Helpful Hints from Hollie: quick wins with Salesforce

12th June 2020 by Hollie Armstrong in Salesforce
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The positive side to the COVID-19 crisis was that it prompted a wave of innovation in business. As part of BrightGen’s service management team, I speak to customers every day about how they can take advantage of Salesforce to change and adapt. 

I’ve gathered a few examples of how our team has helped our customers in the last couple of months. I hope these will be helpful hints to get you thinking differently about some of the challenges you might be facing when it comes to getting value from Salesforce. It’s not always as difficult as you might think!

Integration of Files in Salesforce

A couple of our customers found that they were wasting a lot of time uploading documents to both Salesforce and Microsoft SharePoint. This was doubling their efforts but they needed to make the documents available for different internal audiences. They wanted to find out if they could upload the document to one place and have it save in multiple locations at once. 

This is something BrightGen has enabled for several companies. If you need to attach files knowing your whole business is using the same version, we can configure it for you in Salesforce. This way files can be centrally stored and retrieved either in Salesforce, where potentially the majority of the day-to-day activity occurs, or directly via the application. We have done this for organisations using Microsoft Sharepoint and also Power Automate.

Streamlining authorisation process

A different customer told me they were frustrated with creating repeat Conga Forms from scratch for relatively minor purposes. They needed to record signatures to get things authorised but the process was highly manual. They had to record the same data across multiple systems and the admin of filling in Salesforce fields was laborious, risking human error when recording data. Sometimes data was being skipped altogether.

We showed them how to create pre-populated forms. As the forms didn’t need to be signed for legal reasons, it could be done electronically. This could then all be set up so that Salesforce fields would automatically be updated with new data, including the authorisation signature. Everything is now available in one place, rather than across multiple systems. Their process is digitalised, low-effort and automatic.

Preventing spam mail

This will be a familiar story to many – our customer came to us with the challenge of receiving thousands of spam emails every day. These were coming from bots accessing their online forms.

BrightGen’s service management team implemented Recaptcha for them. This solution has saved them time and effort trawling through emails to find what they really wanted to see as well as saving data storage space which helps with processing speeds.

Lightning isn’t just about Salesforce

Pardot users: did you know that when you migrate to the Lightning experience in Salesforce, you should also upgrade Pardot? We guided one of our customers through this Pardot transition, helping them rethink their entire customer journey in the process enabling them to utilise the B2B analytics that come with Pardot functionality. With a little bit of planning and thought as to your customer’s journey, you will be able to analyse the associated data.

Communication is everything when working remotely

With reduced ability for face to face meetings during lockdown, we’ve been helping a number of customers reconfigure their infrastructure to manage the new way of working.

Many of our customers have come to us with issues around setting up remote working while their offices have been closed. Their employees have had to find new ways to fulfil their role. To facilitate home working or remote working, we’ve helped them implement Okta. This utilises 2-Factor Authentication and Single Sign On. As a result, employees have been able to work remotely and the company’s security has not been compromised. They only need to log in once and access all parts of the system they need to access. 

We’ve spoken to companies who don’t have offices where their clients are, so they’re unable to conduct face-to-face communications with their customers. For these companies, we’ve enabled ‘web chat’. This has been particularly valued by those with customers based in Asia or in different time zones.

Customers can be anywhere in the world and when they want to ask questions or know more about products right there and right then. They can use their mobile phone or web chat to communicate directly with customer service agents.  This is not only more efficient, but also reflects the shift to using social media apps to enable a more human exchange, brining more of a personal touch.
 

If you have been toying with these ideas for your business, or have any other questions you’d like to run past us, please get in touch. We are certainly learning to re-balance our business and here to help you re-balance yours.