February 2022

Salesforce Experience Cloud and its Benefits What if you could deliver amazing experiences that were personalised for your customers and partners? With Experience Cloud you can build sites, portals and forums faster than ever. You can start from a selection of pre-built templates, like a self-service community, where your customers can help each other including case deflection and customer engagement, or a personalised portal where your customers can securely access data and take action from any device. Extend the power of your CRM data to your partners so that they can manage their business faster. And because you are building a digital experience on salesforce, you can extend your CRM to everyone in your community. Drag and drop components, content and processes. Change the UI of your experience as per your brand and use your CRM data to personalise it for every user. You can also develop your custom components and themes and even access pre-built components and solutions on the AppExchange to innovate faster. Going digital is the way forward today. The pandemic has revealed two facts about business transformation: the digital experience is necessary for businesses to survive, and customers expect to interact online with companies effortlessly and intuitively. Digital experiences that connect customers and facilitate a digital transformation, empowers them to engage and take action. To make this leap to go all-digital, partner with an experienced Salesforce Consulting Company and get going on these 3 points: Go to Market with your experiences ASAP And update them even faster to adapt to what’s evolving with market trends as well as within your own business. Create personalised and actionable customer interactions One you integrate all customer data and business processes on a unified platform, it will empower your customers to take swift action. Deliver a uniform multichannel customer journey across all touchpoints Customers must feel compelled to “stick” to the digital ecosystem you have created for them. Image Source – salesforce.org These needs have been the driving parameters behind the creation of Experience Cloud, and today many businesses are creating an endless ensemble of digital experiences that are critical to their mission and goals. What is Experience Cloud? Experience Cloud empowers customers to go-to-market faster, deliver data driven experiences, and connect everything together to deliver a seamless customer journey, all of which gives them a clear competitive edge. With Experience Cloud companies can quickly deploy portals, websites, mobile apps, and many other digital touch points to engage with customers, and digitize business processes to move faster in the digital world. Experience Cloud brings together Experience Builder, Salesforce CMS, Mobile Publisher, and a suite of in-house apps to power the entire customer journey. All of this, integrated with the power of the world’s #1 CRM. Discover the experience that is driving customer relationships and revenue. Pre-built apps. Drag-and-drop tools. Code-less way to help you grow. Create without waiting. Empower your teams to iterate in an agile framework and deliver engaging digital experiences using prebuilt apps in a virtually code-less environment. Do data the right way. Deliver personalized content with AI-driven processes. Foster long lasting stronger relationships through a unified platform. Unite your teams and empower customers with foresight. Deliver seamless experiences and actionable insight across teams. Image Source – salesforce.org Here are some benefits you can derive from the digital experience built on the World’s most powerful CRM platform BUILD YOUR EXPERIENCE Customise your experience to align with your requirements. Business Integration Deliver digital experiences with data across systems, anywhere. Customers can create and escalate support cases. Partners can update opportunities and qualify leads. Employees can access and share files. Personalisation Connect with experts, groups, and content with automated suggestions. Recommendations are based on individual behaviour, needs and interests which facilitates greater community participation. Customisation and Branding Customise Experience Cloud to align with your brand and widen your digital experiences. Create awesome, easy-to-use interactive environments. Mobile Collaborate anywhere, from any device. Access digital experiences through any device. Deliver powerful, custom branded, mobile-responsive experiences anywhere. Lightning Bolt Effortlessly create future ready experiences and portals that seamlessly integrate with Salesforce. Topics Access all information with auto-generated pages based on relevant topics. Aggregate content – discussions, files, groups, and experts in a single view. Chatter Collaboration Empower employees to collaborate on tasks, find experts, get updates, and more. Foster an innovative workplace where anyone from anywhere can contribute. Groups Structure your online conversations and activities. Create groups for an upcoming event, a new project, or a campaign. Share files and information and content across teams. CONNECT YOUR CUSTOMERS Deliver 5 star service with powerful, user friendly portals and experiences, with intelligent self-service. Knowledge Empower your customers to help themselves and enable your agents to work smarter, with easy access to knowledge base content and the collective wisdom of the community. Case Escalation Customers can create cases on their own, followed by automated escalation based on keywords, or if a query goes unresolved. Agents can answer publicly or privately. Engagement Recognize the most active members in the community and make them stand out by associating them with customizable badges. Empower members to create a vibrant community by allowing them to endorse each other for specific skills and expertise. Ecommerce Integrate your ecommerce platform and enable customers to search and buy products in one branded, device friendly social environment thereby creating new purchasing opportunities Experience Management Measure and analyse metrics, such as adoption and engagement, popular topics, users and groups by utilizing preconfigured and customisable Lightning dashboards in the experience management console. GROW PARTNER SALES Fast track your sales channels by connecting directly with distributors, resellers and partners. Sales Force Automation Share contacts, leads, and records with partners. Integrate easily with third-party systems to centralise pricing, inventory, and other relevant data. Data Sharing Connect product experts and partners and customise sharing settings to enable partners to access only relevant information. Actions Take appropriate action promptly right in the feed. Convert leads to opportunities and approve or adjust allocated marketing spends. Design customised actions for third party app integrations. Dashboards and Reports Track, monitor and manage partner performance, share reports and dashboards and ensure alignment on key business objectives. Get deep insight with Einstein Analytics by connecting with any external data source. Customer 360 vision is the foundation of the Salesforce’s digital experience platform (DXP). Work with your Salesforce Consultant to deliver connected, rich digital experiences — fast. Reimagine the customer experience, drive customer engagement, and fast-track growth across industries with data-driven, powerful UI experiences. Want to know more about enriching customer experience? CONTACT US

Stay ahead in the game with a unified, agile commerce platform developed on the world’s #1 CRM. Commerce Cloud lets you start selling online, FAST! Merchandisers have access to literally hundreds of out-of-the-box features, drag and drop features, and commerce portals. Salesforce CMS allows you to effortlessly create and deliver rich, customer-centric content-rich experiences. And they can leverage Einstein intelligence to augment average order value and customer engagement and deliver a one-touch, seamless, device-friendly checkout. Salesforce Order Management empowers customers with self-service capabilities like chat. It enables customer service personnel to engage with customers to automate the order process, managing workflows with a shared shopper profile and inventory data. It allows you to effortlessly manage order modifications, cancellations or returns.   And everything is connected to Customer360 data. Allowing you to build integrated commerce channels with all the functionality that customers expect like a personalised 2 click re-ordering experience. Business managers can set up account-based rules like contract pricing, custom catalogs and approval workflows. Salesforce B2C Commerce Benefits: SHOPPER EXPERIENCE Optimise the sales funnel. Trim abandoned carts with proven best practices, optimised checkout processes, and accelerated payments. Go mobile. Master mobile commerce with a complete suite of mobile-first functionality, with customised responsive designs, data-driven mobile user experience and one-touch payment. Leverage social. Extend the reach of your catalog by merging commerce with social channels. Empower customer service teams. Enable service agents to fast track over-the-phone orders and check out on behalf of customers. Extend digital commerce into the store. Enable mobile access to digital inventory that store managers can offer to sell and ship in real time, anywhere in the store with Commerce Cloud Endless Aisle feature. Manage the complete order lifecycle. Bridge the sales and service experience with complete Order Management. Make ordering and payments easier. Simplify 3rd party gateway integrations quickly and easily for a better shopper experience. MARKETING AND MERCHANDISING Build commerce experiences quickly. Design, schedule, and publish product pages with Page Designer. User friendly drag-and-drop interface with powerful reusable components allows you to easily build pages with clicks — not code. Launch campaigns faster. Create and launch campaigns and promotions based on consumer behaviour, channel, and location without any technical support. Personalise merchandising. Attract shoppers, build loyalty, and improve conversion with merchandising rules and AI-powered recommendations. Unify products, pricing, and catalogs. Simplify retailing with a unified view of products and pricing across multiple sites, languages, and currencies. Help shoppers find what they want. Optimise shopper search and boost conversions with custom rules that adjust for search intent and product profitability. Boost organic traffic. Improve page rank and boost visitor traffic with SEO optimised pages. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE Personalise recommendations. Deliver personalised shopping experiences with Einstein Product Recommendations. Use customer insights to drive sales. Understand purchasing behaviour and optimise your product bundles and deals with Einstein Commerce Insights, an AI-driven analysis dashboard. Deliver a uniform experience. Use customer data to drive personalisation across channels with Einstein Recommendations API. Boost conversions with intelligent search results. Einstein Predictive Sort automatically customises category pages and search results for each shopper to boost conversions. Improve searches with “type ahead” guidance. Trim down on abandoned searches with Einstein Search Recommendations, which gives type-ahead suggestions personalised to every shopper. INNOVATION Connect to the power of Salesforce. Deliver a unified customer journey across all core functions. The Salesforce Platform connects Commerce Cloud with sales, service, marketing, and more. Embrace API-first commerce. Build and extend shopping experiences using the Open Commerce APIs, which offer core B2C ecommerce functionality for developers and third-party apps. Extend, customise, and innovate your sites. Enhance the shopping experience with the extensive library of prebuilt, certified integrations, including payment accelerators, ratings and reviews, and loyalty programs. Code with developer-friendly tools. Fast track innovation by responding to business requests with a development environment that provides industry-standard, JavaScript-based tools. Bring commerce to any industry fast. Accelerate your time-to-market with industry-specific solutions and pre-built apps prebuilt. SCALABILITY Go global in record time. Minimise the risk, cost, and complexity, logistical as well as technical, of entering new markets with a secure, borderless infrastructure. Localise Quickly customise sites to localise commerce for customs, cultures, currencies, and languages Execute global content strategies. Build engaging digital commerce experiences with targeted content, offers, and products. Manage multiple sites and regions easily. Manage all your B2C eCommerce properties from a single, unified platform. Salesforce B2B Commerce Benefits: BOOST ONLINE REVENUE Offer simple, self-service online buying. Empower your customers with the real-life shopping experience they enjoy on a digital platform, anytime, anywhere. Simplify B2B eCommerce. Simplify eCommerce with B2B specific features, including quick reorders, user hierarchy, contract pricing, custom catalogs, and more. Optimise daily B2B functions. Stack up retail store inventory, and facilitate online ordering of products for your wholesalers and partners. Empower your sales teams. Eliminate manual tasks and give your sales teams access to real-time customer data giving them the insight they need to develop winning strategies. Enable your channel partners. Facilitate partner growth by deploying branded ecommerce stores and portals that you can design and deploy fast. Get to market faster. Get access to the ever-growing B2B eCommerce market by deploying in weeks. ENGAGE MORE CUSTOMERS Connect customer data with the #1 CRM. Create a single, 360-degree view of customer activity across sales, service, and commerce using the native power of the Salesforce platform. Be there every step of the way. Stay connected and respond to customer needs across all touchpoints, in real-time. Make B2B eCommerce personal. Personalise buying recommendations tailored for each customer in real-time with Einstein. Keep customers coming back. Deliver guided buying experiences that are fast, efficient, and personal to build customer loyalty and ensure repeat business. SCALE YOUR BUSINESS Hit the market faster. Launch in record time and fast-track sales with the fastest B2B eCommerce implementation on the market. Reduce costs and reallocate resources. Empower your buyers with self-service tools and guided experiences, and free up time and resources to focus on growth opportunities. Innovate more quickly. Create new business models on demand and adapt fast to changing markets and customer needs. Update regularly. Get updates every year to facilitate continuous innovation in your B2B eCommerce strategy. TAILOR TO INDUSTRIES Support manufacturers as they go digital. Streamline ordering, implement account-based pricing based on custom rules and split order shipments. Modernise consumer goods purchasing. Stock inventory in retail stores and deliver smart digital experiences with contract pricing and custom catalogs. Transform B2B2C experiences. Transform the entire value chain from manufacturing to distribution to the end customer with a seamless, personalised digital experience. Excited to know more about how Salesforce Commerce Cloud can augment your current product sales? Connect with a Salesforce Consultant today. Looking for more details? Contact our reps to discuss how we can help you. CONTACT AN EXPERT

A product sales company is built on 2 core objectives – Acquiring new customers and retaining existing customers.  And retailers across the world understand that retaining existing customers is the single most important criteria for growth and success. They need customers to keep coming back for more. One of the primary goals of eCommerce businesses is to better understand their customers and deliver an engaging buying experience that compels them to come back for more. Customers are demanding and rightly so, with so many options available in the online marketplace, and as they reveal more and more about themselves, they also expect a more personalized buying experience in return.  When your customers trust your business and have an exceptional buying experience, it makes it easier to achieve that second objective of retaining existing customers through a bouquet of upselling and cross-selling. Cloud is the new normal Retailers, big or small, are today rapidly deploying cloud-based commerce storefronts to transform the way they sell, enabling them to close the innovation gap, and deliver on demanding consumer expectations. Retailers today, have accepted as a norm that Cloud is the way forward. However, with many cloud-based options available in the marketplace, the cloud commerce landscape can be difficult to navigate. This is where the role of a Salesforce Consulting Partner becomes important. Say hello to Salesforce Commerce Cloud Salesforce Commerce Cloud is a unified, agile commerce platform developed on the world’s #1 CRM. With a plethora of eCommerce-ready tools and features, Salesforce Commerce Cloud will empower you to deliver rich, personalised and engaging shopping experiences to your customers and enable you to leapfrog your competition. Commerce Cloud is designed to engage your customers in a whole new way.  By creating a unified online and offline intelligence-driven commerce experience with a mobile-first approach. Engage with customers with a plethora of tools and features and foster one to one in-store journeys to enable customers to make purchase decisions based on context of the moment. Commerce Cloud personalises all aspects of the buying experience. Customers can buy anywhere, receive anywhere, and get serviced anywhere. With Commerce Cloud retailers can deliver amazing journeys through commerce, marketing, and service. Deliver commerce experiences that customers love. Here’s a look at the key drivers for success in eCommerce. 5 Key business drivers for deploying your store on the cloud: Growth Growth is the primary goal for retailers. Retailers and Brands need an infrastructure that can handle high traffic, surges in transaction volumes, virtually endless product catalogues, and flash sales. The scalability needs of that infrastructure should be such that it can serve the needs of the business 5 years into the future.  As business grows, your commerce platform needs to keep up. Commerce Cloud offers the power and flexibility that new-age adopters need to fast track growth in today’s extremely competitive landscape. Branded Innovation Consumers today engage in comparison shopping. They don’t just shop just for the assortment. They shop for an experience. They compare top eCommerce stores for a compelling and engaging experience. To meet buyer expectations, retailers and brands must bring to market unique, compelling, brand experiences. Successful brands are continuously evolving to stay ahead of the competition. While deploying unique online shopping experiences, these retail entrepreneurs require a cloud platform that embraces innovation. Time to Market With each delay in the launch of a new online store, there comes a potential loss in revenue and customer satisfaction. In today’s business context, where Go Digital is the first choice, retailers and brands simply don’t have time to lose. Ecommerce engages a borderless world and presents tremendous opportunities to retailers and brands that go far beyond traditional borders. Commerce Cloud is a solution that can accelerate time to market across all channels on a unified platform and deliver success. Site Speed Speed is critical to providing a great shopping experience, especially when one is mobile. Consumers use smartphones more than ever, but if content doesn’t load quickly, they will bounce. Moreover, search engines factor content load speed into their ranking, Consequently, slow content loading may jeopardize potential sales. Commerce Cloud, by virtue of being built on the world’s no1 CRM platform, is a top-tier enterprise architecture grade platform that delivers content at the pace at which consumers expect. Unified Shopping Experiences Shoppers expect an engaging shopping experience across the entire journey, including marketing, commerce, and service. As shoppers engage with brands in many different ways, and in many cases, the technology supporting multiple sales channels operate independently. Consequently, leading to multiple sources of information and disconnected data. Salesforce Commerce Cloud delivers a shared view of customers, orders, products, and behaviour to provide a single unified view of the customer. Commerce Cloud delivers a full-service feature stack to retailers to send their business into overdrive.   Image Source- Salesforce.org Questions? We’ll guide you to the right path Want to know more about how a Salesforce Consultant can help you start seeing results quickly? Contact Girikon today! CONTACT US

Salesforce Financial Services Cloud is software from the world's #1 CRM solution, reimagined for the financial services industry. Financial Services Cloud is an integrated platform designed to drive stronger, long-lasting client relationships. Financial Services Cloud is powered by Lightning, which makes it easier for advisors to deliver the personalised service that clients expect. Armed with the superior set of productivity and engagement features, advisors can spend less time gathering client information and more time doing what they do best-providing holistic, goal-oriented advice to clients. With Financial Services Cloud, advisors can collaborate with clients from anywhere using any device. This enables them to build strong personal relationships with clients to facilitate key investment decision-making based on goals and life events. Consequently, investors can manage their wealth more smartly, and meet their financial goals. Let’s look at the benefits you can derive from a Financial Services Cloud Implementation: Transform Across Financial Services Financial Services Cloud provides an integrated platform that can be tailored to any financial services organisation’s customer engagement model. Wealth Management, Insurance, or Banking – whatever your core business may be, Financial Services Cloud will empower your teams to deliver personalised advice to your clients across channels and devices. Differentiate with Data Modelling Financial Services Cloud has a unique Client Data Model at its center that allows companies to have access to all information required to strengthen client engagement opportunities. Strategic partnerships with best-in-class industry leaders make it easy to deliver superior service with portfolio rebalancing, custodian data services, and asset aggregation across all accounts. Additionally, Financial Services Cloud benefits from the continuous innovation by virtue of being a part of the Salesforce Platform, with multiple updates every year. This ensures you get access to new features and enhancements designed to fast-track your business growth. Grow your Business Financial Services Cloud allows you to track referrals, thereby converting your client base into an active referral network.  Get a clear view of individuals who are key to cultivating new business. It gives you more insight into your clients on not just their investment strategy, and will empower you with all the networking tools necessary to grow your business. Financial Services Cloud comes out of the box with all the core Sales Cloud features, and on top of that allows a great deal of flexibility and comes with customs fields and objects allowing advisors to completely customise the CRM while staying completely aligned with the direction and objectives of the firm. Manage Compliance Effortlessly When combined with Salesforce Shield, Financial Services Cloud offers a powerful bouquet of compliance functionality. Firms, advisors and agents can adhere to new regulatory guidelines. Now you can drive collaboration across teams effortlessly. Monitor and track client relationships and interactions. And launch coherent onboarding tasks to ensure the client's best interests are always prioritised. Data Security In addition to Financial Services Cloud, Salesforce Shield capabilities come integrated with an extra layer of security including tools that monitor access and usage and protect you against any malicious activity. You can get access to Event Monitoring, Field Audit Trail, and Platform Encryption to ensure your clients' financial account information is kept confidential and secure. One doesn’t have to be a Salesforce expert to get up and running with Financial Services Cloud. Work with a trusted Salesforce Implementation Partner to build a complete solution that addresses all your business goals. Ensure scalability that promotes continuity in innovation. Let’s look at what advantages Financial Services Cloud offers to any financial services role: WEALTH ADVISORS Meet your financial goals. Managing meaningful client relationships while handling their complex investment portfolios can be quite a challenge. Financial Services Cloud makes it easier by drastically reducing routine administrative work and enables advisors to deliver smarter, personalised advice. INSURANCE AGENTS Become a trusted advisor. The best-performing agents put their clients at the center of everything they do. With Financial Service Cloud, advisors can proactively engage clients during important life events such as retirement planning or a home purchase. Insurance professionals can utilize these opportunities for engaging with clients to earn their trust and lock in lasting loyalty. BANKERS Breakaway from the banking inertia. Create experiences that not only improve customer satisfaction but also grow investment portfolios by seamlessly connecting all channels of communication. Financial Services Cloud helps banking institutions digitally transform engagements that customers love. SERVICE OPERATIONS Deliver long-lasting service. Service operations can make or break retention. Financial Service Cloud makes it easier for agents to find information quickly and address customer requests promptly, across channels and devices. BUSINESS EXECUTIVES Bring your growth strategies to life. Unique differentiation or superior customer satisfaction – whatever your goal may be, Financial Services Cloud helps sales, service, and marketing teams take action at the point of insight. Teams across your organisation can work smarter and faster with visibility into analytics and insight into quantified business objectives. IT EXECUTIVES Deliver more for less. Drive productivity and satisfaction with apps built on enterprise-level security and empower advisors to engage with clients on any device. Scale the apps further with a highly scalable platform, integrated data services, and a powerful ecosystem. Also, with Salesforce Shield, IT teams can reinforce the protection of customer data and provide an auditable trail across channels. We at Girikon understand that great technology alone is not enough to ensure success. Our Salesforce Consultants will support you throughout your journey of digital transformation to ensure that you become a financial service firm that clients love to work with. Get in touch Contact us for more details on how we can deliver experiences like never before for your clients. CONTACT US

Educational institutions are today faced with the challenge of meeting the changing needs and expectations of students, and fostering alumni and donor relationships. With the rise in student expectations, educational institutions need to provide a connected, personalized experience throughout the entire student lifecycle. Just like traditional marketing customer experiences, educational institutions can use the tools and capabilities of CRM to support that journey. However, the data model and user experience must be aligned to meet the needs of institutions. Many educational institutions have a multitude of student data but very few have the means to use it to manage student engagement. Salesforce Education Cloud provides the tools that enable institutions to increase productivity and student engagement, coordinate activities across departments, and adopt a more data-driven approach that ensures student success. The Salesforce platform empowers educational institutions with the technology needed to manage the entire student lifecycle. However, technology is just one component of student success. The right Salesforce Consultant can help your institution obtain great value out of the Salesforce platform, bring practical Salesforce skills to your classrooms, and empower educators to drive innovation across the industry. Image Source – Salesforce.org Increase Student Engagement with Education Data Architecture EDA: The Cornerstone of Education Cloud Education Data Architecture (EDA) is the cornerstone of Education Cloud. It allows you plenty of customizable features and functions to allow you to meet the needs of your student engagement staff. EDA comes with pre-configured automation and objects specific to education to enable you to answer key questions about members of your campus community: who is this individual, where have they been in their educational journey, where do they intend to go, what their interests are, and who do they interact with? EDA empowers institutions to customize solutions that are personalized to their unique needs and processes. Get a 360 View of Students A 360-degree view of a student gives you insight into their daily life and allows you to understand the various ways in which they’re engaged with the institution. While staff who engage with students always aspire to know each of their students well, it may be impossible for an individual advisor to memorize this level of detail about each and every student they work with. That’s where the relationships and affiliations feature of Salesforce offers support.   Relationships and affiliations are customary EDA objects that facilitate a complete view of a student. Relationships in EDA display contact-to-contact connections. While creating a new relationship, you can choose its type (friend, spouse, parent, and so on) and its status (former or current). And every time a new relationship is created in EDA, Salesforce creates a reciprocal relationship, mirroring the same relationship in the opposite direction. Create Custom Apps for Specialized Service The obligations that fall under the purview of student services run from career counseling to the registrar, academic advising, financial aid, and so on. Custom apps empower advisors and staff to unlock the real value of Salesforce to serve students. Custom apps can be created to serve multiple objectives and can work for any team. In order for a custom app to be a success, staff, leadership, and your Salesforce Consultant all need to be on the same page about app requirements before they begin building. Personalize Student Outreach Image Source – Salesforce.org What is Marketing Automation? Forging strong student engagement depends upon clear and coherent communication. Some of this communication usually happens in person. But the truth is that a lot of that communication is digital. As staff workloads grow and the students continue to prefer communicating digitally, the task of monitoring back and forth messages becomes challenging. Salesforce’s marketing automation tools let you automate standard activities like social media posts, emails, forms, among others. These channels of outreach are key to maintaining student engagement. Marketing automation trims the manual component of outreach tasks. Salesforce comes with 2 options for marketing automation: Marketing Cloud and Pardot. Either of them has its own unique qualities and empowers you to stay engaged with your contacts. More Dynamic Student Interactions with Marketing Automation Irrespective of the tool you choose to use, interactions with students can become more personalized and dynamic with Salesforce marketing automation. The beauty of marketing automation is that it allows your teams to utilize the benefits of both efficiency and personalization.  Maximize Outreach by coupling Marketing Automation and Campaigns We have covered the aspect of impact marketing automation can have on the efficacy of engaging with students, but what about the content it delivers? This is where Education Cloud users unlock the power of campaigns. A Salesforce campaign is an engagement activity you plan, manage, and track within Salesforce. Campaigns can be used to track any outbound marketing initiative that requests a contact (for eg a student) for a response. The campaign hierarchy feature allows you to connect multiple related outreach initiatives to a single campaign. Once your campaigns are created and linked with the associated campaigns, you can use the campaign reports feature to run reports on your initiatives. Strengthen Campus Connections with Experience Cloud Salesforce Experiences for Greater Connectivity Salesforce experiences are customised digital spaces for your students, staff, and faculty to connect, collaborate, and engage. Salesforce Experiences is a powerful tool that can transform the way members of your educational community interact with each other and share ideas and information. Connect Students to their Peers Peer-to-peer connections are key to establishing strong student engagement, especially for new students. Experiences provide a background for connections to sprout and grow. They also give staff the data and information they need to better understand what kind of support students need most so they can offer the right resources and assistance. Using experiences, students can self-organize themselves into relevant affinity groups. They may connect based on courses they have taken, departments they belong to, sports teams or clubs they’ve signed up for, or just general interests they have in common. Faculty and staff can engage with student groups to respond to queries, share links to resources, and provide real-time assistance. The reporting capacity of Salesforce Experiences provides valuable information. Staff can run reports to monitor popular topics in the experienced community enabling them to better understand prevalent issues and identify the resources that are most sought-after. Keep Your Campus Informed Experiences allow community members to become independent by connecting them to vetted, searchable resources. Community members can easily access answers to their questions without an email, a phone call, or an appointment thereby drastically improving the user experience and freeing up valuable time for all involved. Onboard and Train Staff Salesforce Experience can also be used as a training tool for staff by providing access to information resources. Users can create file repositories and groups within an experience. These repositories hold relevant documents and information about a particular topic. The Groups feature allows students to self-organize and connect based on shared interests or organizations and can also be used by staff to create private spaces for training and onboarding purposes. To sum it all up, Salesforce Experiences provide an environment for students and staff to gather and collaborate, even when they are at different locations. They foster the relationships and connections that are the cornerstone of true student engagement. When combined with the 24/7 access to informative resources, it nurtures a campus community that is invested in each other’s success and empowered to self-educate. Discover how you can empower students with Education Cloud . Contact our expert today! CONTACT AN EXPERT

Every organization is driven by a mission and a set of goals. And they in turn are governed by a core set of values and principles which guide them on that path. Salesforce allows you to bring in those values and principles into the World’s no1 CRM platform enabling you to bring direction and focus into your organization’s vision and objectives in a way that is measurable. Image Source – Salesforce Planning- Getting Started The single most important step before you begin the Salesforce deployment exercise is to understand and validate the cause of adoption. Why do you need it? This question appears very simple yet it’s the most complex one. It’s the cause of the change that is about to come. Define the specific objectives of the implementation. Have you identified what is not working? What goals are you seeking to accomplish via this implementation? Are you comfortable with the implementation methodology suggested by your Salesforce Implementation Partner? How would you define a successful implementation? What challenges do you perceive in implementation and adoption?  In what ways will your productivity improve? And how do you intend to measure that improvement? Work in close collaboration with your Salesforce Implementation Partner to find answers to these queries. Stakeholder Buy in Have you discussed with your teams? Have you secured leadership buy in?  Make sure your leadership team (or you, if you’re the boss) understands the strategic value of this implementation.  Work with your Salesforce Consultant to create a narrative which is aligned with your organization’s core values and principles. Make sure all stakeholders understand that Salesforce is a new efficient, effective and productive way of doing the same business. And finally, find someone to champion the project! Someone who is driven. You need someone from your team who clearly understands why this implementation is crucial to your organization’s success and has the wherewithal and authority to utilise resources as and when necessary to complete the implementation. Solution Design The solution design strategy should be centred around organizational goals and objectives. Ensure the collaboration and buy in of all stakeholders, those directly and indirectly affected. Empower your champion to collaborate amongst various user groups and understand their relationships. Document every detail. Typically, outputs from one process assigned to a particular user group in Salesforce, will impact other processes connected to other user groups or departments.   The implementation team needs to ensure that these affected teams or departments are consulted and provide their inputs. This approach will not only -coordinate an enterprise-wide requirement management, but also ensure all stakeholder teams are aware of each other’s dependencies. Now while this approach may stretch your implementation timelines set out initially, but it allows you to design for the whole and not the part.  After all, your organization needs to work like a well-oiled machine with several disparate parts. Commit to simplicity Salesforce was designed to be simple and seamless for all users. Their product teams have spent thousands of hours interviewing customers to design the best user experience. There are many routine processes already built into the platform. So before you think about customising, take a look at what’s already available as an out-of-the-box offering. And always, always prioritize simplicity. Think less is more.          Tools you can use to simplify: Salesforce Optimizer: You can start to clean up the clutter by running Salesforce Optimizer. It will find you redundant fields, unused reports and layouts, and other things that distract users or slow down performance. Subsequently, go through the summary pages to dive deeper into the ones that really matter to your business. Profile & Page Layouts: You can also leverage Profiles & Page Layouts, which will customise the look and feel of your user pages based on their role,  thereby allowing them access to personalised information that is relevant to them. Automation: Use automation to eliminate data entry. You can integrate email into Salesforce to simplify things for your users. Salesforce has free connectors to both Outlook and Gmail.  Data This is when you switch from your existing platform to Salesforce. Data is at the core of your solution. All your decisions will evolve out of the data you have loaded into Salesforce. Work with your Salesforce Implementation Partner to clean up your data before importing it. Wherever possible merge accounts to avoid duplicate records. Start by importing a small batch and test its validity and fidelity. Did you get everything? Are there any errors you need to fix? You may want to evaluate your configuration settings and fix them if necessary.  Run this imported batch of data through some of your users to get external validation. After making the necessary fixes, import everything into Salesforce.  Visit AppExchange to get access to a range of tools to do this for you. Make sure your teams are up to speed on the progress of the process. Collaborate and Adopt Repeat, mundane tasks, done manually can be a drain on your teams’ resources.  You need to automate these activities. This will not only free up time for your team members but also allow them to focus on activities that are important and require a human touch.  Collaborate with your teams and identify those repetitive tasks and processes that are impacting your organizational performance. Right from Building a Process, Creating Workflows, Establishing Approval Processes, Assigning Escalation Rules, technology can play a crucial role in automating all these business processes. Reduce errors and accelerate productivity. Establish parameters to measure time and cost savings as a result of automation to buy in user engagement. Track your Progress Once you have implemented Salesforce, review the process and seek proactive feedback on an ongoing basis. Are there new/different issues you’re bumping into? How well is the new process working? Is a certain aspect taking too much time? Why? Taking time to review your Salesforce implementation might seem unnecessary, but it will give you a clear understanding of what worked and what needs your attention. Customise and automate KPI Dashboards and reports for users. Define key metrics, track performance of those metrics and observe trends. Drive usage of your Salesforce implementation by creating a purposeful experience. You can also set up a Dashboard for Salesforce Adoption. It will provide visibility to user login history and give you an insight into adoption of key features and productivity enhancers. And don’t forget to thank your team for adopting this change. Change adoption takes time, energy and intent. As a business leader, make sure you recognize everyone’s efforts and initiatives. Adapt, Train, Repeat Growth is a never-ending process, right? Thankfully, the developers of the Salesforce platform understand this very well and have spent thousands of hours in building a product that can adapt to the ever changing needs of business. Salesforce is updated regularly, so you will need to iterate as and when new features and functions becomes available on the platform. Your processes may also undergo change as your business evolves. You may also need to implement new processes and integrate new members into your team. The key is clear, precise communication across user teams of the changes that are coming up, their nature and the reason for their implementation. Keep your teams up to speed and your organization ahead of the curve by working with a Salesforce Implementation Partner who is not only aware of the platform upgrades, but more importantly aware of its ramifications on your business. Collaborate with teams for training upgrades that are in sync with the platform upgrades and stay ahead. With these guiding principles, your team will be better set up for getting the most value out of your investment and driving success. It’s important to note that adoption requires a different approach for everybody and is driven by their unique business goals. An adoption strategy for sales would be completely different from that for service. Each use case is unique. Change is hard, and adoption can be challenging. But by combining the technology that powers the world's No 1 CRM platform, and embracing a collaborative approach to user onboarding, the long-term rewards will be overwhelming. That’s the Salesforce promise. At Girikon, our Salesforce Consultants will work closely with you to get the most out of your Salesforce implementation. Questions? Our reps have answers. CONTACT AN EXPERT

Cloud computing has been around for almost two decades and despite its advantages like business efficiency, cost-benefit, and enhanced productivity, a significant portion of the business community continues to operate without it. According to a report published by Dell, companies that invest in cloud technology, mobile first apps, big data, and security reap up to 53% faster revenue growth than their competition. As is evident, an increasing number of businesses are acknowledging the benefits of adopting cloud-computing technology. Salesforce Consultants around the world today are empowering organizations to run more efficiently and they are able to serve their customers better, and significantly improve their top line. As the planet’s economy explodes with digital data, it is becoming more and more challenging for individuals and businesses to keep all of their vital information, records, programs, processes and systems up and running on in-house servers. The costs are too high. Not only of the tech infrastructure but also of maintenance and support. With a humble beginning as a Software As A Service (SaaS) Company, Salesforce today is the world’s pioneer in Cloud Computing Technology. So why is Salesforce the World’s preferred platform for on-the-cloud apps for businesses. It’s because it brings sustainability, user-friendliness and flexibility as a fraction of the cost to users and compels businesses to adopt this new way of doing business. One of the key reasons why Salesforce is so successful is that offers a mechanism to convert a business process or a new idea into an app in the fastest possible way. Instead of spending tons of money, time and resources on infrastructure, you can focus on building and deploying apps that mirror your ideas and processes.  New apps can be deployed in a matter of days, something that was unthinkable a decade ago. Let’s look at the top 6 reasons why Enterprises are embracing Salesforce to drive productivity and growth: Cross-functional insights and reporting. Data is at the heart of a digital economy today and it’s available from a number of resources: social media, analytics, business apps and Data Archives. For it to be useful however, it needs to be cleaned up, sorted, analysed, and made actionable for stakeholder teams, who have a unified view of the customer and all the customer’s information. Nowadays most businesses use social media and rely on interaction metrics from those platforms. Google Analytics is another important tool many businesses use to monitor their traffic and engagement levels. However, this data alone does not translate into business intelligence.  You need a robust CRM solution that can consolidate all this data and present a holistic view of your customers’ needs. You can use your CRM platform to aggregate, organize, and customize data suited to unique needs of every concerned department. Business owners can empower their users to adopt a customer centric approach, enabling them to make decisions keeping them front and center. Image Source – Salesforce.com Actionable dashboards. Traditional solutions require using spreadsheets or disparate systems to manage customer relationships and typically require manual handling of data. This makes figuring out what’s important a challenge, and does not provide an overview with historical context. They don’t provide a full picture of a customer relationship to derive relevant insights. Salesforce does most of this for you. Once you’ve invested in the platform, you can take advantage of another benefit of the World’s most popular CRM platform, the dashboard. You can set up a personalised dashboard for every user to help translate insight into action. Effortless collaboration. Salesforce keeps a record of conversations, interactions, notes, and contacts— all key components to creating customer-centric experiences. With this up to date information, users can easily access updated records from anywhere. Salesforce has built-in collaboration tools that allow multiple users to work on one file simultaneously or follow the progress of a document, allowing shorter response times to customer requests. All your authorised CRM users can work together through this shared record. All stakeholder teams across departments teams work together seamlessly without having to worry about siloed information. Salesforce’s collaboration platform Slack lets teams communicate and collaborate effortlessly in real time. Conversations come together, information can be accessed easily, collaboration is effortless, and all your favourite apps are at one place. With Slack: Users can effortlessly share what they are working on and get organization wide visibility on what’s going on. Users can join public or private channels, and get access to latest topics and solve problems collaboratively. Teams can collaborate on an account or opportunity, using information that's easily accessible and updatable right from within Slack. Businesses can get insights and reminders to augment productivity of sales teams. Apart from being an incredible way for people to collaborate, irrespective of location, Slack offers a unique and distinct competitive edge for sales teams. Process Optimization. Salesforce offers effortless automation of repetitive tasks and standard workflows and processes. Shorten the time it takes to nurture leads with drip campaigns Consistent, customer-centric interactions across concerned departments and prompt customer service through personalized automated communication. Tagging leads using custom parameters that can be either manually set or with built-in AI, so teams can better prioritize which qualified leads can convert to customers Marketing can spend time creating audience centric campaigns designed for optimal effectiveness using analytics. Sales can focus on optimizing their strategy for pushing products or services, commerce can focus on creating personalised purchase experiences to drive growth, Customer Service personnel can focus on resolving customer issues with personalised attention. Eventually, all translates to an organization working efficiently like a well-oiled machine to better serve its customer. Leveraged Artificial Intelligence (AI) The coolest feature of Salesforce is AI which has proved to be incredibly beneficial in improving automated workflows, processes, discovering insights and to make predictions. Having a powerful platform is one thing but the power to derive insight from data to drive decision making is what makes Salesforce a uniquely beneficial proposition for enterprises. Einstein Discovery is one such feature in Salesforce which comprises of powerful AI and machine learning algorithms which analyse and learn the workflows and habits of customers. Additionally, it uses data science to offer predictions and qualify leads to provide customer centric recommendations. Limitless Customization Yes, Salesforce has literally endless customizability, which makes it the most loved CRM platform. You can make easy customizations using: Point-and-Click Features AppExchange for creating mobile-ready apps that are ready to talk to each other Salesforce developer tools to build custom apps Salesforce allows you complete flexibility to digitize your strategy and workflows in complete alignment with your business goals. Takeaway If you want to know more about how Salesforce can send your organization’s productivity into overdrive and drive profits, contact us today. As your preferred Salesforce Consulting Partner, Girikon will empower your teams to make the most of your investment and fast track growth.   Questions? We’ll guide you to the right path To know more about Salesforce products, implementation, pricing, custom apps or anything else. Our consultants are happy to help. CONTACT US