April 5th, 2016

Does your look and feel carry through your customers' experience? 

Last week, we walked you through the pivotal questions to ask yourself when considering if you should customize Salesforce:

  1. How important is it that the new platform allow you to maintain and support your current processes and workflow as is?  Do you need this platform to augment to your team’s effectiveness?
  2. Do you need additional functions which are not included within off-the-shelf Salesforce?
  3. Will the new platform be a core component of your overall customer experience? Will your brand suffer if the experience of using it sucks?

We covered identifying when data, workflow and processes necessitate that you customize Salesforce as well as when you should explore custom features or apps. This week, we’ll focus on the often overlooked, but critical importance of levering your brand into Salesforce.

The Look and Feel of Your Brand

In today’s marketplace, every single point of interaction with your organization matters. No matter who your customers or clients are, they have a growing expectation that whenever and wherever they interact with you, the experience will be as convenient and ‘on-brand’ as possible. You can be sure that if you fall short in that regard they will be looking elsewhere for what they want. Our society has an ever-diminishing degree of patience for poor customer experiences.

Clean Office Space
If your Salesforce were a physical experience, would it look like this?

Imagine that you’re inviting clients over to your office. You’d probably clean up the conference room, make sure your laptops hook up to your display properly, and hang your name on the door – right? You’d also make sure security knew to expect them or they had the right number to call upon arrival. These basic principals are the exact same when it comes to welcoming your clients, partners, or prospects to your digital space.

If the Salesforce platform you have in mind is going to play a central role in your dialogue with customers or partners, it needs to be brand-fluid and easily navigable. A frustrating online experience all too quickly sours a customer’s overall opinion of a brand.

To customize Salesforce to accommodate your brand can be a relatively easy process. At LookThink, we pair our User Experience experts and Front End Developers to evaluate your brand, the purpose of your customer’s interaction with your platform and industry standards. We provide recommendations on how your brand can best be carried out through your client portal and adjustments that makes their experience seamless and convenient. Leaving your website to enter a portal shouldn’t be noticeable.

Internal Branding is Important, Too

Just because your employees aren't customers doesn't mean that they aren't also very important users who have similar, if not higher, expectations regarding their interaction with your brand. Poor user experience internally can lead to a break down in processes, various work arounds that complicate data, and poor morale. Your employees should feel the tools they use are seamless with their work flows; how that looks and feels is a large part of seamless integration. 

Ask yourself:

  • Who are your users and what experience will they have from a usability and branding standpoint?
  • Will they be accessing your platform off your website or through other branded material such as a landing page or email campaign?
  • Will your users have experienced similar portals and functions from your competitors? How important is it to differentiate yourself from them in your portal?