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Customer centricity with technology – the undisputable advantages of Salesforce CRM

It is obvious that customer-facing functions are changing fast. Companies are relying on technology in delivering more value to the customer – the quicker the better. Keeping up with technology infrastructures, avoiding silos and enabling transparency are critical. As a tool, a CRM solution used alone cannot deliver the best results. It needs to be combined with a proper customer-centric design approach using the customer journey framework.

Salesforce CRM empowers employees with the information they need for making the best decisions for every customer with trustworthiness and speed. With the easily available, on-time, valid information, they can serve the customers efficiently, adding value in every step of the customer lifecycle.

In this article, Deloitte’s Specialist Leads Prince Kumar and Anand Bhardwaj dig deep into the advantages of Salesforce and give a few pointers on the importance of building a customer journey.

Deliver value with lightning speed

Data, decisions, discounts, offers – customer-facing technologies must be able to take in a lot these days. When it comes to any modern CRM solution, organising customer data in order to provide a complete 360° view across the channels and deliver the targeted customer experience and business value. Anand Bhardwaj describes the situation:

‘In organisations, Salesforce – as a solution – not only speeds up the sales process but also improves communication with better information flow, automates business processes, enables better customer support and contributes to order-fulfilment processes. The impact is holistic, touching the entire customer journey and experience.’

‘Salesforce’s core CRM capabilities, along with the industry-specific solutions built by ISV (independent software vendor) partners on the Salesforce platform, enable organisations to take their innovation to market faster and keep their focus on business values. With a tonne of declarative, predefined capabilities, you can deliver your CRM system with a few clicks rather than spending time on coding. This enables agility in the very first set-up and when the dynamically changing markets or improving internal practices require changes,Prince Kumar continues.

Salesforce is a market leader in the CRM domain with two clear main advantages: trustworthiness and speed. Data can be trusted in the cloud which, in turn, gives more uptime and access points, resulting in delivering business value faster. Salesforce, together with Deloitte’s deep business understanding and tested best practices, enables rapid and agile implementation for client projects.

‘Salesforce CRM and Saleforce’s platform form an intriguing combination that is legacy-driven yet enables one to always stay ahead in the game. It’s simple UI architecture increases user adaption in order to provide business value the fastest, not to mention providing the latest innovations and continuous improvements to the technology,’ Bhardwaj explains.
 

Understanding the customer is the key

No matter how good the solution is, if the groundwork is not done properly, it will not bring the right value to the customer experience. Hence, when investing in CRM, the importance of defining a solid customer journey should be recognised.

‘It really is a very outdated way of working to build a solution first and then think of fitting it to the user,’ Bhardwaj points out.

Kumar describes the situation: ‘Customer needs and expectations continuously evolve, which means that understanding a customer is a continuous process as well. Getting ahead of the curve requires a complete 360 degree view of the customer and the ability to decide on the precise next steps based on all your past interactions. This is where Salesforce is best with its console-based UI and powerful Einstein AI that can be used to generate recommendations, predictions and the next best action. This results in higher efficiency, a very personalised customer experience and more cross/up-sell opportunities.’

According to Bhardwaj and Kumar, the main goal should always be to design a solution with a human-centric approach. In practice, start by understanding the customer value and the purchase processes first, and then match these to the capabilities, illustrating a fluent user flow from the employee perspective, and only then combining technology as a tool to enable an efficient collaboration flow. The customer journey is both a functional framework and a starting point for implementation.

‘For example, we helped a global client with the CRM selection process. Our key contribution was to develop a customer journey, a TO-BE CRM capability map and compare those with CRM options and clients’ AS-IS IT capabilities. The capability map and customer journey were developed by combining Deloitte CRM expertise and the client’s needs. We discovered the client’s needs by interviewing sales, business process experts and technical stakeholders ’ Bhardwaj explains.

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