Welcome to the age of the Customer. The only riddle that matters here is—how to connect better with them, carve meaningful relationships, address their problems faster and exceed their expectations. But what seems easily achievable, is apparently not so simple. Why? Well, because your enterprise might be using various application, which may be functioning in silos, restricting your efficiency, operational consistency and quality. And all of it contributes to customer dissatisfaction, directly.
How to deal with it? Short and simple answer – by integrating your systems and data that reside both on-premises and in the cloud using Salesforce
Salesforce integration provides a synchronized and collaborative experience by disabling IT bottlenecks, streamlining data flows among applications, and enabling them to speak the same language across all business processes.
Here’s why Salesforce integration can turn the tide for your business.
STREAMLINING PROCESSES ACROSS MULTIPLE LANDSCAPES
Streamlining the sales process is the first step towards achieving synchronization. Your organization landscape may spread across multiple systems, locations, even continents; you may be talking to your partners and customers via many separate channels like cloud, mobile, social and partner networks; you may need to integrate billing of front and back office apps to integrate with ERP, CRM or financial systems, etc. Integration scenarios can be manifold. Some may entail a fixed set of applications with several integrations, or multiple applications and several integrations, but their collaboration is imperative for a sound performance.
Salesforce can infuse great levels of efficiency, eliminating traditional hindrances and ensuring free flow of information.
SMARTER BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE WITH IPAAS
For executing platform-to-platform integrations, such as with Salesforce’s Force.com, an iPaaS can be of use. By making diverse applications and software components compatible, iPass, the scalable subscription-based platform for integration, enhances reporting abilities, facilitates creation of detailed custom reports, and constructs on premise repositories for several kinds of reports to feed other apps.
Apart from little or no hardware requirement to maintain and run integration processes, iPaas lets data from cloud or on-premise to sync in real time, turning it into actionable intelligence, accessible from social apps or mobile devices.
Recognizing trends and insights across sales, support, and buying habits is pivotal; it’s the basis of your next step towards growth.
DATA COMPLEXITY MADE SIMPLE
As your business grows, systems expand, processes extend in different directions; often several components of the same data are analyzed by separate teams.
A simplest of examples can be a company offering a time bound warranty and refund on a product. For that it needs the purchase date, the warranty expiry date, and the reason for refund. Data would be required by a contract renewal rep (who’d deal with the customer), marketing/product team rep (who might be interested in the reason for the refund request), the account department rep, through whom the refund would actually take place.
Integrating Salesforce with your ERP system or field service solution will offer the right visibility needed to operate smoothly through these layers of data. Everybody gets a view of what they need, fast and on-demand, resulting in better growth.
ACHIEVING EFFICIENCY STARTS WITH SALESFORCE INTEGRATION
Customer information may be distributed over several systems. By connecting other application with Salesforce, you get a free flow of information, easy access to analyze data, and no hassles of multiple logins. But there’s more to efficiency than that.
For instance, in a b2c environment, when a sales opportunity is closed, the inventory manager might want the inventory information to draw a particular product from the storehouse, wrap it up, and do the needful for shipping it. The accounting system on the other hand must know the exact details of the product, the time when an invoice needs to be raised and sent to the customer.
It’s precisely this part where every department must have the right information at a given time in a business cycle. This is what efficiency is really about.
WRAPPING UP
Out of the many applications used by enterprises today, a majority of them aren’t built to collaborate with others. Each of them can have different data, user interface, layers of security as well as business logic. And these typically are the areas that need to be integrated.
To create a suitable integration strategy for your system, the first step would be to take into account your scope, requirements, IT environment, resources, existing technologies, users, and the tools needed for the task. Apart from being a technology issue, integration is equally a significant business decision having serious strategic outcomes for organizations.
A sound Salesforce integration solution can be an opportunity to streamline your business and amplify growth.
Ready to find out how you can leverage from it?
GET IN TOUCH!
If you are seeking a suitable Salesforce integration solution for your enterprise, then Happiest Minds can help you with it. You can find us here.
Sachin Singh is a hands-on technology leader with expertise in building business solutions using Salesforce framework. His expertise and interest lies in Salesforce roadmap planning, implementation, training and enablement. He lead successful design and delivery of Salesforce implementation for Retail, Healthcare, Non Profits, Banking and other industries.
