Most business leaders across the world recognize the value of Salesforce. They are aware of how the world's leading cloud-based CRM platform can help them cultivate rewarding customer relationships, address gaps in customer service, and enable them to adopt a more holistic approach to managing day-to-day operations. What many of them are not aware of, however, is the role of a Salesforce consultant to help them navigate the challenges involved in transitioning to Salesforce. And that's not the full picture. Salesforce consultants can also help to optimize and automate business processes to enable a seamless transition.
What is a Salesforce Consultant?
Salesforce consultants help customers achieve their long-term business goals by ensuring the smooth implementation of Salesforce tailored to their unique business needs. They also assess the dynamic market landscape and adapt the customer's operations to be future-ready.
Salesforce consultants also manage customer relationships, and project plans, do market research, understand user needs and sentiment, gather requirements, research organizational data, and train employees to get the most out of Salesforce.
The best Salesforce consultants have deep knowledge of Salesforce technology, rich experience in similar prior implementations, and awareness of the best business practices.
Challenges that Salesforce Consultants face and how they can solve them
As a business leader, if you really want to unlock the true power of Salesforce, we recommend that you choose the best Salesforce Implementation Partner. Apart from implementing the CRM, they can also help you solve various key business challenges. Here’s a look at some of them.
1) Handling sensitive information
One of the key challenges organizations must deal with while transitioning to Salesforce is ensuring their customer data is safe. Any data breach can result in drastic consequences for the business.
A Salesforce consultant will follow industry best practices to ensure that there are adequate safeguards in place to secure the data exchange between your existing systems and Salesforce. Additionally, they also ensure that once your data is in Salesforce, it can be accessed easily by users. This allows them to get a comprehensive view of their customers including contact details and interaction history in the least number of clicks. This helps them to make data-driven decisions leading to greater customer satisfaction.
2) Providing personalized assistance
All businesses are unique. This is true even for businesses offering similar products or services with a similar customer base. Each business has its unique vision, goals, and strategies that set them apart from each other. Consequently, they may have completely different reasons to implement Salesforce and completely different expectations from the implementation based on their unique business objectives. A vastly experienced Salesforce is well aware of the nuances of customer goals and expectations and works closely with customer and implementation teams to ensure the CRM implementation is fully tailored to the customer’s unique needs.
3) Offering valuable insights
Salesforce has been purpose-built to provide a 360-degree view of your customers. It includes everything from your contact information, purchase history, service interactions, interests and preferences, and social media interactions. As a business owner, you want to have deeper insights into customer behavior along with intelligent recommendations in a single place.
A good Salesforce consultant makes that possible. They can help aggregate siloed data and give you a unified, single-window view to help you better understand customer preferences and behavior patterns, regardless of which channel they interact with you on. This enables you to provide seamless interaction experiences to your customers across sales, marketing, and customer service across multiple channels.
4) Providing instant support
When customers interact with a business's customer support, they want instant resolution to their problem. And businesses are no different. When you invest in a platform like Salesforce, which includes licensing and implementation costs, you want your users to be up and running quickly so that they can close deals faster and resolve customers' concerns quickly.
While a library of documents, manuals, and videos may be helpful for your users, they may not be able to help in resolving a critical issue that may be disrupting operations. What businesses need is the support of an expert who has been there and done that. That expert is your Salesforce consultant. A Salesforce consultant understands the nuances of the platform and knows where to make tweaks to resolve common issues.
5) Configuring user permissions
Would you allow complete access to your financial data to all your employees? Would you allow access to customer information to your HR department? Sounds absurd, right?
Assigning the right access privileges to users is a critical part of any Salesforce implementation.
Creating the right user-profiles and customizing permissions in Salesforce requires a certain level of expertise that your existing IT team may not be equipped to handle. This is where the roles of Salesforce consultants become important. They can ensure that your users have access to only that functionality of Salesforce that allows them to do their job effectively. Not less and certainly not more. A Salesforce consultant can help you navigate the complex domain of user management to get the most out of your users.
6) Discovering business-specific solutions
The goals and needs of small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are different from their larger counterparts. Consequently, their CRM platform needs are also different. How do you go about designing a solution that is tailored to your unique requirements?
Purchasing a Salesforce license is just the starting step. Salesforce has virtually limitless capabilities and you may not have the requisite expertise in-house to choose the best-fit features of the platform to achieve your vision. A good Salesforce consultant leverages their prior experience and deep knowledge of the domain to establish clear goals and business requirements. They then use this information to recommend solutions that are aligned with your goals and needs.
7) Boosting user adoption
Poor user adoption is one of the primary reasons why many Salesforce implementations fail to achieve their true potential. In fact, industry research indicates that the problem is so acute that in the absence of adequate guidance and training, teams are likely to stop using the platform altogether. And this should be a matter of concern for you. When users don't use the platform, each of them relies on personal, non-standardized methods to manage customers and their data. Without a unified view of customers based on gold-standard industry practices, your executives are unable to make critical strategic decisions.
Which is why you need a Salesforce consultant. With adequate guidance and training programs tailored to each user group based on their job functions, they can ensure that your employees feel empowered when they look at customer data, giving their productivity a shot in the arm.
8) Other challenges
Quick setup
Setting up and managing Salesforce can be complex unless done by an expert. A Salesforce consultant knows the nitty-gritty of configuration, where to tweak the platform and configure the right security settings to ensure a robust and secure CRM that works for your business.
Enhance customer experience
Organizations that have achieved success with Salesforce will be able to tell you the value a Salesforce consultant brings to the table to improve productivity and provide enhanced customer experiences. With deep insights on customer behavior, and automation of customer service, they can help you close service cases faster translating to greater customer satisfaction.
Easier and faster Salesforce adoption
A good Salesforce consultant can help you go live quickly with minimal disruption in your day-to-day operations. They draw upon their extensive experience and deep business domain knowledge to come up with a comprehensive roadmap that includes implementation, training, and strategy to drive user adoption.
Risk reduction
A certified Salesforce consultant has the right experience and technical know-how to help organizations manage uncertainties associated with Salesforce implementation such as data migration and security, process automation, and migration to ensure a seamless holistic transition.
Salesforce Consulting Services from Girikon, a Gold Salesforce Partner, can help you unlock the true power of Salesforce. With customized solutions aligned with your unique business needs, we have helped many businesses improve productivity, boost efficiency, and increase revenues. Get in touch with an expert to learn more.
Salesforce, the world’s leading CRM platform empowers businesses with tools and services to manage customer data, automate processes, streamline operations, and drive customer satisfaction. Salesforce consultants aren’t just experts at handling the software; they recognize that Salesforce is a great tool to improve business productivity and align themselves with customer goals, wants, and needs to unlock the true power of the platform. In short, they empower teams to do what was earlier not thought to be possible.
As a Salesforce Consulting Partner for over a decade, our experts have compiled a list of tips to guide the next crop of Salesforce consultants on their path to success. These tips are a result of over a 100-man years of Salesforce experience, countless hours spent with customer teams, and millions of lines of coding. Let’s dive right in.
1. Understand the ‘Why’
While there are certain skills that can be acquired such as data management, data analytics, and process automation, critical thinking is one area that can only be awakened from within. Critical thinking entails having a larger-than-life view of the business while having an in-depth view of the everyday activities of the organization. Many Salesforce consultants have a great technical background and are adept at turning requirements into recommendations and ideas. But what is truly required to be understood is the "Why". Why do they need it? What are their business goals and what is stopping them from achieving them? What are their people like? What are their pain points? What do they want in terms of work satisfaction? Finding answers to these fundamental questions will go a long way to advance your career in Salesforce consulting. You need to evolve from being a manager or business analyst to being a problem solver, and for that, you need to identify and understand the problem and all its constituents and dependencies to the last detail.
2. Adapt your communication strategy
Salesforce consultants have to work closely with engineering teams, customer user groups, and senior leadership which may sometimes be spread across the globe. For you to be successful as a global Salesforce consultant, you need to adapt your communication depending on who you are interacting with. Understanding the audience, their vision, and the way they see the business and its horizon (both short-term and long-term) plays a vital role in the success of the projects you are working on.
As an example, if you are interacting with engineering teams, you may want to interact in a way that they understand via a common language. As a representative of your organization (like a front office), you need to be aware of your unique communication style and how your interactions are received by others. As a thumb rule, communication strategy varies from who you are interacting with to the size of the group you are addressing.
3. Know Your Audience
Whether you are presenting to a CXO at a Fortune 500 company or interacting with individual project members, knowing your audience is one of the key skills all Salesforce consultants need to have.
When you are involved in multiple projects and have to interact with different audiences, whether it is for project updates or course corrections, an instinct is to use the same template for interaction. This approach rarely works as each individual user group has its own perspective and level of understanding. Recognize the value each stakeholder is seeking and develop a mindset to tailor your presentations to align with the audience.
4. Develop a self-help attitude
One of the job responsibilities of a successful Salesforce consultant is to hire new consultants. And you can only attract talent as good as yourself. When recruiting new consultants, veterans of the game often look for leadership traits such as taking self-motivated initiatives. What homework did they do before they sought help from seniors? Demonstrating a self-help attitude would go a long way in cultivating strong leadership and problem-solving skills.
5. Always be willing to learn
Salesforce consultants, especially ones who are still young in their consulting journey, need to constantly upgrade themselves on products, processes, and frameworks, but more often than not they get no guidance or direction. Well, if you want to grow, you are on your own. It’s your mindset to self-direct your learning and find solutions to challenges that will take you on the path to growth. Having a keen learner’s mindset goes a long way in building a keenness to take on new challenges and learn to grow.
6. Pick an Area of Expertise
While it’s great to be a jack of multiple trades (skills), it’s important to be very good at something. Whether it’s a certification in Sales Cloud or your early experience as a Salesforce administrator, it's important that you pick one area in which you are an expert. Expertise in a certain area builds client trust and establishes credibility. And once you pick an area you want to build further on, make sure you are up to date with the latest product innovations in that area and establish how you can help businesses leverage your expertise in these new innovations.
7. Know When to Say No
Customers want the moon. Literally. If it was left to them, they would want to implement their entire roadmap for the next 10 years as of yesterday. Many times, consultants agree to customer requests while working on a project even when they know it is not in their best long-term interest, or it just cannot be done at this stage. While customer satisfaction is extremely important in your line of work, you also need aware of what is in the best interest of the customer and the project. Make your point politely yet firmly, with an irrefutable basis. You were hired because you are an expert in your field, and this is time to say it emphatically. While it's always tempting to say yes to every customer request, learn to say no when you have a reasonable basis for it.
Draw on your past experience working with multiple customers on a variety of Salesforce projects. Offer alternative suggestions and help the customer see the larger picture. Your job as a Salesforce consultant is to be a partner with your customer, working towards a common goal and that job includes knowing when to say no.
Conclusion
Hiring a Salesforce consultant is an investment you make to achieve the heights that you envision for your business.
Ready to unlock the true power of Salesforce? Team up with a Salesforce Implementation Partner who can guide you on the right path.
Some Salesforce Consultants are successful in building a stable client base that they nurture and grow over time while others find it a rocky road and eventually hit a wall. Have you ever wondered what the difference is? Client relationships. Strong client relationships are the foundation for a successful Salesforce Consulting practice. Loyal customers are not only a joy to work with, but they also stay longer with you and are happy to refer new clients.
How to build lasting client relationships?
Below we have compiled a list of actionable ways to nurture and grow client relationships that will not only improve client satisfaction but also grow your business.
Pay attention to detail and gather all information
The foundation of a strong consultant-client relationship is laid before the client even signs up. Good consultants are aware they need as much information as possible about the prospect to come up with a proposal that stands out from the competition. And the key component of that proposal is how it aligns with the business’s goals and values and the personalities of the people you’ll be working with.
This means collecting “objective” information like:
Their products and services.
The end-users and their profile.
Top 3-4 competitors.
Prioritized goals and associated challenges.
Strategies that have not yielded desired results in the past.
Tools, apps, and systems currently being used.
Budget – long term and short term.
Expectations from a new consultant
It also includes “subjective” information such as:
What is their definition of success?
Future business plans such as new products or services.
Mission and values they stand for.
What is unique about them and how are they different from their competitors?
Skills, experience, interests, and preferences of the team you’ll be working with.
What are their pain points and wants from a new consultant?
Absorb the information
The intel you collected will be utilized not only in your bid document but will also be leveraged throughout the entire project execution lifecycle. Take the time to absorb and understand every point in depth so that it is made evident in everything you do.
Go above and beyond with your proposal
From the point of view of a project, your bid illustrates how you will go about achieving your client’s goals. From the point of view of a relationship, it’s an opportunity for you to demonstrate that you have a deep understanding of your client’s business and its people.
To be successful, you need to seamlessly link what and why.
What refers to activities included as a part of the project and why should link one of the "whats" to one of the business goals? Once you identify the why, establish the expected measurable outcome once the why is addressed. Include in your proposal how you will measure this outcome.
This approach demonstrates your commitment to the client’s business and its people and shows that you care about the people impacted by your proposed offering.
Have an onboarding process
Once the client has signed up with you, there are bound to be regular interactions across the user group. A smooth onboarding process sets the benchmark for free and open communication and ensures smooth execution which is necessary for a long-term client relationship. Start with a kick-off meeting to ensure everyone is on the same page and well-versed with the goals and expectations of the project.
Treat clients as partners
Treating your clients as partners in success lays the foundation for a purposeful and fruitful engagement, where both your and your client’s points of view are respected, and each does their best to ensure success. At the end of the day, it’s a transactional relationship and a well-defined partnership ensures that each party delivers its end of the bargain.
Be proactive
Share fresh ideas and propose new strategies.
Inform the concerned teams in advance about any disruptions that may be caused due to system changes or changes in requirements.
Educate the teams and empower them to be proactive.
A proactive approach based on transparent communication lays the foundation for a seamless execution and ensures success for all concerned.
Be a good listener
Clients can at times get reactive about results. While you may be doing a great job with your project, the results are not going through the roof. Instead of stone-walling the client’s perspective, use a more empathetic approach such as:
“I see what you’re talking about. It’s a valid point. “
“We’re glad you brought this up. Let us review this and allow us a week to report back to you.”
Position yourself as a partner in the journey. Value everyone's point of view, evaluate objectively, and present your findings to build a long, trusting relationship.
Establish a framework for communication
Conduct scheduled meetings with relevant stakeholders and end them with clearly defined action items
Set up weekly or fortnightly meetings to review progress and answer questions. Make the meetings more about listening than talking. This illustrates your intent to be accountable and helps build trust with the client. Leverage text messaging to build rapport and personal connections with team members and foster a more informal way of working.
Share your concerns early
This is particularly relevant when the business landscape is changing rapidly. Avoid saying yes to everything they want. Clients may have big plans and as a consultant, it's your job to double-check on everything they want for its viability, its efficacy, and impact on the overall project. Understand the challenges – both short-term and long-term, and communicate your concerns clearly.
Establish quarterly business reviews
Quarterly reviews with the senior leadership are a great way to build on relationships. Make these reviews focussed on high-level strategy, allowing the client to reflect on long-term goals. Review past strategies, what's worked and what hasn't, and pivot if need be.
Quarterly reviews are also the apt time for a client to provide insight into the changing business landscape, and the shift in goals (if any), and to establish how these changes impact the scope and budget of the ongoing project.
Strong client relationships are the backbone of a successful Salesforce Consulting practice. It lays the foundation for increased loyalty and referrals and makes the journey a joyful one.
Businesses today are generating mountains of data and forward-looking business leaders recognize that there are critical insights hidden inside their data. With AI, businesses can unlock these insights to identify trends, opportunities, and challenges. Building a strong enterprise-wide data culture along with robust and trusted AI holds the key to unlocking these hidden insights.
While business leaders recognize the value of data for decision-making, a recent global survey conducted by Salesforce amongst 10,000 of them reveals some interesting facts.
67% of them are not using data for making critical decisions like product or service pricing
Less than 33% use data to drive strategies for new markets
79% don’t leverage data for diversity and inclusion
While the above numbers revealed something unexpected, here is what the survey summarized.
Companies that make data-driven decisions are more likely to beat sales targets than those that don't
Companies that combine AI with their data showed an average increase of 30% in revenue
Companies that embrace this approach are able to reassign human and financial capital quickly and can create personalized customer experiences much faster
What can you do now?
Here are some suggestions for creating a strong data culture. We will take these items up later in this article.
Put together the right team
Provide them with the right tools and training
Test your theories on a pilot scale and iterate
Prioritize the human aspect of your data culture
Identify areas where AI can derive more value from your data
Data-driven V/s data-informed
In a data-driven company, most of the organization’s employees can access and analyze data, draw inferences about what it means, create a dashboard, visualize data, and use all of these to determine the next steps. Employees in a data-driven organization don't depend on data analysts to do this.
Being data-informed enables organizations to make decisions based on a mix of data, research, experience, and insights. Data-informed organizations may or may not have the skills that data-driven organizations have.
Why is it critical to build a strong data culture
Business leaders have to deal with countless challenges before embarking on building a data culture. Avoid over-analysis by starting with a single use case that validates the value of your new data culture approach. McKinsey research has shown that data-driven organizations achieve their goals faster and their data culture initiatives contribute at least 20% to earnings.
Here’s why this works:
Data analysis identifies actionable trends
Data analysis identifies patterns that unlock value and enable organizations to utilize opportunities faster. Adding AI to the mix can accelerate the process by doing a deeper dive into data analysis at scale and serving up recommendations. Combining data and AI drives growth, promotes innovation, fosters collaboration, and creates uniqueness.
AI and machine learning increase success by 30%
Organizations that still rely on legacy knowledge and instinct to guide decision-making are missing out on opportunities. With AI and machine learning, organizations can make quick and accurate decisions. According to Salesforce research, adding AI to organizational data and business functions eliminates the guesswork from the decision-making process and increases success by an average of 30% across important metrics like operational efficiency, employee productivity, and topline growth.
Strategic work keeps employees engaged
When decision-making is guided by data analysis, employees spend less time on mundane tasks that add little or no value and can focus on strategic or creative tasks. This keeps them engaged and improves their productivity. Salesforce research shows that 84% of organizations that have adopted a data culture observed higher employee retention.
Empower the right team
The best way to create a team of data champions is by showing not telling. Illustrate with real numbers how data-driven decision-making increases revenue and customer satisfaction and streamlines operations. Instead of choosing any random use case to illustrate your point, capture their attention by selecting a project that scores a financial win and one that you can scale for greater impact.
Here’s how you can start:
Step 1: Put together the right team
Create a working group of employees from across the organization with diverse backgrounds and functions. These team members should have a collaborative mindset, unique skills and abilities, and individual organizational perspectives. Ensure that you include employees across the corporate strata such as senior executives, managers, engineers, consultants, and machine learning scientists.
Step 2: Provide them with the right tools and training
Salesforce research stats on data literacy don’t paint a pretty picture. Only 35% of the surveyed workforce has received training on data visualization tools and 29% on statistical tools. 27% percent workers say they can interpret data outputs relevant to their job function, and only 26% say they can use that data to make decisions. With proper access to training on technology-driven data analytics, organizations can empower their entire workforce to unlock the power of data to drive decision-making.
Step 3: Test your theories on a small scale and iterate
Start small, analyze results, refine your theories and iterate. Eventually, a winner will reveal itself when your employees can measure the impact of your project on their bottom line.
Step 4: Prioritize the human aspect of your data culture
Encourage involvement of all team members in the entire process from setup, testing, fine tuning, to data analytics and its application for decision making. This will ensure that you avoid bias and guesswork which can have a negative long-term impact.
Take data at face value to avoid bias by proxy. Let’s consider ZIP codes as an example. At face value, they are just a location indicator. But sometimes ZIP codes can be a proxy for an area’s racial makeup and financial services companies consider ZIP codes in loan applications. Decisions based on this data point must be free of bias.
Step 5: Identify areas where AI can derive more value from your data
You can start your AI journey at many places, in any department, for any function, or extend it further if you’ve already started. Start small, demonstrate results, and bring everyone on board. Establish guidelines and standards for consistency, security, accountability, and ethics from day one. Ensure completeness and accuracy of your data to make the best use of AI.
Incorporating an AI-driven data culture can be a daunting task. It takes time and effort to bring people on board, retain their interest, and demonstrate results. For most business leaders, this transformation may be a whole new experience. This is where working with a Salesforce Consulting Partner could prove to be very useful. At Girikon, our certified consultants can guide you on this transformational journey of embracing AI with a strong data culture.
Contact us today. Take the next step to build your AI-powered data culture.
Businesses across industries are leveraging emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to power sales, marketing, customer service, HR, and operations. In fact, banking is one of the top industries to embrace Chatbots in recent years to streamline operations and enhance the customer experience.
Banking chatbots are AI-powered virtual assistants that can understand customer requests, resolve their queries, and execute transactions. Chatbots are software programs that have in-built machine learning algorithms and can process natural language prompts to automate the relationship between a customer and a bank.
GirikSMS Salesforce Chatbot developed by Girikon Inc, a Salesforce Development Partner, help banking institutions streamline operations, scale customer service, reduce costs, and improve customer satisfaction.
In this article, we will explain what GirikSMS can do for banks and their customers and how bot-driven automation can benefit banking institutions in several ways.
Chatbots are cost-efficient. Bots allow you to scale operations quickly without the associated costs of additional manpower.
The era of mobile banking. Customers today prefer digital first and the need for on-demand mobile banking is increasing across all age groups. GirikSMS Salesforce Chatbots are available 24/7 and can be easily integrated into mobile banking apps to offer immediate resolution of customer queries.
Customers prefer text. Most smartphone users are well versed with popular messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Slack, and SMS, using these channels for daily interaction with friends, family, and even businesses. Text conversations over these apps are now the preferred choice for most users. GirikSMS ChatGpt Empowered Salesforce Chatbot uses the power of conversational AI to interact with customers over these popular messaging apps and channels ushering in a new era of digital services.
Here’s a look at some of the use cases where GirikSMS APP can help banking institutions automate their day-to-day operations to enhance the customer experience.
1. Onboarding new customers
New customers can rely on GirikSMSChatbot for onboarding activities such as:
Uploading all required documents and validating them.
Sending agreements for review and sending reminders to complete the documentation.
Setting up a new account and providing a guided tour of available products and services
Downloading and exploring the banking app on users’ mobile phones.
GirikSMS ChatGPT Empowered Chatbot can also be used to collect feedback from new customers about the onboarding process for detailed analysis and ongoing improvement.
2. Provide 24/7 customer service
GirikSMS Chatbot can be extremely useful in customer service operations. They can resolve routine customer queries quickly and enable banks to scale 24/7 support to customers. They can answer commonly asked questions and provide accurate answers to customer queries quickly without any wait times. Not just that, customers can also modify account information such as an address, all within the chat conversation.
3. Transactions
GirikSMS Salesforce Chatbots can help customers perform banking transactions such as fund transfers or opening a deposit account. GirikSMS is native to Salesforce. So, if a user types the name of a beneficiary to do a fund transfer, the bot can look up the receiver’s account in the CRM and execute the transaction.
Some of the other transactions that GirikSMS Salesforce SMS App can help customers with are:
Report a missing/damaged card.
Report an unauthorized transaction.
Change account passwords.
Modify account limits or apply for higher limits.
Apply for account upgrades like more privileges.
Apply for a loan.
4. Providing financial advice
GirikSMS Chatbot can be virtual financial assistants. Based on the customers’ income and spending habits they can recommend saving plans, tax tips, and recommend best-fit banking products.
5. Cross-selling
Banks offer a range of products and services such as insurance, loans, mortgages, wealth management, etc. GirikSMS Salesforce Chatbots leverage CRM data and analyze past customer interactions across multiple channels to make intelligent recommendations about new products that may be relevant to them.
6. Preventing fraud
GirikSMS Salesforce Chatbots record all interactions with users in the CRM and can use natural language understanding capabilities to detect suspicious behavior to alert agents to take prompt and appropriate action. Data from chatbot conversations can be used to identify patterns and train the chatbot.
7. Onboarding new recruits
GirikSMS Salesforce Chatbots can be used to assist new employees by:
Answering their queries about the company’s policies.
Providing access via interactive menus to onboarding material such as documents, presentations, charts, photos, or videos.
Setting up IT accounts and assisting them with system walkthroughs and privileges.
GirikSMS Salesforce Chatbots can also train employees on several aspects of customer communication and engagement.
8. Assisting in internal operations
GirikSMS Salesforce Chatbots can also act as virtual assistants for banking personnel by providing them with quick answers when dealing with customers. They can answer questions related to
Policies and regulations.
Products and services offered.
Intelligent forecasts on customers based on their account status.
GirikSMS Chatbots for Salesforce can also help streamline internal operations by sharing documents across team members and facilitating reporting and evaluation processes.
9. Omnichannel availability
Customers today prefer digital first. And they engage with brands on multiple channels such as websites, mobile apps, social media, and messenger apps. GirikSMS Chatbot for Salesforce can be easily integrated across all popular channels ensuring that you are available to them 24/7 regardless of where they are.
While the above use cases can be a game-changer for banks, it is also important to follow certain best practices to make the most of this disruptive technology offering. Here is our list of 5 best practices for implementing Chatbots.
1. Understand the limitations and challenges of Chatbots
Work with your Salesforce partner to have a thorough assessment of the capabilities and limitations of AI Chatbots to set the right expectations.
2. Protect user data
Banking institutions must secure and protect the data and information gathered by Chatbots. Giving confidence to customers that their data is secure with you builds trust and loyalty.
3. Secure transactions
Chatbots, especially customer support ones open up opportunities for hackers and fraudsters. You must ensure that all transactions and interactions over bot conversations are encrypted and secure.
4. Create specialized chatbots
Banking offers many use cases for deploying Chatbots such as lead generation, sales, and customer service. Start with a simple use case and deploy chatbots in phases.
5. Test extensively
An erroneous chatbot can lead to frustrated customers. Test and train your chatbot extensively before going live.
As Salesforce expands its boundaries to integrate the disruptive technology of conversational AI and adds more functionality into its platform, you need the support of a Gold Salesforce Consulting Partner like Girikon to unlock its true power. Connect with one of our experts today to learn more about how you can harness the power of GirikSMS Chatbots for Salesforce.
In the rapidly evolving business environment, it is essential for companies to utilize state-of-the-art technology to stay competitive. Nowadays, forward-thinking businesses are incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) into their operations, particularly through the adoption of customer relationship management (CRM) software, to automate and enhance their CRM processes. Salesforce, a leading CRM platform, has consistently been a pioneer in innovation, especially in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI). Notably, Salesforce AI has transformed the way organizations handle their customer service processes.
The integration of Salesforce and AI is more than just an augmentation. It has indeed opened new avenues in Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Rather, it offers a smarter, efficient, and a highly custom-made customer interaction. To know more about Salesforce AI integration, businesses should consider partnering with a reliable Salesforce consulting partner.
Salesforce and Generative AI: A Dynamic Relationship
As a cloud-based platform, Salesforce is highly customizable and configurable and can be leveraged by organizations to meet their unique business needs by tailoring their services. By leveraging tools like Salesforce Flow, users can automate intricate business processes, create agile service experiences, while streamlining data management.
The next phase of transformation will involve incorporating the capabilities of generative AI into a versatile platform using Einstein GPT. This integration holds the potential to transform the way businesses function and engage with their customers
How to Leverage AI to Improve Customer Service?
Listed below are ways how AI can help businesses provide better service to their customers:
Improved Customization: Utilizing AI will empower businesses to deliver personalized experiences by harnessing customer data and their preferences. This will pave way for tailored recommendations, quick support, and a deeper comprehension of customer requirements.
Unified Omnichannel Support: AI-driven chatbots can integrate easily with several communication channels such social media, web chat and more. This guarantees uniform interactions across several platforms, offering customers a unified experience.
Intelligent Automation: AI can be leveraged to automate repetitive and mundane tasks thereby saving a lot of time that can be used up by human agents to focus on more complex and strategic activities. This will boost productivity, quicken response times, and optimize cost for businesses.
Sustained Learning and Development: AI systems will keep gathering insights from customer interactions, feedback, and real-time data, which in turn will foster continuous improvement. This continuing improvement will yield more precise responses, intelligent recommendations, and enhanced overall performance.
What are the benefits of AI in customer service?
AI in customer service offers several benefits that can improve the overall customer experience and streamline business operations. Some of the crucial advantages include:
Increased Productivity: Leading IT players believe that AI can be adopted by organizations to serve their customers in a better way. Research conducted reveal that access to AI assistants and tools can increase productivity for support agents significantly.
Increased Efficiency: Carrying out tasks manually can be burdensome for service agents. This includes tasks such as navigating between different systems to access customer history, searching for relevant informative articles, sending field staffs to service locations, and manually inputting responses. These manual processes are usually prone to errors as they are executed by humans. The integration of AI in customer service can provide intelligent suggestions to service workers drawn from knowledge bases, and customer data.
A more Personalized Interaction: When a customer interacts with a chatbot, artificial intelligence (AI) has the capability to retrieve vital details, such as the name of customer, location, account type, and language preferred. If the inquiry demands the involvement of a field service technician, AI can promptly convey all relevant information to the technician, allowing them to deliver tailored service as soon as they arrive on-site.
Less Exhaustion and Enhanced Morale: AI empowers agents to do away with monotonous, time-intensive tasks, enabling them to focus on tasks that demand creative thinking, problem-solving, and intricate critical thinking. These activities significantly impact the overall customer experience. Consequently, it shouldn’t come as surprise that majority of IT leaders anticipate that generative AI will alleviate workload of teams, while reducing burnout.
Scalability: AI systems can simultaneously handle a huge rush of customer queries making it simpler for businesses to scale their customer service operations without consistently increasing staffing levels.
A Practical Service Experience: AI has the capability to draw information from contracts of customers, warranties, buying history, and marketing data. This ensures the identification of optimal actions for agents to pursue with customers, even post the conclusion of the service engagement.
The future of AI in Customer Service:
The future AI seems to be quite promising in the customer service industry. In the years to come, artificial intelligence is poised to gain prominence in workplaces given the ongoing advancements in technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). Besides handling routine tasks, these AI programs will offer significant insights into consumer behaviors and habits through big data analysis. Organizations can utilize this valuable data to optimize their return on investment in marketing strategies and branding initiatives. As technology evolves, AI is set to play a key role in uplifting customer experiences and boosting operational efficiency.
Final Words:
The fusion of AI and Salesforce is reshaping the CRM terrain, presenting matchless possibilities for organizations to elevate both their customer relationships, as well as their operational efficiencies. This integration when leveraged by businesses enables them to position themselves at the frontline of technological advancement, ensuring they stay competitive and in agreement to the ever-changing needs of their customers. In doing so, organizations can provide value to customers and stakeholders while future-proofing their operations in this quickly evolving digital era. Organizations should consider availing Salesforce implementation services if they wish to make the most of the integration of Salesforce and AI.
According to Salesforce research, close to 90% of customers say that a business's overall experience is as important as its products or services. In today’s competitive landscape where companies are juggling between staffing shortages and overwhelmed resources, they need to be able to do more with less. Customer expectations are at an all-time high, and given the plethora of options available to them, anything less than an exceptional experience will lead to customer churn.
Automation and self-service technologies have given many businesses across industries a significant improvement in productivity, cost savings, and customer satisfaction. In 2021, Salesforce reported that customers using its Cloud products and self-service tools such as AI chatbots witnessed a 30% increase in customer satisfaction along with a 27% improvement in agent productivity.
To meet this ever-growing demand, Salesforce launched Virtual Assistant – an Einstein-powered chatbot solution built specifically for financial services businesses to automate routine customer requests faster across popular digital channels like SMS or messaging platforms. This enables agents to focus on complex cases while chatbots can promptly resolve routine service requests, such as updating credit card information, renewing subscriptions, making payments, modifying subscription plans, and more.
Virtual Assistant offers multilingual support, allowing businesses to use a single chatbot across multiple geographic regions regardless of their native language. And in the future, Einstein-powered Virtual Assistants will automatically create support articles based on customer conversations.
Salesforce Chatbots for financial services come with pre-built bot templates, leading to faster setup and deployment. They can streamline support and assist agents with routine questions such as “How do I calculate my tax?” or “How do I upgrade my insurance plan?”
With Virtual Assistant, financial services companies can re-direct thousands of customer calls to the Salesforce Chatbot leading to significant cost savings.
Salesforce Chatbots can handle thousands of concurrent conversations for queries such as loan application status, product information, insurance premium renewal, claim filing, technical support, and more, freeing up dozens of front-line agents.
Salesforce Chatbots improve the customer experience by enabling seamless self-service for simple tasks, thereby significantly reducing wait times to speak with an agent. The rewards of embracing self-service technology can be substantial, and businesses need to leverage technology to scale quickly and deliver efficient customer service.
Features of Salesforce ChatBots
Salesforce Chatbots powered by Einstein are equipped with advanced features to solve customer issues by replying to their questions and understanding their behavior to evolve continuously.
Here are some stand-out features of Salesforce Chatbots that you should be aware of before you hire a Salesforce Development Partner for its implementation.
Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Salesforce Chatbots use NLP to understand customer intent and provide relevant answers. This makes bot interactions more natural for customers.
Multi-Channel Support
Salesforce Chatbots can be deployed on multiple channels such as mobile apps, websites, online stores, social media pages, and on popular messaging platforms like WhatsApp and SMS. This allows customers the convenience and flexibility to interact with businesses on their preferred channels whenever they want.
Personalization
Salesforce Chatbots can personalize responses based on customer data, their preferences, past purchases, and browsing behavior, making every interaction more relevant and meaningful.
Contextual Conversations
Salesforce Chatbots can understand and maintain context across multiple conversations regardless of the channel, thereby providing more accurate and relevant responses to customer queries.
Integration with Salesforce
Salesforce Chatbots are built on the world’s leading CRM platform, allowing for seamless integration with other Salesforce cloud products. With Salesforce Chatbots, managing customer data has never been easier.
Analytics and Insights
With Salesforce Chatbots, businesses can get valuable insights into customer behavior. By analyzing customer interactions, Salesforce Chatbots can help businesses identify areas for improvement to enhance the customer experience.
Continuous Learning
Salesforce Chatbots leverage machine learning algorithms to learn continuously from every interaction and better their responses over time, improving the accuracy and relevance of responses as they gain more experience.
Here are some generic features of Salesforce Chatbots.
Re-direct bot conversations to human agents for complex customer queries.
Understand the intent of customer queries.
Rapid response times.
Understand customer input and recognize errors.
Available 24/7.
Lead generation – collect customer data and qualify leads for sales teams.
Scale customer service with personalized automation and connected customer data
According to Salesforce, new features in Financial Services Cloud such as proactive service and call deflection will enable financial services firms to reduce operating expenses while delivering exceptional customer service experiences:
In 2021, Salesforce customers reported a 27% increase in case resolution with self-service automation and AI-powered Chatbots (Virtual Assistant). Salesforce Chatbots automate routine request resolution across popular messaging channels such as SMS and WhatsApp, so agents can spend more time on cases that necessitate human intervention.
With Customer Service Coordination, agents can collaborate in Slack to fast-track case resolution. With automated workflows and custom Chatbots, Customer Service Coordination gathers customer data and generates alerts in a central Slack channel allowing teams to respond to critical incidents faster like fraud incidents, executing time-sensitive trades, and claims processing.
With the Customer Data Platform, financial services marketing teams can unify customer data from multiple sources with a point-and-click interface. This enables marketing teams to engage with customers across multiple channels such as web, email, mobile, and social media in a far more personalized way. With Salesforce Chatbots, enhanced Insights, and Data Actions, one-on-one advisor interactions and transactions can be triggered in real time.
A unified console with actionable insights and workflows for faster service
New features in Salesforce Financial Services Cloud include AI-powered dashboards and Chatbots to deliver key insights:
With Intelligent Agent Desktop, agents can get access to deeper customer insights from right within the console page. With Customer Identity Verification, agents can reduce the risk of fraud, and with Customer Record Alerts, Chatbots can serve up issues that customers may not be aware of when they initiate a conversation.
With Analytics for Financial Services, financial services businesses can interpret customer data with insights for faster and better decision-making, eventually delivering more revenue, and strengthening customer engagement.
Girikon has been a Salesforce Consulting Partner for over a decade providing unique and scalable solutions for the financial services industry. We have the necessary expertise in-house to deliver tailored experiences to every customer through self-service, automation, and AI to improve efficiency across your business. Contact us today to learn more about how Salesforce Chatbots can transform your financial services business.