competition offers and charges. Using automation to run reports on the competition helps businesses to develop compelling deals, counteroffers, and bundles for their customers with state-of-the-art website experiences that stand out and do not just blend in.

Businesses should always remember that great online customer service is equally important as a perfectly presented product inventory or an online e-commerce business website.  Just as in physical retail stores when customers run into issues such as shopping online, businesses should be there for kindness and support. Real-time messaging built into an e-commerce website is an indispensable tool that brands can use for engaging with customers and solving their problems including bounce rates, shopping cart abandonment, and shopper dissatisfaction.

Omni Channel Marketing

 

Omni Channel Marketing
Most modern customers are comfortable with receiving relevant and personalized advertising messages from digital channels. This is valid on the web, email, and social media. Businesses can help deliver an easy shopping experience to these customers by integrating e-commerce with digital marketing.

Offering connected experiences to the customers is considered important across every channel and brands must take care while integrating shopping links into personalized web ads, emails, and social content used in digital marketing campaigns. Micro-targeted omnichannel marketing enables brands to choose the highest value e-commerce customers and other desired niche markets that deliver content to those who are most likely to click and convert.

The Shop sections can also be added to brand profiles on important social media websites such as Facebook. From here, it becomes easy to tag products from the brand’s shop in image and video posts. The content of Stories on Instagram and Snapchat can also be linked to a brand’s retail e-commerce platform leading to the seamless customer journey and omnichannel conversions.

Driving Sales

 

Driving Sales
The Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based e-commerce platform that is powered by innovative technology that helps in connecting businesses and customers in a way that is never done before. It is immensely scalable and it can adapt to suit the needs of B2C and B2B sellers of any shape, size, and scope.

Commerce Cloud features Einstein Artificial Intelligence which helps the brands to inspire and convert e-commerce customers with highly personalized journeys while seamlessly connecting all channels. For ensuring mobile e-commerce success, a responsive mobile design, optimized micropayments, and one-touch payments are all built into the platform.

Artificial Intelligence


The use of Salesforce Commerce Cloud enables the customers to get personal recommendations in a way that they can tailor the shopping experience to each use with Einstein product recommendations that deliver highly personalized product suggestions with all clicks. Businesses can drive revenue using the customer insights using the internet purchasing behavior and optimizing the product bundles, sets, and deals with Einstein Commerce insights which is an AI-powered shopping basket analysis dashboard.

You can use customer data to power personalization across any channel including mobile applications with Einstein Recommendations API. In addition, the conversions can be boosted with intelligent search results by helping the shoppers find what they are looking for and more with Einstein Predictive Sort which automatically tailors category pages and search results to each shopper. The Salesforce Commerce Cloud improves searches with type-ahead guidance. The abandoned searches can be reduced with Einstein Search Recommendations which offers type-ahead suggestions personalized to every shopper in real-time.

Innovative Customer Experiences


The Salesforce integration enables the creation of unified customer journeys across all core functions with the Salesforce platform that connects Commerce Cloud with sales, service, marketing, and more. The API first commerce helps in building and extending shopping experiences using the Open Commerce APIs that surface core B2C e-commerce functionality for developers and third-party applications.

New revenue channels can be unlocked with scalable APIs because headless commerce allows you to mix and match composable capabilities for meeting the business needs. The operations can be launched quickly and the total cost of ownership while delivering agile and innovative customer experiences can also be reduced.

Salesforce helps in extending, customizing, and innovating the sites in a way that the shopping experience can be enhanced with an extensive library with certified integrations, ratings and reviews, payment accelerators, and loyalty programs. There are developer-friendly tools that help in coding as well by responding to business requests and delivering innovation quickly using a dev environment that provides industry standard and JavaScript-based tools.

Salesforce also helps in developing mobile commerce applications using scalable APIs, technology patterns, full development framework, etc. Lastly, the time to market can be accelerated with industry-specific solutions and apps prebuilt for common use cases.

Scalability in Business

 

Scalable Business


The Salesforce Commerce Cloud offers a great deal of scalability in business. You can go global in record time while minimizing the risk, cost, and technical complexity of entering new international markets with borderless infrastructure, and safe interactions. It is easy to quickly customize websites for accounting customs, cultures, languages, and currencies. You can give localized reference architecture for English, Japanese, French, Japanese, etc.

Salesforce also helps in the easy execution of global content strategies. It is easy to build great digital commerce experiences with targeted content, offers, and relevant products that are organized by language, region, city, or country. In addition, it is also possible to manage multiple sites and regions easily because you are able to launch and manage all the B2C e-commerce properties include brands, sites, devices, and geographies from a single and unified framework.

Seamless Customer Experience

 

Seamless Customer Experience
The Salesforce integration enables optimization of conversion funnel while reducing abandoned carts with proven best practices including save carts, payment accelerators, and optimized checkout flows. You can also go mobile with the Master mobile commerce and a full suite of mobile-first capabilities including responsive design, one-touch payment, and a data-driven mobile UX.

Salesforce helps in leveraging social extensions by extending your reach and merging digital commerce with social channels and online communities such as Facebook and Instagram. It is possible to empower customer service teams by helping service agents accelerate over-the-phone orders and check out on behalf of customers with real-time access to digital storefronts and order history. You can connect digital commerce in the store and enable mobile access to digital inventory that store associates can offer to sell and ship in real-time anywhere in the store with a flexible add-on called Commerce Cloud Endless Aisle.

The Salesforce Commerce Cloud manages the complete order lifecycle while connecting commerce and service experiences, unifying customer profiles, and unlocking order history with an add-on called Salesforce Order Management. It becomes makes orders and payments so that customer value and loyalty can be increased with seamless interactions with the customer journey. The integrations can be simplified and commerce payments can be embedded quickly and easily for a better shopping experience.

Conclusion

Salesforce assists the entire customer journeys across commerce including sales, marketing, customer service, communities, and more. It is one of the top-ranking customer relationship management systems in the globe that is home to trailblazing customers, expert partners, and software platforms including Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Sales Cloud all of which integrates with Commerce Cloud to power the entire customer lifecycle from awareness to purchase and retention.

Hence, e-commerce businesses must unify their customer journey with agility, authenticity, and scalability. With the integration of Salesforce, businesses can unlock revenue across channels with customizable commerce experiences.

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Business Opportunities with Salesforce in 2022

Business Opportunities with Salesforce in 2022

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Business Opportunities with Salesforce in 2022

Salesforce has been able to lead from the front when it comes to various CRM features that it can offer. It has expanded the capability of businesses to discover, win over, and keep customers. With the digitalization spreading, there are many businesses that keep turning into digital selling to stay competitive. This has in turn resulted in many businesses making the most out of salesforce for business.

If you are from one of the organizations that are still getting comfortable with remote working then you must be aware of the challenges that come with managing systems and partnering outside the office. These challenges are solved by Salesforce easily to the point that it is impossible to deny the power and comfort offered by the Salesforce integration. It has become valuable for businesses to grow and meet the changing demands of customers.

As we move into 2022, Salesforce has brought in many new features. The tradition of coming up with new features for companies continues strong with Salesforce. It is this innovation that keeps the Salesforce subscribers at the top. This year, Salesforce has stressed more on collaboration, automation, and orchestration. It has already released many new tools designed to help teams work efficiently.

We can easily say that Salesforce has become more robust in 2022. In this blog, we will be talking about the business opportunities that come with Salesforce in 2022 and the different ways in which innovations can help us in moving ahead. Let’s begin.

1. Platform Connecting Customers, Partners, Employees

Platform Connecting Customers, Partners, Employees


Salesforce and Slack have an appreciated history of working with one another. Way before the acquisition of Slack by Salesforce, the two enterprises worked together for many years integrating the services they offered and helping sales teams access important account information.

With the shared customer base of Salesforce growing to tens of thousands of team installs, the customer requests for integrations across the Salesforce platform grew too. Ever since its launch, the Slack-First Customer 360 has been ensuring the way people work improves considerably. The platform is such that it connects the customers, employees, partners with each other easily.

The applications that these customers are using already can also be connected with the current Salesforce records that come within Slack. The platform includes the Salesforce for Slack app and many other integrations such as Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Service Cloud.

Using the Slack-First Customer 360, the teams can quickly respond to new opportunities and work easily with each other across companies. This enables cross-company swarming to resolve quick challenges quickly, plan and act on insights instantly and make partners a part of the team.

The platform is capable of offering a rich user experience in the digital world. The applications and workflows have the ability to boost team productivity and collaboration and also support the continued success of all the customers. Slack and Salesforce together give businesses a single platform for connecting employees, partners, and customers with each other and the applications that are being used every day.

2. Value-Based Healthcare With Health Cloud 2.0

 

In September 2021, Salesforce became the global leader in CRM to announce Health Cloud 2.0, a technology that is designed to empower businesses to deliver much better health and safety for their own employees, communities, and customers.

With the whole world going into a hybrid of digital, on-site, and in-person mode, the focus was shifted completely on ensuring the health, business operations, and safety in the new normal. These things became important factors for ensuring trust and business continuity.

Salesforce realized that things such as vaccination, contact tracing, wellness assessment, testing, and vaccination have become critical in all industries as companies look for ways to keep their customers and employees safe. Hence, Salesforce came up with Dreampass which allows robust and scalable safety protocols for all in-person attendees.

Dreampass was made to offer safe in-person events for all employees, communities, and customers. The capabilities include attendee registration management, testing vendor integration, COVID-19 vaccine, testing verification for issuing testing kits. 

Dreampass enables admission after the integrated test results with a personalized QR code are checked properly. If the protocol changes or there is an exposure then the notifications and messaging are also sent to the attendee directly.

3. Lightning Page Performance

 

If you have worked as an end-user in a Salesforce org, you would know that the lightning pages are neither optimized nor inconsistent. The Salesforce Lightning Page Performance has been created to solve this problem. When working with the Salesforce org, the feature helps in managing inconsistent pages or the ones that are not optimized.

The Lightning page performance tool is created with the lightning app builder for doing all the analysis. The end users can execute their tasks much more quickly and efficiently by leveraging the Lightning Page Performance and optimizing the location of the lightning component. This can be done while avoiding distractions that pop up in opening pages to complete the daily activities.

4. Flow Orchestrator

 

The workflow requirements of all admins tend to become increasingly complex. The processes that were considered simple span across multiple users and departments. People may even have to wait for days, weeks, and months between every stage of a workflow. Each handoff between users and the waiting period between steps is a costly gap for all businesses. This gap can reduce customer satisfaction, productivity, and revenue.

With the teams becoming more distributed, the gaps have only increased as the users are becoming comfortable with remote meetings and digital channels. People are frazzled and struggling to keep up. They depend on Salesforce for quick configuration and maintenance of business workflows. As a result, Salesforce created Flow Orchestrator so that the admins can quickly create multi-user and multi-step automated business processes with clicks and not code.

An experienced Salesforce admin can tell you easily that Flow can maximize your impact and create the best user experience. Flow Orchestrator helps to amplify the impact of new and existing flows by introducing new features, steps, and stages. Steps define which flow you want to execute, the number of individuals assigned, the information they receive and where the flow is supposed to appear. Steps can be assigned sequentially and in parallel for flexibility.

The stages are for grouping the steps together and executing things sequentially. The stages can be separated by a decision element for supporting complex logic. The stage consists of one or more steps. Organizing different flows into steps and multiple steps into stages enables the Flow Orchestrator to bridge the gap in the workflow. This amounts to better productivity, happy customers, and better revenue.

5. Public Cloud

 

Salesforce Hyperforce offers companies all over the world the ability to make the most out of the power that the public cloud is capable of. This is a new and next-generation infrastructure architecture that uses public cloud Salesforce partners to help businesses expand quickly and meet local data storage requirements.

This can be done with the use of common tools, security practices, deployment patterns, and software development processes. The organizations can store important data in a region for supporting regulations and compliances that are specific to the businesses or industries. The regional cloud infrastructure facilities work quickly in the country’s performance and short routes between end-users and data centers that help in improving user experience.

Salesforce comes with an ability to scale quickly because of the flexibility and additional efficiency of the public cloud. Hyperforce reduces implementation time and also allows the resources to be deployed in the public cloud quickly and easily. Something that took months in the past only takes a couple of days now.

6. In-App Guidance for Engagements

 

The maintenance of employee engagement is something that includes processes that can prove beneficial. Right from onboarding new employees to user adoption for the systematic enhancements, the employees who work in sales and support cycles can find it difficult to remember the steps needed to complete the jobs.

The in-app guidance features help the employees to navigate the systems by offering reminders, tips, and gradual walk-throughs as well. One can find this feature to display a floating message in the utility bar for tracking the effectiveness of implementations. In addition, this feature also offers resources to users even before they begin to notice that they have a requirement which further helps in increasing the company’s revenue.

7. Marketing Cloud

 

Many businesses face troubles in finding customers which is one of the many competing priorities. In case you are more focused on developing a service or product that people are bound to love then often there is not much left for identifying leads. This is where the solutions like Marketing Cloud prove useful as they help businesses to create meaningful connections with customers, capture leads, and achieve more conversions.

There are many ways in which Marketing Cloud can help in finding more customers. It allows automating processes while improving efficiency and freeing resources. It works easily with Salesforce and allows businesses to use data that has been gathered already. The Data Studio in Marketing Cloud helps in improved marketing analysis.

The Marketing Cloud and Pardot help in building personalized and data-driven email campaigns. It is easy to reach customers on preferred channels which also helps in speeding the return on investment. The Pardot also helps in generating reporting so that you can understand all the elements of strategies. These are the features that offer real results. Using Pardot, many customers have witnessed an increase in sales revenue and marketing effectiveness.

8. Sales Cloud

 

With more customers looking for businesses that can understand, the businesses react by improving their investment in sales technology platforms. Salesforce workflow automation that comes with Sales Cloud offers companies the tools needed to modernize the selling process in a digital and remote world.

A rich customer activity timeline, advanced automation, and a mobile app are some of the powerful features. Sales Cloud continues empowering each aspect of the sales process with a wide view of customers. All the customer data is in one place and the sales team can contribute to each sale.

There are no more spreadsheets and it becomes easy to look through emails or sticky notes. The users can even take the benefit of AI-powered sales tools that can automate everyday processes. This helps the sales teams to close more deals. Just as other Salesforce products, the Sales Cloud comes with an intuitive interface that makes winning hassle-free. There are real-time dashboards as well to empower and improve decision-making.

9. Service Cloud

 

In the Salesforce Cloud ecosystem, Service Cloud helps in retaining customers after the sale is done. Salesforce understands that the customers are becoming selective and it is far from certain that one sale will lead to another. Rather, most businesses around the world are moving to customer service software.

Many customers make a decision based on the customer service that is offered to them and there is a rise in customer expectations as well since the past two years. The Salesforce Service Cloud solution is ideal for businesses that are hoping to establish and maintain higher levels of personalized customer service. 

It allows businesses to engage with customers on channels, serve them faster and deploy AI-powered chatbots. The Service Cloud also makes it simple to set up self-service options for customers. It is easy for customers to access articles, account information, and community support.

Conclusion

 

Businesses must be able to make the most out of using Salesforce and the many features that it offers for boosting business revenue. Salesforce presents many business opportunities that are focused on two areas including growing revenue and a reduced investment cost. It can be beneficial if companies ensure that the employees are doing everything to fulfill both these goals.

The Salesforce consultant at Encaptechno can assist in customizing the Salesforce infrastructure to meet specific business needs. If you want to maximize the business opportunities with Salesforce in 2022 and beyond, get in touch with us.

 

 

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How is Salesforce Sales Cloud Different from Service Cloud? | Encaptechno

How is Salesforce Sales Cloud Different from Service Cloud?

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How is Salesforce Sales Cloud Different from Service Cloud? | Encaptechno

For many people, the dilemma of choosing either Salesforce Sales Cloud or Service Cloud can be an overwhelming one. However, the truth is that both of these solutions overlap each other in many ways while making it somewhat challenging for the users to make a choice.

Both of these solutions are highly used and in fact, they make up a lot of Salesforce’s revenue as well. But the question is, what should you choose in the long run?  In this blog, we will give you a guide that will help you answer all the questions one by one. Keep reading to make an informed decision.

Salesforce Sales Cloud

 

The Salesforce Sales Cloud is one of the most important Salesforce products designed for the management, analysis, and management of sales processes. Many times, both the sales representatives and sales managers use the functionality of Salesforce Sales Cloud for completing the tasks scheduled for different priorities and better efficiency.

As for the sales representatives, the Salesforce Sales Cloud offers efficient and rather comfortable customer communication with numerous channels right within the Sales Cloud UI. With an advanced integration on a customer’s website and social media sync, you can collect precise information about contacts, accounts, and targets. There are extensive automation capabilities that help the sales representatives with numerous routine tasks while freeing up their time for nurturing leads and closing multiple deals.

With the sales cloud implementation, you can construct a sales strategy and manage it within a single system only. Sales Cloud helps sales managers control and assess sales representatives. By using the performance data, the sales manager can easily identify the strengths and weaknesses needed to improve skills which then allow increasing the overall performance of the sales department.

By using the Sales Cloud, sales managers can also deal with challenges such as disjointed sales processes and the process alignment needed with marketing.

Salesforce Service Cloud

 

On the other hand, the Salesforce Service Cloud helps in making the customer service process much easier and effective. Since it is way cheaper to retain a customer as compared to gaining a new one, the Service Cloud can become a strategically important tool for your company. The customer service managers say it can positively affect customer retention rates while ensuring that a company is recognized for caring about customers.

For the customer service agents, the Salesforce Service Cloud offers integration with numerous channels of communication with customers. As communication via every channel is available within the Service Cloud UI, the customer service agents can serve much faster. In addition, the service cloud enables creating and managing a knowledge base that can be a useful source of information for the customers. The knowledge base helps in reducing the response time and training new agents quickly. Since the Salesforce Service Cloud offers customer service process automation, the service agents solve many cases quickly as the customers receive answers to their questions without any delay.

As for the customer service managers, the Service Cloud offers a possibility to organize customer service processes while managing them within Service Cloud UI. The service cloud enables customer service managers to control the performance of customer service representatives which further helps in identifying the areas of growth and organizing training.

Features of Salesforce Sales Cloud

 

Some of the features of Salesforce Sales Cloud include:

1. Lead Management

Lead Management - Features of Salesforce Sales Cloud


The starting of the sales funnel is about generating and nurturing prospects for finding viable deals. The prospective customers get captured as leads and are nurtured by sales representatives to move through the lead funnel. There are many standard features for the process of lead management such as lead assignment rules that automatically help in assigning new leads to representatives and teams based on some attributes such as the product of interest and geography.

Salesforce offers a great learning guide for lead routing along with links to resources on how to do lead assignments in Salesforce Sales Cloud. The Salesforce Sales Cloud also comes with a set of lead auto-response rules for automated follow-up for eligible leads. For instance, in case a lead comes from an online information request form then the Sales Cloud has the ability to automatically send an email thanking the lead for interest and letting the lead know that someone from the team will be in touch soon.

Coming to leads from online forms, the Sales Cloud also has a native feature called web to lead that enables one to automatically generate web forms for capturing prospects that can be added to the site even if it is not a Salesforce page.

As a representative nurtures the leads, you can give the guidance for success in a path component. When the lead expresses interest in going ahead, a representative can qualify them as a strong prospect and convert the lead to a full account. In addition, once a lead is converted to an account and related records, it is possible to manage important information about the company and the person with the customer information features.

2. Sales Pipeline and Forecasting

Sales Pipeline and Forecasting - Features of Salesforce Sales Cloud

 

During the phase of converting a potential lead into a customer, the sales representative really starts talking more and gets a much better sense of value. The potential sales also get captured as opportunities. Similar to leads, you can define a number of sales processes that are in line with the sales methodology that a company uses.

A Salesforce path can be added to opportunity pages for guiding the representatives at each step. It is important to understand that reporting and monitoring are important parts of any sales organization. 

You have to predict how much money each representative will choose in a given period and how you can track performance. Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation comes with forecasting tools that give sales managers and representatives visibility into the projections and performance.

3. Quotes

 

So many industries have a sales process that necessitates complex quote building. The sales cloud comes with functionality as well. With the basic Sales Cloud quote building, you can add in products, quantity, pricing, and discounts. 

A single opportunity might have many quotes since your sales representative will be negotiating the deal. However, you can always pick which quote will be syncing to pipeline reports and forecasting.

You can also add products underneath an Opportunity in case you do not want to go the formal route. Building the quotes is a tedious job but you can always make the quote template for starting the process. The rapid products also offer your representatives faster quote-building capabilities. In case you have a customized product configuration and pricing model, Salesforce CPQ is one of the best applications to explore.

Features of Salesforce Service Cloud

 

1. Case Management Tools

 

One of the most important features of Salesforce Service Cloud is that it offers you the ability to automatically handle incoming cases while making sure that nothing is missed including lead auto-response and assignment rules.

Anytime a new customer ticket comes into the system, Salesforce helps in offering the customer an auto response by sending an email that acknowledges the issue and helps in running through configured assignment rules for routing the ticket to the right agent and team.

Another important feature in Service Cloud is known as email to the case which lets you route emails that come into a special inbox to Salesforce directly. In case customers email to a support email, you can easily have inbound emails that address sync automatically to a case in Salesforce so that you do not have to worry about anyone manually monitoring the inbox.

Right after the case gets created, the auto-response and assignment rules will run normally. Email to the case is a great feature but it comes with some limitations too. The email to case premium plugs in many holes in the normal email to case with enhancements to native infrastructure.

Way beyond handling incoming cases, Service Cloud has many ways to track the kind of support that a customer might be entitled to while defining key milestones of that process. The entitlements and milestones help your team keep a track of cases needed to define appropriate service levels while outlining steps within a service process.

2. Customer Support Channels

Customer Support Channels - Features of Salesforce Service Cloud

The Salesforce Service Cloud also enables customer support beyond cases. Today, many customers want to get support on their terms either through an email, support portal, online chat, or SMS. One of the best features that the Service Cloud offers is omnichannel.

It is helpful in connecting all the support channels while also providing consistent support to the customers and giving your agents work in a consolidated place. The omnichannel can also assign an incoming customer service issue dependent on agent capacity by checking the workload.

The Omni Channel performance dashboard lets you monitor agent work performance to maximize efficiency. With the help of omnichannel, you can roll out various support channels for the customers. Salesforce also comes with a native live chat option that can be embedded on a webpage.

It offers native SMS support so that the customers can text from their smartphone while the agents stay in the Salesforce console. It has released Service Cloud Voice that is the CTI tool for handling and routing incoming calls.

3. Self Service Options

 

Way beyond case management, the service cloud has many features that help in deflecting the cases and provide self-service options to the customers. In the beginning, a knowledge base is an important way to provide easy answers and critical information.

The lightning knowledge makes this easy to do right within the Salesforce. You can either make a public knowledge base or the one for registered customers, but either way, the information will deflect cases.

Rather, there is an amazing case deflection component that Salesforce offers out of the box. Using the type ahead-searching in the Submit case fields, the components recommend knowledge articles for improving the chances of solving an issue. This is one of the best ways to prevent Cases and give customers one of the best experiences.

It is also possible to deflect cases and addresses with a chatbot. By using Einstein bots, you can customize the Bot’s name and personality with the bot sitting right in the normal chat window that the agents use. The chatbots act like triage and handle more rots such as FAQs checking on order status, and basic company questions. In case the bot cannot find the answer, it can route it to an agent and create a case for the customer offering a seamless user experience.

To Conclude

 

By implementing the Sales Cloud module, you can easily get more deals on regular optimization of the business that improves market interaction. This will also help in making quick choices and business decisions. You can eventually close more and more deals at a quick rate and experience high returns on investments.

With the adaptation of the Salesforce Service Cloud module, you can get a maximized productivity from the agent’s end to work at any place and at any time. The customer experience also gets enhanced with the implementation of service cloud because it creates a lifetime value.

The Salesforce Service Cloud makes sure that data and confidential information stays secure and within the cloud platform for avoiding any kind of harm to the business. Faster case and report tracking also helps in detecting the loopholes in the business processes for working on it within time to improve sales.

To end, one can say that both the Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud are pretty effective modules. They are efficient in helping a small and large business while gaining more customers and doing better business.

How is Salesforce Sales Cloud Different from Service Cloud? Read More »

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CRM-for-retail

Why Your Retail Business Needs to Integrate CRM Software?

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With digitization becoming popular, businesses no longer run the same. Whether offline or online, the retail industry is undergoing a complete transformation. Being a customer-centric business, maintaining a strong relationship with customers is a must. A recent report has revealed that by 2020 retail sales will top $27 trillion. Staggering, doesn’t it? The market is huge. But with plenty of options available to customers, the competition is tough. To survive and excel incorporation of technology is no more a need rather a necessity.

As visible, the concept of shopping is now changing. The online marketing is gaining prominence. According to a recent survey, 51% of customers purchase stuff online. This has made the offline retailers to pull up their socks. A more personalized user interaction is the need of the time. But with an expanding customer base personalizing each interaction becomes tough. Here Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software comes into the scene. It is a robust and comprehensive software. With smartphone usage becoming common, a number of CRM mobile apps have entered the market. The retailers nowadays are using CRM mobile integration on a large scale.

That is to say, the CRM software is helping stores to serve their buyers in an efficient way. Curious to know more? Let’s have a look at why your retail business needs CRM integration. Here we go:

  • Image building – Building a positive image of your business is very important. With the help of CRM software, you can have a more professional approach in dealing with customers. An inviting image will attract buyers to your stores or services.
  • Personalized customer service – In a time when options are plenty having a loyal customer base is tough. A personalized interaction with your customers will help you in this direction. CRM software provides social media data, purchase history, likes and dislikes of every individual customer. This help store owners deal with their customers in a better way.
  • Better alignment of sales and marketing – Big data hold immense potential for businesses. A proper analysis of it will propel your business to heights. The marketing team can manage big data content with CRM integration. Also, by giving access to pricing literature and personalized dashboards, the CRM software can help the sales wing too.
  • Loyalty programs – Implementing loyalty programs can do wonders for your business. It’s a powerful tool but underused. By using CRM software, you can handle customer loyalty programs in an effective manner. It will help in managing customer profiles, their reward tiers and how can they redeem them. An online portal showing details of offers, complimentary coupons, current reward status etc. will help you in developing a loyal customer base.
  • Better inventory management – CRM software enables you to keep a track of intercompany transfers. You can check the availability of stocks, demand/supply ratio, and replenishment processes. Such in-depth information will help you in better management of your inventory. You’ll never go out of stock. This will help your business in the long run.

In brief, CRM software holds immense potential to deliver a superior customer service. In the times of the empowered customer, it will propel your business in the right direction. We at Encaptechno, have years of experience in CRM mobile integration. So, if you also wish to give your business a technological push, we are there to help you. Feel free to reach us at [email protected] and we will revert back at the earliest.

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Sales Automation – It`s More Than Just Sales

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In the business world, nothing is more precious than time. But, how often do you take measures that actually save you a plenty of time? If your whole sales process continues to operate in conventional ways, it means your sales team takes notes of everything worth noting down; schedules call to potential customers and arrange leads based on their priority. Any guesses, how much time your sales team goes into such processes? It is more than half. Don’t this sound alarming? Yes, it does. No business owner would let such a huge amount of time to go waste, nor should you. So what`s the solution?

Sales Automation is the best solution to put a brake on the time wastage. What it does is automates the tasks that sales teams do repeatedly – every day, every week and every month. Automation saves your company time, brings accuracy to tasks filled with errors and makes sales process speedy. Business owners now-a-days are implementing CRM tools like Salesforce, Zoho CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM to automate their sales process.

When I say sales automation automates every task sales team does, many businessmen may misunderstand the statement. They tend to make it mean something that completely replaces sales team, and that`s not true. In fact, sales team retains its relevancy, its position, its task even after deploying sales automation. It improves the sales process, renders complex processes, makes sales team efficient, removes errors and saves time. When automation takes care of recurrent tasks such as receiving and scheduling orders, making available information on shipping, updating customer information, it gives your sales team freedom to do other things that automation cannot do. Researching, cementing relationships with customers and figuring out ways to make automation more accessible to get the right proportion of technology and human workforce that makes your sales team look more professional.

These days every business sort of invests huge amounts in automation technology to boost sales. The estimated expenditure on sales automation was $3 billion way back in 2004, according to IDC report.

Tasks to Automate with Sales Automation

It`s time to discuss why sales automation is not just about sales only. In fact, multitudes of processes are there that you can automate with the help of sales automation to increase the productivity of your sales process.

  • Drafting an Email – One thing you see sales people constantly doing is sending emails and that consumes plenty of time. With sales automation, email drafting process gets a lot easier and speedy because of well-personalized email templates.
  • Calling a Lead – Dialing manually all your leads can be a tiresome thing to do. But by integrating CRM tools with your business, you can not only make the tasks simpler but also get to dial more leads than usual, which is not possible manually.
  • Prioritizing a Lead – It should be a daunting task to figure out who to call first, isn`t it? The same thing can be done quite easily by using right technology. Automation technology sorts and prioritizes leads based on their lead scores.
  • Taking a Note – When a call is established, next important thing to do is taking a note of, or writing down, what you deduced the positive points out of a call. Technology such as Salesforce CRM can automate the note-taking process by taking down call results automatically. It helps sales person keep track of his own performance and create a separate list of potential leads.
  • Scheduling an Appointment – Scheduling appointment is an important sales process that needs to be automated. You can create a schedule with the help of Salesforce Inbox, where you point out all your available times and potential customer can choose appointment time by clicking on the time he is available. With just a click, you get to schedule an appointment right away.
  • Specific Lead to Specific Person – It is the best feature you get with sales automation. Now your representatives will no longer have to transfer calls because with this advanced feature a call will be automatically transferred to the right department and right person based on their availability and skill, no more mixing up.

These are not the only tasks, but they are sufficient to give you the glimpse of how sales automation works and what changes it can bring to your work culture. They give you an idea how to save you time, energy and money.

With that said, you should not miss its other aspects which is equally important to be considered here. You should not get blindly obsessed with automation technology and totally ignore the human trying to establish human connection. This could destroy your aspect of building customer relationships. You have to make technology and human contact go side by side. After all, what automation can`t do, humans can. In business, customer relations are what matters the most!

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Salesforce Implementation

Salesforce Implementation from Chaotic to Exciting

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Salesforce Implementation

You have most probably launched a hunt for Salesforce consulting and development because you want to implement it in your own company, that could be the only reason you are here reading the article. Well, in that case, I need to lay down before you certain things about Salesforce that in the long run would help you in the successful implementation of the Salesforce in your business organization. So we will be learning about Salesforce implementation challenges, Salesforce implementation requirements and steps for successful Salesforce implementation. Well, in short, it will be about making the Salesforce implementation process more exciting, less chaotic.

Salesforce Implementation Challenges Business`s Face

There is no doubt about benefits to get after implementing Salesforce, but the process of implementation may not be a smooth one. It has its own challenges. The business owners sort of tend to ignore these challenges. Either because of misinformation, or they are completely unaware of the fact. So let`s take few of these challenges and discuss them one by one.

Calculating Salesforce Implementation Cost – The question that frequently creeps in during discussions on Salesforce implementation is how much does it really cost. Obsession with cost question negatively affects other considerations that are equally important but get ignored due to the emphasis on cost thing. They base their cost calculation exclusively on license requirements, which is not a right way to do, especially when you are yet to choose a Salesforce consulting company. The right way to go about is letting the consulting company properly analyze and design a model based on your business and then investing in the license.

  • Choosing the right Salesforce Implementation Company – The challenge with it is because if you choose a wrong company, your whole process of Salesforce implementation will not function according to what you had planned. Be it the marketing of your company, keeping track of sales, customer support services, Salesforce integrates them all. Any error in implementation process can tear down business operations of your business and make it slow, less efficient and disintegrated. So, you have to be extra careful while choosing a company for Salesforce implementation.
  • Keeping Track of Data Migration – The biggest challenge with Salesforce implementation is data migration. Keeping track of data when it is being migrated from one system to another can really be a headache. Any strategy you adopt during data migration, it should be such as would least impact your routine business.
  • Salesforce Integration with Business Applications – In order to cash in full benefits of Salesforce, its integration with every single business application your company has been using is necessary. These business applications include mobile apps, applications, and systems used inside your company, cloud computing applications and other IT infrastructure of your business organization. When I say integrating these systems and networks is must, there you have to also remember how significant a challenge it is to ensure the proper integration between these various systems and networks during Salesforce implementation.
  • Introducing Salesforce to your Team – Technology implementation would mean nothing if your team at your company do not understand how to operate it. That`s the biggest challenge. Introducing Salesforce app development to your team. It is the story common to every business organization, people don`t want to switch to new technology. They would rather do things traditional way than engage with modern sophisticated technology. You will have to introduce Salesforce to them, how it can benefit company and them as well. It is about getting their confidence.

Salesforce Implementation Requirements to Consider

In order to successfully implement – without any hindrance – the Salesforce, you should take care of following requirements before going for implementation process directly. It will help you take every step measurably and move ahead with confidence.

  • Create a Team – Based on accessibility and time commitment of people at your organization, you can create a team which can look after the whole project of Salesforce implementation, right from the beginning till the end. It is not helpful only in picking up the right candidate for the task at hand but will also give a plenty of time. Your team should be able to make decisions on behalf of the company and users as well and should have clear expectations in mind.
  • Document Needs and Requirements of Company – Well, before you partner with any Salesforce Implementation Company, your team should documents each and every need of your company based on merit. Some things you must have, some things are nice to have. It is the task of your team to choose between the two and decide upon one that really adds value to whole set up of your business organization. There will be a lot of data sharing taking place between your team and Salesforce consulting and development company unless to have already documented useful data, the process could get weird and lose track.
  • Defining Business Process – Every company markets itself distinctly has different channels to sell through and uses various ways to connect with its customers. While implementing Salesforce, much of the discussion would revolve around defining the business process of your company. How everything in your company operates should be already documented and vividly defined by your team, and then you will not miss on the target because it will include everything from data to security to business process.

Some Tips for Successful Salesforce Implementation

Not always is the implementation process smooth and anxiety-free. It can really get weird sometimes. But here are few steps you can follow for successful implementation of Salesforce in your company.

  1. Plan an integration of Salesforce with other business applications well in advance. The objective should be to streamline all your business processes and get everything connected and centralized.
  2. Introduce your team to Salesforce and make them understand what this technology is all about and what benefits to reap with it. Distribute tasks among various members of your team, resolve any after-math issues and take care of what they say.
  3. Only that data should be migrated which is of real use to the company, get rid of everything else before data migration starts. It would give you enough time to remove errors and typos and clean up your data.
  4. Update Salesforce regularly to make use of new features introduced periodically. It is must for keeping business process relevant and enhances adaptability.

While the Salesforce is a great thing to have, its implementation is always a very daunting process. So you need someone who understands and masters Salesforce implementation, someone who is reliable and has a name in the market. In short, you need to join hands with Encaptechno and meet our Salesforce certified developers to know more about our services. We understand your needs, and we know how to successfully implement Salesforce.

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