The business ecosystem has become extremely complex. To sustain themselves in a competitive landscape, it becomes extremely important for retailers to keep growing, innovating and diversifying. This would require them to understand and fulfill customer demands while provide them with a superior customer experience. Unfortunately, the retail marketplace is riddled with slow economic growth and high costs. The problem is further compounded by new age customers who seek personalization, and promotion based pricing, which has made it extremely difficult for retailers to sustain let alone expand and attract new customers. However, disruptive trends associated with retailers, as well as customers have resulted in massive explosion of data, which when processed and analyzed can provide retailers with a sizeable opportunity to understand customer behavior and other valuable insights that can be leveraged for informed decision making. However, processing such humongous and voluminous sets of data has become a tremendous challenge for companies, and will continue to grow in the years to come. According to report shared by Gartner, data volume is set to grow by 800% in the years to come, 80% of which will reside as unstructured data. To make sense of this wealth of big data, retailers require a robust data management solution that can help them retrieve and process data from multiple places. This will help them draw real-time insights for quick decision making while generate true business value. Predictive analytics has emerged as a sure shot solution to all the data woes faced by businesses. By anticipating customer needs based on post-interaction, historical and real-time analysis of big data, customer requirement can be fulfilled in a quick and efficient way. According to statistics shared by Forbes, there has been a whopping increase in number of companies adopting predictive analytics i.e. from a mere 17% in 2015 to a massive 53% in 2017. A combination of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), predictive analytics is growing all the more accurate and insightful. However, several businesses continue to assess this technology with certain degree of skepticism considering it to be too complex, disruptive and expensive to incorporate.  Listed below are few ways how businesses could achieve sales goals and increased customer satisfaction by leveraging this smart technology: Uncover Qualified Leads: Though, the entire practice of lead scoring has been in place since quite some time, they were largely based on guesswork and were extremely time-consuming. With a predictive analytics solution in place, businesses can make their sales and marketing teams more efficient by allowing them to access information such as whether your offering matches a potential customer’s needs, how convinced is your potential client to make a purchase, and similar other details that too in a precise way. This would allow your marketing and sales teams to better determine whether or not a customer is likely to convert and if yes what would be their potential lifetime value. This helps your sales team focus their efforts on the most rewarding areas. Measure Call Outcomes: Till date, many companies rely on manual assessment of data in order to determine the success of a new product campaign or sales strategy. Since, data is manually recorded, it is subjective and prone to inaccuracy. This doesn’t leave much scope for precisely evaluating campaign success. With an automated system in place, calls and activity are appropriately tracked. This allows the sales team of a business to accurately measure their sales performance. Reduce Customer Churn: Predictive analytics is extremely useful in identifying issues and trends that has a large impact on your business operation. This would help you predict when and why customers might consider abandoning you. Such important details will allow businesses to take proactive action to enhance customer experience and serve their needs in a better way. The altering demands of technological forces have influenced the retail sector in the biggest possible way. Predictive analytics has the potential to transform businesses and industries in a way that will make them more productive, competitive and efficient. Used effectively, this technology can turn out to be the key to your outbound sales success and customer satisfaction. In a nutshell, it will act as a magic bullet that may lead to improved profits and better business outcome. As a reputed name in the IT space, Girikon offers robust

IDC Whitepaper Salesforce.com is #1 in Fortune’s list of ‘100 best companies to work for’. New customers are signing contracts for Salesforce licenses every day, and this indicates the popularity of Salesforce CRM worldwide.  Salesforce CEO Benioff once said, “Salesforce reached $5 billion in annual revenue faster than any other enterprise software company and now it’s our goal to be the fastest to reach $10 billion.” Currently, businesses are stepping forward to adopt the Salesforce technology with the intention of customer satisfaction as well as enhancing their current sales operations process. To implement a Salesforce solution, a company needs Salesforce geeks who helps them to achieve their business goal.  Currently, Salesforce Consultants and professionals are in huge demand due to Salesforce being adopted by small to large business organizations worldwide at rapid rate. The market has a demand for Salesforce Administrators and Salesforce Developers. To implement Salesforce as a CRM solution, there are various roles required to fulfill the business need such as Administrator, Developer, and Salesforce Architects. A recent research by G2 Crowd found that:    Customers are crediting Salesforce when it comes to overall CRM functionality 85% higher than the industry average of 75%. The Salesforce CRM has an 80% better scalability than any other CRM vendor outside the leader category in Gartner’s quadrant and 23% better scalability than vendors present in the leader’s category. It is always believed that referred customers are always a bonus for any business. More than 80% Salesforce customer has recommended Salesforce as CRM solution to their peers.   85% of Salesforce users believe that Salesforce is headed in the right direction.    Do your dreams include succeeding in Salesforce? Salesforce is aggressively acquiring companies (small to mid-size) across the world, that provides a competitive edge over other CRM players in current market. More than 2 million companies are using Salesforce as a CRM solution to boost their current sales process and successful customer support. Due to the high adoption rate of Salesforce demand for Salesforce professionals such as Administrators and Developers to manage the Customer’s Salesforce CRM has also increased. To achieve a business goal, Salesforce consultants assist businesses to fully exploit the full potential of Salesforce by having an in-depth knowledge and experience relating to a Salesforce implementation.  To have a career in Salesforce, Consultants need a focused effort in right direction and with level of passion and dedication. Salesforce is like an ocean and consultants do not know how far they can reach. If you are looking for a relatively high paying career, then Salesforce is the right path to proceed with the added ability for work opportunities in this field. The key is to completely understand the elements of your responsibilities and what is required for the job.  Now let’s understand the difference in terms of responsibilities and the earnings achieved by Administrator vs Developer: Key activities for Salesforce Administrators: The key areas that are being considered for Salesforce administrator are as follows:  User setup and permissions Data accessibility  Account modifications  Moreover, Salesforce Administrators are also involved in some other activities such as page layout setup, data deduplication, picklist values configuration, workflow & rule configuration, reports & dashboard creation and many more.   Key roles for Salesforce Developers: Salesforce developers create  Triggers Visual force pages as well as custom functionality to support the business processes defined by organization.  Moreover, developers are responsible to establish interface with third party applications to Salesforce through custom APIs integration to accomplish the business need.  To create a Salesforce Solution, both administrators and developers are required, and it is totally depending upon the business requirement.  Salesforce administrators and Salesforce developers are like the two sides of a coin.  Girikon a Salesforce Consulting Partner based in the USA, Australia and India and has a team of Certified Salesforce Consultants including administrators and developers. The Salesforce Consulting Services team have proven expertise with over 400 projects delivered. For further information about Girikon contact us on +61 1300 332 888 or email sales@girikon.com and discuss your current business challenge. We guarantee we will have a solution for you.