July 1st, 2020

Salesforce, when implemented well, is one of the most powerful CRM platforms in existence. When setting up your Salesforce instance, it's important to have business processes in place, a sound data structure, and a pleasant user experience so people will not only use it but use it properly. It's common for folks to miss important features or misconfigure an org when setting up a Salesforce instance. It's also common for folks to set everything up correctly but people don't actually end up using the new system. 

Here's how 5 companies optimized their Salesforce usability in order to see tangible results:

Global Hotel Brand

A global hotel brand decided to revamp their customer service process by creating a more efficient call center experience. Together with Acumen Solutions, we took several disparate systems and fused them into one holistic platform that empowered call center agents to do their jobs more efficiently, which resulted in increased customer satisfaction and lower onboarding costs. One of our key goals was to make the language human and easy to understand so agents knew what to expect from each click. It was important that an agent could follow a task from start to finish without getting lost in the system. We also needed to make sure agents could exit a flow if the customer request changed — so we identified auxiliary information that should accompany the main flow. Through rapid prototyping and user testing, we revamped their Salesforce instance to improve customer service agents' experience overall. In fact, time to train a new agent dropped 80% and the original 6-8 week training period dropped to only 1.5 weeks. The agents reported the new interface was clean, easy to read, and intuitive to use.

Briya Public Charter School

Briya's Excel-based school management system was becoming increasingly problematic and time consuming for their teachers and school administrators. We created ways to streamline data collection and increase reporting use in Salesforce for the full student lifecycle, including registration, enrollment, attendance tracking, calendar, and grade-keeping to give teachers and administrators the insight they really need to get the full picture of the whole student. Workflows, triggers, and Apex classes were used to enhance the Salesforce objects’ functionality in many ways, among which are helping to limit repetitive data entry and to ensure data quality. To date, Briya has generated over 315 custom reports and in 2018, they won the Data Excellence Award from DC Public Charter School Board.

The Mentor Network

The Mentor Network is a health and human services provider, offering quality services and support for thousands of individuals across the country. Providing high-quality care is, and will always be, The Mentor Network’s top priority — and to do that effectively and successfully, those responsible for providing care must be able to track, record, and analyze key data points. We traveled across the country talking to multiple user types from two service locations for each business line. Scheduling dedicated time with each group was critical to gaining a holistic view of the implementation, both to understand how each business line leverages the power of the platform and where users were struggling most with its features and functionality. We analyzed findings from over 100 interviews to create a new and improved Salesforce system that makes sense for them.

GSA 

The GSA’s Automated Advanced Acquisition Program is designed to connect commercial real estate holders who would like to lease space to federal agencies with federal managers responsible for finding space to lease. AAAP hired us to redesign and optimize the user experience within the context of a migration to what was then, a new Salesforce platform, Force.com. While web pages supporting the exchange existed previously online, they were extremely cumbersome and non-intuitive. The process required the real estate holder to complete a linear series of dense forms requiring a lot of detailed information – without the ability to save or manage input. We created a Salesforce system that no longer overwhelmed users with massive forms and also created a way for users to easily start and save their progress. 

Major Automobile Company

This major car company needed to build a more robust, modern collaboration platform for its dealerships, in order to facilitate corporate communication, provide a platform for service and other requests, and reduce the manual load on its partnership managers. Working with corporate and dealer-level users, we helped envision a Dealer Portal with optimized workflows, transparent accountability, and an enriched experience using Salesforce Communities. We increased operational efficiency through workflow automation, which allowed Marketing managers to spend more time supporting their dealers. Streamlining this process resulted in higher customer satisfaction overall on dealer experience with issues, warranty, and repairs.

Whether you've been using Salesforce for years or are just starting out on the platform, there's plenty you can do to harness the full power of the system and increase user adoption across your organization. Download our checklist to see if your organization is ready for a Salesforce Optimization.