Most of the world’s largest Salesforce end users are also Deloitte clients, making Deloitte an excellent place to develop as a Salesforce Architect.

What did you do previously?
Before joining our Salesforce talent group at Deloitte in January 2020, I worked for the online fashion retailer Zalando for a couple of years. At Zalando, my team managed the implementation of the Salesforce Service Cloud for the customer care technology department. More than 3,000 customer care agents, serving Zalando’s millions of customers across 17 countries, actively use this contact center application. I personally was involved in planning, designing and executing various projects around social customer service, KPI improvements through automation and a chatbot pilot project.

Prior to Zalando, I worked as a product owner for a luxury retail jewelry brand based in Mumbai. My prior assignments were mainly in consulting with Deloitte as well as another consultancy firm, both strategic partners for Salesforce with a global client base.

Why did you decide to join Deloitte’s Salesforce team?
During the two years I worked at Zalando, I missed the internal training and certification support that Deloitte provides, not to mention the other forms of guidance that employees receive. Having previously worked for Deloitte in India, I knew what kind of support I could expect, and was keen to return to the company and further develop my skills. Most of the world’s largest Salesforce end users are also Deloitte clients, making Deloitte an excellent place to develop as a Salesforce Architect. I thus decided to return to Deloitte to work toward becoming a Salesforce Certified Technical Architect (CTA) – a “crown jewel” in the Salesforce credential system, requiring extensive project experience and cloud computing knowledge.

Tell us more about your daily work: With what kind of issues do you deal with, and what are your specific tasks as a Specialist Lead? 
I am currently working on automating marketing processes for Deloitte Germany’s Salesforce CRM. In past months, we were successfully able to standardize our Sales CRM using the GDPR template offered by Salesforce as an out-of-the-box package. Last month, we tested our first automated newsletter sends using the Marketing Cloud and are currently working on upcoming releases for the end of May.

My day-to-day tasks include working as an interface between stakeholders and key users, understanding their needs and CRM processes. Once analyzed, my team and I work closely to structure these requirements as user stories, in order to follow an agile method of project management.

As an architect, I am personally responsible for designing solutions and building prototypes that later help my team members to build the actual solution, which key users can then test and evaluate. We are constantly working on implementing the latest features while ensuring efficient user journeys, in order to provide our end users and Deloitte’s customers a best-in-class user experience.

What are your current challenges in the world of Salesforce and how do you meet them?
Salesforce is constantly evolving as a product and ecosystem. While originally a CRM solution, Salesforce has now become a larger ecosystem of products, with components like Marketing Cloud, Einstein Analytics and Mulesoft that are essential for a customer’s IT landscape.

A key challenge that remains to address is to ensure interoperability of functional modules across the ecosystem: For example, we have currently implemented GDPR templates in Sales Cloud (a data privacy framework) across multiple mid-size to large projects; however, support for these objects in Marketing Cloud is very limited.

Thanks to our EMEA alliance with Salesforce, we have direct contact with the product teams from Salesforce that are working on providing upgrades in the upcoming release. This has allowed us to align our implementation with upcoming product upgrades, thus streamlining implementation processes and costs for clients.

Teamwork is essential in every project. What makes your team particularly effective?
My colleagues at Deloitte are very creative, both professionally and in their private lives. We often brainstorm solutions collaboratively; the diversity of our team ensures a variety of perspectives, thus facilitating solutions that are more robust. We all find this collaborative style of working very engaging during our workday. This allows everyone to bring ideas forward while learning continuously from one another

What do you like most about your job?
I am a people person, so I greatly appreciate the opportunity to work with people from diverse backgrounds in an international and friendly atmosphere. The work at Deloitte has offered invaluable opportunities for networking, enabling me to both share and gain knowledge.

The firm initiatives at Deloitte have also allowed me to explore other sides of my professional persona – for example, as a Salesforce trainer during our Dive-In program. As someone with nine years of industry experience, I have a unique opportunity to steward newcomers and serve as a mentor to the next generation of consultants. This is the aspect of my job that I love the most.

Currently, the Salesforce team is looking to grow. What kind of people do you seek to hire?
We are always on the lookout for talented individuals who want a great place to work while sharing their creativity and innovative spirit. We are primarily interested in professionals with prior Salesforce experience, but we also consider individuals with 1 - 2 years of relevant experience in CRM and Digital Marketing domains.

The training and certification initiatives at Deloitte offer all professionals a great opportunity to advance their knowledge in areas they would like to explore. The constant inflow of interesting projects at Deloitte offers ample possibilities for hands-on creativity while working with Salesforce.

Professionals with extensive experience are sure to find opportunities for growth at Deloitte, given our large-scale projects, which provide fertile ground for learning and applying best practice in design and delivery.

What is your personal advice for success on the Salesforce team at Deloitte?
Now in its twenty-first year, the Salesforce ecosystem continues to grow, meaning there will always be new skills to develop and credentials to attain. My advice to our practitioners would be to invest time to understand Deloitte’s consulting methods. Our knowledge exchange platform offers hundreds of project management and strategy templates, which can be quite useful in your day-to-day work. This platform furnishes a real sense of community at Deloitte, for it allows individuals to collaborate, learn from each other, and share knowledge. Our monthly KX sessions offer a great opportunity for technology enthusiasts to learn new tools and methods; such knowledge transfer is crucial given the fast pace of technological change in the present-day workplace.

Want to learn more about opportunities in Salesforce at Deloitte? If so, take a look at our career website – the first step to joining Deloitte!