Top 5 Reasons to Run Your Customer Success on Salesforce
This interactive eBook explains the top five reasons why organizations like yours already choose to run their projects, processes and workflows on the Salesforce platform. Read on to find out more.
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CHAPTER 1
Customer 360
1. Customer 360
What is a customer 360?
With a single, shared view of your customers, your teams can better meet your customer demands.
Salesforce defines Customer 360 as a way to ‘give everyone in your company a single, shared view of your customers’. This means that all of your teams, from marketing and sales, through to commerce, service and IT departments, can all work as one – allowing you to deliver personalized experiences that customers love, and giving you the foundations to build lasting, trusted relationships.
Linking Sales and Service Clouds
Projects form a vital component of your Customer 360. While onboarding projects complete the crucial link between Sales and Service, while Customer Success initiatives and projects are a great way to keep to build and improve customer relationships on Salesforce. But only if you’re using the correct systems.
When managing customer relationships, the best solutions connect your entire business around the customer, from sales, service, and marketing to IT, and analytics. For the best customer experiences, it’s vital you’re using the same system for both sales, onboarding and service.
We loved the ability to see a complete picture of our entire lifecycle. This tool is highly flexible and allows for visibility into large projects and the fine details of quick turnaround work.
G2 Review
Managing customer projects using Salesforce means you can easily log, manage, and analyze all customer activity in one place. The Salesforce platform provides an ecosystem of fully connected mobile and social tools all powered by the cloud, with Customer 360 at the heart. With Sales Cloud and Service Cloud working in tandem on the same platform, your business can keep up with the speed, innovation, and connectivity that produces great customer experiences leading to customer loyalty. By connecting all of your data, you can build 360-degree views of each customer and provide seamless interactions across any channel or department.
By using one of the Salesforce native Project Management or PSA tools from the AppExchange you can seamlessly connect onboarding projects to all your favorite Salesforce records such as accounts, opportunities or cases, so customer data flows freely giving you that true 360 Customer view. Deals can be closed from the Sales Cloud, Customers can be onboarded using a Salesforce-native app like Cloud Coach, and ongoing support can be provided from the Service Cloud. The whole customer journey with you, managed without leaving Salesforce.
Create tailored, relevant customer experiences
Although processes are largely repeatable, no two customers are the same. By giving your team a way to access crucial customer data (on anything from needs, history, interests and even their frustrations), your team can serve experiences tailored that meet the needs of your customers. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? By Onboarding with the Salesforce platform account managers will always have access to up-to-date information before in advance of any customer or client call under the account record, be it project timelines, change requests, billing information and more.
CHAPTER 2
Reduce Handoffs
2. Reduce Handoffs
Remove ambiguity from internal handoffs
Managing a customer project can be a time-consuming process. From sales, through to project teams and ultimately customer success teams, there’s a lot of information and knowledge that needs to be transferred in a structured – and ideally repeatable – way within your organization.
By running your projects from Salesforce, the handoff from Sales could be as simple as a single click, allowing you to automatically launch your projects when opportunities close. You can convert opportunities and CPQ into new projects in seconds, at any point during the sales cycle. You can even leverage templates to drive best practices through your company and keep your whole updated on progress by displaying your onboarding projects status back to your opportunity and account records.
One system gives you control
By storing all of your information from across the whole project lifecycle in one single system, you can manage all your stakeholders – and your time – far more effectively. All data is accessible from the same place projects are being managed – meaning there’s no need to switch between Salesforce, spreadsheets or any other form of siloed technologies something that takes time and compromises quality. Everyone is working from the same system, with the same information; anything from client communications through to task assignments, all managed in a single platform.
Salesforce also ensures that everyone has visibility of the project. When delivering client-facing projects you can use an ‘external view’ and communities to bring customers into the picture, allowing you to share project updates in real time, alongside other information like project meeting minutes. Crucially, you can also use permissions to ensure you’re sharing the right information with the right people, at the right time.
CHAPTER 3
Customer Satisfaction
3. Customer Satisfaction
Create tailored, relevant customer experiences
Although processes are largely repeatable, no two customers are the same. By giving your team a way to access crucial customer data (on anything from needs, history, interests and even their frustrations), your team can serve experiences tailored that meet the needs of your customers.
It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? With the Salesforce platform account managers will always have access to up-to-date information before in advance of any customer or client call under the account record, be it project timelines, change requests, billing information and more. Everything is on hand to make your customer experience as simple as possible.
Using the Salesforce platform to deliver is great service is critical to building lasting customer relationships. But how can you be sure your customer is truly satisfied?
Track customer health metrics
Managing your customer success projects on Salesforce gives you the opportunity to track your customer health metrics, allowing you to record scores in a range of configurable areas.
By monitoring experiences (like product and onboarding experience) and outcomes (such as adoption, engagement and deployment) separately within Salesforce, your customer success teams can quickly and easily identify areas of improvement, ensuring your customers are receiving the best service, and getting the best results, every time. It can be as easy as a traffic light system!
CHAPTER 4
Get More From Salesforce
4. Get More From Salesforce
Your organization is already investing a lot in Salesforce, in both money and time. So why not leverage that existing investment to expedite and improve your customer success processes?
Leverage your admin knowledge
When looking at the right solutions for your organization, there are lots of factors to consider; like data security and costs, for example. Something that is often overlooked though, is knowledge.
Your business uses Salesforce already. And you’ve likely invested in your people, ensuring they have sufficient training levels to take on the tasks required by a Salesforce admin. If you decide to use an off-Salesforce platform solution, you’ll need to upskill even more members of your team to administer a third-party platform. By using a customer success system native to Salesforce, most of your training is already done!
Cut IT & procurement headaches
Deciding on the right customer success solution for your organization can be transformative. Quicker projects, happier customers, and more fruitful working partnerships. But once you’ve decided on the best system for your business, there’s one final obstacle that you need to navigate through.
Procurement and IT teams will naturally be cautious about adding another tool to your organization’s ecosystem, particularly when that tool is intended to house vast amounts of internal and external customer data and information.
If you decide to use a Salesforce-native app for your customer success, such as Cloud Coach, all your data is stored by Salesforce with your CRM data, so you can skip the lengthy security check stage completely: speeding up your time to value from your new solution!
CHAPTER 5
Better KPI Reporting
5. Better KPI Reporting
Collecting data is one thing, but presenting it to your management team in a manner that lets them make informed decisions to improve the business is another. In a busy work day, accessing that information needs to be easy, sharing it needs to be simple, and it should be presented in an easily digestible, relevant format.
Customization
With a Salesforce customer success solution can come with a set of out of the box reports while also allowing further customization, so all the reports and dashboards that your executives need to make decisions to drive your business forward are always at hand.
By running your customer success on Salesforce, you can report on all your KPIs in real time, 24 hours a day from any device, and easily share with relevant executives – to same even more time, these emails can be automated to send at a regular cadence of your choosing!
CHAPTER 6
Conclusion
What Next?
So, you’ve taken a look at how using Salesforce for customer success could be the right step for your organization. The next question you need to explore is: how do I make that happen?
By leveraging the expertise of your consulting partners, or even your internal Salesforce experts, you may have the capabilities to build an basic onboarding solution on Salesforce in house if your needs are simple and unlikely to change. Or you might considering buying an AppExchange solution instead. Before making any decision though, there are a number of factors you should consider. Cost, control, maintenance and risk will all need to be carefully evaluated.
There’s a great Buy or Build guide available at Projects on Salesforce to help you decide what makes the most sense for your organization.
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