Salesforce

Before we dive into how SMS from Salesforce can drive hiring, let us understand how SMS works and what can do it to engage prospects and customers. What is SMS marketing? In general, SMS marketing or text marketing, implies an opt-in stage for customers to choose how they wish to be contacted. This is where users either leave their phone number on a web form to choose how they wish to be contacted or send an SMS message or short text to an automated system to receive future updates, discount coupons, or any other information they have chosen to receive directly on their mobile device. When the customer leaves a phone number or sends the initial message, an automated marketing software solution saves the customer’s phone number in a database. Marketers use an automated SMS marketing system to send relevant marketing information to these users as and when they choose. Users of course retain the right to opt out of these marketing messages at any time. What benefits does SMS marketing offer? One of the biggest benefits of SMS marketing is that people are more willing to trust text over any other type of marketing channel. SMS or text messages are non-intrusive and do not pose any security threat. SMS marketing messages have a very high open rate when compared to email marketing making it one of the most effective marketing methods available. Another key advantage of SMS marketing is that it enables you to engage with prospects or customers quickly. Response times to SMS messages can be less than a few minutes, compared to several hours or even days that it takes in the case of email. Industry research suggests that people have their phones with them most of the day, which means it is very likely they will see a text message within a few minutes of receiving it. How can businesses utilize SMS marketing? SMS marketing is not just about sending text messages. It can be interactive in nature and if you want to tap into new prospects or upsell to existing customers, there are some best practices that you can follow. Deliver value Text messaging is non-intrusive and personal. Generally speaking, most people exchange text messages with friends, colleagues and relatives. So, if they have chosen you to be a part of that circle, then you need to make your interaction with them worthy of that invitation. Segment your audience based on relevant parameters such as prospects or customers,  geography and age groups, build your messaging content and send only relevant messages. When your audience sees a text from you, they will be inclined to open it. Similarly, deliver exclusive messaging content for the deals and information you provide. If your audience gets the same messaging content in your emails, ads, or your website, the text messages lose their value. Ensure that opting in makes sense to your audience. Pay attention to timing When is the best time to reach out to your prospects and customers? Probably not during regular working hours, especially if your business isn’t even operational during those times. And you are not operational on weekends, then the same rule applies for those off days. Track the periods when your users are most active on your mobile app or site to establish the ideal times to send messages for pushing promotions and other information. Moreover, ensure that when users opt in for your text alerts and notifications, your system sends an immediate acknowledgement. If customers opt in and but don’t hear from you for long periods, they are more likely to lose interest. Track results and act upon them If you want your SMS marketing campaigns to be effective, you need to keep track of how it’s doing. Track how many customers opt-out with every incoming message and use that to ascertain what type of content generates the best results. Applying SMS Marketing in Salesforce to hiring On many occasions, manpower requirements in organizations are sporadic and immediate. Hiring of a qualified workforce in a brief period of time is one of the most challenging tasks that HR managers have to deal with. To fulfil these imminent requirements, organizations and recruitment firms need to have a quick and effective recruitment process in place to close job openings within a fixed period. This is where SMS Salesforce for recruitment can be a game-changer and transform the entire recruitment process. Here’s how businesses and recruitment firms can incorporate SMS messaging in their recruitment process and fast track it. SMS Salesforce for recruitment Check Job Status of Prospective Candidates with SMS Salesforce for recruitment Before reaching out to any prospective candidate, it’s important to be aware of their job status. This would help prevent unnecessary expenses incurred in reaching out to irrelevant candidates. With bulk SMS messaging, organizations can send text messages to millions in one go and check if a prospective candidate is looking for a job or job change. This is just one of the ways to use SMS Salesforce for recruitments at scale. Run Surveys to Deliver Relevant Job Postings to Prospects The more you know about your prospective candidates, the more effective your outbound campaigns would be to hire the relevant candidates. It allows you to send relevant job openings to your prospects. With SMS Salesforce you can run an automated campaign of a series of text messages to run surveys and automate the process of candidate profiling. Moreover, you can segment prospective candidates based on parameters such as years of experience, annual remuneration, work profile and location and create targeted lists. And you can send the most relevant job openings to the candidates on these lists. Schedule Interviews with URLs Once candidates evince interest in the job openings, you can request for their resumes for screening. Following that, using automated SMS messaging from Salesforce, you can send regular status updates about their job application. And to add to this outbound messaging, you can send a web URL to schedule interviews. Send Confirmation Texts By sending URLs in your SMS messages for scheduling calls or interviews, you give the necessary convenience to your candidates to apply at their convenience and trim the time and effort associated with repetitive manual calling. Once a prospect provides a convenient date and time, you can automatically send a confirmation message and avoid any confusion later. Send Reminders and cut down on No-Shows No-shows for scheduled interviews lead to wastage of time and effort of HR managers, recruitment firms and interviewers. Salesforce SMS APP for recruitment can help in reducing candidate no-shows. Automated reminder text messages can be sent to remind candidates of their upcoming interviews. Share Results of Interviews Once an interview is over, candidates are eager to know the result. Recruiters and managers are inundated with calls and messages from candidates to share results. SMS from Salesforce allows recruiters to trigger SMS texts to send out the results automatically as the status of candidates changes from interviewed to selected. This saves a significant amount of manual work and time for recruiters. Collect Documentation for Onboarding Not only SMS, but now even WhatsApp has also become an important channel for effective communication. Now recruiters can collect all relevant documents through WhatsApp. This allows them to simplify the process of document collection and complete the onboarding. Accelerate your hiring process and close job openings with SMS from Saslesforce Recruitment is a time bound activity. And needs a fast and efficient process for being effective. SMS Salesforce for recruitment empowers recruiters to connect with candidates faster at every stage of the hiring process. They also cut back on calls and emails normally associated with the recruitment process. Moreover, it allows recruitment firms to close the open job openings within specified timelines. To know more about how Girikon can utilise the power of SMS Salesforce to accelerate your recruitments, talk to one of our experts today.

Several form builder options and software available allow users to create Forms that allow users to work on different fields and manage different features. Salesforce Forms help users to communicate with Salesforce while creating and saving records with Salesforce Integration. These forms help users to eliminate paperwork while providing Salesforce integration with real-time access across Salesforce Objects. Salesforce Forms are a data collection tool that allows for a reliable way to access accurate records that is free of any discrepancies, which is of utmost value. With a Salesforce Form Generator, it is easy to build forms that can update or create records in Salesforce. With a Form builder App, it is possible to map the data you collect whether it is a lead, contact, case, or opportunity, irrespective of the data structure or hierarchy in Salesforce that too securely.  Salesforce Forms is a 100% native Salesforce form builder and it enables prefilling forms dynamically while generating and updating records. With Salesforce Forms, it is possible to optimize their business processes while improving efficiency. Salesforce Forms can be leveraged by businesses across various industries and are a practical option for those who wish to make the most of the true potential of Salesforce. One such fully automated and efficient no-code solution to manage real-time data is the Salesforce Form Builder App. Besides enabling automation of your data flow that too without writing any line of code, the robust App has a fault-tolerant architecture that ensures that data is secure and consistent: Fully Managed: Being a fully automated platform, this App doesn’t require any management and maintenance. Data Transformation: Since the App has a simple interface, it is possible to modify, perfect and enrich the data you wish to transfer. Real-Time: The App enables real-time data migration so the data is always ready for analysis. Schema Management: The schema of the incoming data is detected by the App and maps it to the schema destination. Scalable Infrastructure: The App has in-built integrations for numerous sources that can help users scale data infrastructure as and when required.      With Live Monitoring it is possible to get a one-stop view to watch the activities that occur within data pipelines.            Live Support: The Form builder App offers round-the-clock support.         Creating online forms and integrating them with Salesforce that too without any coding and simply using drag & drop functionality is easy. You may either opt to build it from scratch or choose a template from an extensive gallery of pre-built form templates

Managing superior customer relationships is no longer a choice but has become a necessity in today’s era. This is easier said than done as businesses are engaged in multiple activities including but not limited to managing multiple business processes. Salesforce – a robust cloud-based CRM has become one of the most popular and widely adopted CRM platforms across the globe. The innovative platform is endowed with multiple features, functionalities, and components that can be leveraged by businesses to resolve their business issues.

What is a subscription-based business model? Subscription business models are those where customers pay recurringly for continuous access to a product or service. Subscription business models can accelerate growth by virtue of creating recurring revenue. This means as a business owner you get revenue again and again over predictable intervals such as monthly or annually as and when your customers renew their subscriptions. What are the benefits of subscription-based business models? Subscription business models protect you during circumstances created by economic uncertainties. They create a stream of predictable revenue from a stable base of returning customers allowing you to plan for longer into the future. Here is some further detailing of the benefits. Fast Tracked revenue. As your business attracts more customers, recurring revenue from subscriptions grow exponentially. It’s always more convenient to manage existing customer than to attract and retain new ones. Subscription results in better retention drives revenue growth more efficiently and easily. Predictable revenue. You don’t need to plan quarter to quarter. Businesses who offer subscriptions, more often than not, start each quarter with a predictable expected revenue closer to the preceding quarter and then build on top of that. Business agility. Once you establish long-term relationships with your customers, you get access to valuable continuous data that will help you to get a better understanding of your customers, and consequently empower you to server them better as you go. Armed with aggregated customer data of their past interactions with you, you can learn about them faster and respond with new appropriate offerings. And the more this happens, the more efficient and unique your offerings will become. What are the different kinds of subscription business models? There are several kinds of subscription business models, but essentially, they all mean the same thing which is, you charge for access to products instead of charging for the products themselves. Here’s a look at three of the most popular ones: Subscription model: Revenue is set for each subscription cycle which could be weekly, monthly or annual. The charges payable are predetermined and based on a fixed date cycle. For example: a fixed monthly subscription fee for a music or video service. Consumption model: In this case, revenue is variable. The amount that is chargeable and when it is due is based on usage. For example, a cab service. Hybrid model: In this model, customers are offered a mix of subscription and usage. In this case revenue has both fixed as well as variable components. For example: over usage data fees on your internet usage on top of a fixed monthly service fee for a fixed data usage cap. How can I implement a subscription-based model for my business? To implement a subscription model, you need to adopt tools and processes that allow you to create a consistent buying journey, while knowing that customers move through different channels and make modifications to their subscriptions with each of them over time. Once you create a consistent journey, track new metrics to ensure you are on the right path. Here’s how you can get there: 1. Empower customers to subscribe and pay over any channel With a subscription-based revenue model, you are constantly interacting with your customers, and they are not always available for a conversation. And in today’s pandemic reality, they increasingly want to engage on their own term. In fact, recent research suggests that they now prefer digital self-service and remote customer service rather than face-to-face interactions. Businesses need to make it possible for customers to renew and/or upgrade their subscriptions and pay instantly on the channels of their choice. This could translate to having a website or a mobile app, to enable that service. It’s a known fact in today’s digital business context, customers don’t just want to choose digital channels for interaction. They want to be able to cross them.   As a business, you want to know how you can deliver a seamless and consistent journey across channels. For instance, a customer might initiate a purchase on your online store, but then being routed to a sales rep when they stall or hesitate at checkout. A good subscription management mechanism can help. It combines customer relationship management tools, and along with the power of self-service, provides access to the same data to all teams. Once they have that, they can pick up customer conversations from where they left off. As a business, you want every touchpoint with the customer to be amazing. And in order to deliver an exceptional journey, you need to integrate all customer data for a compete view of your customer. Subscription management provides a mechanism way to connect customer data that delivers a seamless journey and provides a great customer experience at every touchpoint. 2. Deliver value to customers Subscriptions don’t mean much if they are delivering value to your customers at every step. You’re consistently asking them to renew and pay for their subscriptions. IF there is no value in the offering, customer won’t renew their subscriptions. Consequently, they’ll fall through the cracks and your growth will hit a roadblock. There needs to be a paradigm shift in your thinking from delivering products to delivering value. How can you consistently deliver value-as-a-service to your customers? For instance, Spotify doesn’t sell music. They offer entertainment-as-a-service. Likewise, an e-retailer doesn’t just deliver great products. They deliver an exceptional buying and customer service experience-as-a-service. Value is unlocked as customer’s access and use the product. This brings customer service teams into focus, who will need to ensure sure adoption and customer satisfaction is high to the point of being delightful. A customer relationship management system that provides complete visibility of data and a certain level of automation is vital. Visibility helps you keep an eye on and act on adoption and usage patterns. And you can jump is to support and assist a customer to fix an issue early before it becomes a nuisance. For instance, with automation you can make it easy and fast for customers to start using new products or services they’ve purchased. 3. Understand recurring revenue with new metrics Customer acquisition is a thing of the past. It doesn’t hold the key anymore. Customer value, which leads to customer retention, which eventually drives recurring revenue, are the key metrics now. How will you improve customer retention without measuring it? Let us first look at customer value metrics. You can measure customer value by tracking exactly how much your customers are using your subscription offering. One of the key metrics is to track is average revenue per user, which is as simple as it sounds. Gross revenue divided by number of users. As your business evolves, with more processes and automation in place, you will become more and more effective at targeting customers with the appropriate offerings, all while retaining them and getting them to renew their subscriptions. And once that happens you will see an improvement in the average revenue per customer. To measure growth in top-line revenue, you need to monitor monthly and annual recurring revenue. These are significant since increasing them translates to your revenue streams becoming more and more predictable and that allows you to plan ahead. Ready to open new paths to revenue growth? A subscription-based business model is today’s new reality of a digital-first approach for business. However, it can only succeed if its authentic. Customers are smart. And you can’t fake value to them.  They will renew only when they get real, consistent value for their money. It’s both a challenge and an opportunity to get close to your customers, not just know them better but understand them better, and offer what they want in the way they want it. Girikon is a Certified Salesforce Consulting Partner and can help you to re-imagine your offerings and envision a whole new customer journey. Contact us today to learn how a subscription-based revenue model can deliver value to your customers and drive revenue and agility for your business.

Customers are now digital first. And that’s great news because now you can more with every moment your customer has with your brand. The key is connecting these moments and making them count. That’s what it takes to build real lasting relationships. To build an enterprise that customers trust and love. But to get there you need data. You need to unify al the data customers have entrusted with you down to the last detail. Then put that data to use. So every interaction feels more relevant and human and personalised. Drive digital experiences across sales commerce and customer service. Salesforce Marketing Cloud puts data at the center of the relationship and that starts with knowing your customers. Marketing Cloud combines all your data from all your siloed data sources creating a single source of truth for every customer giving you a three-dimensional view of who they are and what they want in the moment even as their needs change.  So now you can humanise every moment whether it’s a welcome email and they become a new customer, an ad for a product they might like, an opportunity for their business, a text resolving their shipping delay, of a special offer at checkout for being a loyal customer. And because it’s powered by Einstein AI, the heavy lifting is done for you. Marketing Cloud helps you optimise your impact too giving you actionable analytics, budget and business goals in real time so you are always making your campaigns more personal, more valuable, more resonant. And with Slack as your digital HQ, you can adapt with agility thanks to your teams, tools and partners being more connected and insights more accessible. With Marketing Cloud you can make every moment count. Do more with your marketing initiatives at every touchpoint. Marketing Cloud Engagement automates pervasive customer journeys with engaging and personalised experiences across channels. Meet them on mobile. Engage customers with personalised communication on their preferred mobile channels. Engage them with email. Deliver targeted scalable messaging and content such as offers and promotions and optimize engagement. Give them compelling content. Leverage prospect data for targeted and personalized advertising across channels and ad affiliate networks. Deliver engaging journeys with simple east to use tools. Make every moment count. Use customer data to predict preferences and automate outreach messaging for pervasive, relevant, effective customer interactions. Connect experiences with ease. Boost productivity by creating automated customer journeys using simple click-and-drag tools. Adapt to anything. Automate recommendations and actions on the go as customers engage with your brand, analyse results in real time and optimize performance. Make marketing engagement effective — and easy. Create seamless customer journeys. Acquire new customers and engage existing ones with relevant, connected journeys. Engage in the inbox and acquire subscribers. Create and automate personalized outreach email campaigns. Keep in touch with mobile messaging. Push relevant content to your customer’s preferred channel and device. Reduce costs by delivering highly targeted advertising. Activate data to suppress customers that don’t need content and personalize advertising across channels. Boost engagement and save time with AI. Boost marketing campaign efficiency by taking advantage of AI-powered insights to push the relevant message at the right time. Optimize all your campaigns in one place. Get a unified view of campaign performance with pre-configured and customisable dashboards for journeys across channels Marketing Cloud Advertising The Marketing Cloud first arty advertising engine allows brands to harness their own customer data to create targeted and relevant audiences for advertising campaigns. Whether you want to acquire new customers, engage brand new email subscribers, re-engage customers or supress ads for customers who aren’t relevant for a campaign, Marketing Cloud can help you find success. All by prioritising data security, trust and scalability. With Marketing Cloud advertising, brands can send their target audiences to Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest and Snapchat. The cool things about Marketing Cloud is that the data your customers have already shared with you is the only ingredient you need to create audiences for all your use cases. Security and scalability are top of mind for marketers. That’s why all the first party data stored in Salesforce never leaves the secure environment of Marketing Cloud advertising. Without being securely hashed. Al you have to do is choose existing lists or data extensions in Salesforce to create your audience. No more manually uploading data using unsecure formats. You can even have you data refreshed automatically with a single click. Whether the goal is to acquire new customers, increase RoI, re engage customer or all the above, Marketing Cloud Advertising will help you create personalised advertising moments for your customers. Here are 7 New Features in the Latest Release of Marketing Cloud 1. Salesforce CDP (Customer Data Platform) enhancements With Salesforce CDP, you can get a holistic view of every individual in your database and then use that data to deliver a whole new level of personalization. Upgrades include: Salesforce CDP Integration with Interaction Studio: Target your customers with unified insights and cross-platform data to enhance real-time decision-making. Salesforce CDP Connector with Commerce Cloud : Augment customer profiles with commerce data such as catalogue and order data and provide personalized experiences based on buying history. Calculated Insights enhancements: Utilise new, advanced analytical functions in the Calculated Insights feature, which lets derive the benefits of multi-dimensional metrics in Salesforce CDP. Now, you can make use of ranking, segmenting, and manipulate date and time related functions such as days since the last transaction. You’ll also have access to a built-in function library, be able to edit names of formulae, and the freedom to enable or disable Calculated Insights. 2. Datorama Reports Advanced for Marketing Cloud Datorama Reports for Marketing Cloud takes you beyond out-of-the-box analytics. It is a precluded reporting and analytics tool for Journey Builder, Marketing Cloud Email Studio and Mobile Studio. With the advanced features of Datorama Reports, you can turbocharge your journey analytics across channels and devices with new dashboard tools. 3. Datorama Connector with CDP Now you can automatically convert raw data into powerful insights and improve your marketing RoI by accessing CDP from within Datorama. Datorama will also support an out-of-the box CDP app to give you instant access to your CDP data. With just a few clicks you will get all the insights you need to have a deeper understand of your audience, how they’re engaging with your brand, and their potential value to your business. 4. Google Analytics 4 tagging and reporting It is extremely easy now to connect Google Analytics data with Marketing Cloud. Also, with the new release of Google Analytics, you can access robust analytics for mobile and email content as well and automatically tag with Journey Builder. Google Analytics 4 metrics are seamlessly integrated into the Journey Analytics dashboard and accessible to all Journey Builder users 5. Einstein for Email Marketing enhancements Marketers often ask – when is the right time to launch a targeted email campaign? What kind of subject line will attract the deepest and highest engagement? The B2B marketing automation platform Pardot, when coupled with Marketing Cloud, offers two new ways to provide to answer those questions and improve your email engagement rates with data-centric insights. 6. Pardot Accounts as Campaign Members Organizations are increasingly adopting an account-based marketing approach to grow their business and retaining customers. Hence, account level campaign creation is now more important than ever. This feature can be used to execute prospecting campaigns with sales reps to identify the relevant buyers in each target account. This is a unique and possibly game changing feature that will allow sales reps to help marketing target the relevant buyers for any upcoming campaign. 7. Advertising Studio enhancements Advertising Studio is a powerful tool designed for data-driven advertising. It offers two new features to help you expand to new channels and access vital insights: Snapchat for Advertising Studio: Now you can use your first-party data in Salesforce to build targeted, personalized advertising audiences for the Snapchat platform. Find new customers that are similar to your loyal customers, re-engage inactive customers, augment customer experience, and boost your RoI. Datorama Audience Insights for the Advertising Studio app: This new app allows you to connect and synchronize your data from Advertising Studio in Datorama to improve your cross-channel audience strategy. Deliver meaningful moments to your industry. Communications and Media Turn engagement into a main event. Reach new audiences and acquire new subscribers with smart, AI based, data-driven marketing. Deliver compelling content to drive usage from broadcasts to recommendations and beyond. Boost productivity by automating campaigns at scale across channels and devices. Financial Services Personalize the customer experience across every touch point in their financial journey. Engage throughout the lifecycle for customers in real time with personalized omnichannel journeys. Personalize journeys with data that reveals buyer preferences and interests like investments and more. Healthcare Keep a track of your customers and patients. Foster trusted and lasting Patient, Member and Healthcare Provider relationships at every point of their digital journey across your business. Engage them with personalized messaging on their channel of choice in real time and optimize campaigns on the go. Life Sciences Develop lasting customer relationships at every step. Consumers now want deeper understanding, more self-service options, and consistent, one-on-one interactions at every touch point of their journey. By delivering a digital-first health care provider personalised journeys across their customers’ preferred choice of channel and device, you can nurture lasting and trusted relationships. Tech Deliver state-of-the-art marketing in the right moment. Boost your sales pipeline. Engage customers and prospects with one-to-one messaging across all touchpoints. With AI based analytics and insights, you can optimize campaigns to deliver relevant, engaging and pervasive content at the right time in the purchasing process. Manufacturing Assemble engaging customer journeys. Foster stronger, more impactful customer relationships. Deliver personalized, digital-first interactions along every touchpoint of the customer’s journey. Engage prospects and cultivate leads with the right messaging, on the right medium, at the right time, and with the right regularity and consistency for service updates, order modifications, new offers, and more. Retail and Consumer Goods Acquire and engage loyal customers. As customers move more and more into the digital ecosystem, brands must utilise a unified view of their customers to deliver cohesive, personalized, pervasive experiences with moments that matter. Girikon is a Gold Certified Salesforce Consulting Partner and can help you unlock the real power of Marketing Cloud for your business Contact one of our experts today.

Salesforce Energy and Utilities Cloud gives energy and Utilities providers a digital interaction platform to personalize customer engagements. Utilities can meet new customer expectations by delivering great experiences like easily guiding customers through enrolment, transfer and activation of services through a self-service website. And using out of the box drag and drop tools, to configure complex processes. With data integration with existing back-end CIS and MDM systems, to ensure a streamlines service experience. A utility has a comprehensive profile view of each customer to deliver a highly personalized and predictive experience. Like sharing special offers for programs or new rates for products. Digital tools are available to tailor customer experiences and help customers make informed decisions. With chatbots for the first level of customer support, accessible at anytime from anywhere. So service agents can pick up the case for the right level of assistance when needed. Agents have a thorough view of each customer account and can navigate between multiple residential or commercial accounts. With all the information they need like full chronological history, account and billing information, usage and more. And all data can be consolidated from back end systems so agents always have access to a single source of truth. Agents can also see into process and actions initiated on other channels and can use that information to better serve customers from finalizing a purchase to liaise scheduling field service appointments. Utilities now have insight through interactive dash board to real time data to keep customers at the core of their business. And can provide developers a library with hundreds of pre built business processes and integrations to accelerate time to value and digital transformation. Chart a new course for the future of energy by streamlining your business! Meet the needs of all energy eco-system stakeholders -customers, suppliers, partners and employees with a platform that fosters agile innovation across your entire business lifecycle. Adapt and cater to rising customer expectations. Adopt a digital first approach and scale fast with easy integration with your existing systems. Deliver customer first service to your customer community. Streamline your Oil and Gas business and prepare for the future of energy. Connect stakeholders and assets across the service journey and collaborate in real-time. Drive on field decision-making with on-th-go access to vital data and information. ENERGY AND UTILITIES CLOUD Drive customer service and engagement on a single, connected flexible and scalable platform. Be the trendsetter, transition to energy & utilities cloud in Salesforce with centralized customer data, and on-time, personalized, pro-active service from anywhere, from any device. Energy and Utilities Cloud delivers a scalable, digital and secure energy solution that adapts and scales for future energy needs. Get access to a process repository of more than 100 preconfigured and extendable best practices Easily connect to back office utility Billing and Customer Information Systems (CIS) with easy, drag and drop integrations Utilise a data model with access to more than 350 extended objects specifically designed for the utility industry With Energy and Utilities Cloud, you can take advantage of purpose-built innovations designed for an dynamic and evolving energy landscape. Transform agents into advisors and deliver a whole new way of customer engagement. Empower service agents with the resources they need – tools, analytics, and AI based insights, to deliver personalized customer service anytime, anywhere, from any device. Deliver personalized customer service on a digital-first platform. Support the entire spectrum of customers, ranging from residential customers to large commercial customers. Get a single, scalable and secure solution that delivers connected journeys and promotes self-service. Turn customer freedom into a competitive advantage. Offer quotes and tariffs faster than ever, by quickly processing current market pricing and customer information with a 360-view of the customer and data-driven tools. Improve acquisition and trim churn. Easily generate complex, multi-locational and multi-product quotes to acquire customers faster. Retain customers longer with personalized offerings. POWER AND UTILITIES Adapt and thrive in a dynamically evolving Power & Utilities industry. Easily navigate the intricate utility landscape with seamless and powerful digital transformation. Revolutionise the Utility customer experience. Embrace digitalization and drive into future of energy transformation with a customer first approach. Make advisors out of agents by giving them the tools that deliver a customer-360 view. Encourage self-service and engage customers across the journey with AI, and offer multi-channel personalized service Deliver next generation service operations and customer experience by going beyond the contact center. Service customer needs faster in the Retail sector. Deliver a more connected experience for customers by bringing existing systems on a single platform. Deliver quotes and tariffs faster than competitors with data-driven tools and easily navigate multi-locational, multi-account structures. Evolve offerings, accelerate customer acquisition, and improve customer retention by designing competitive products and services with just a few clicks. Boost customer experience with personalised engagements and streamlined field service operations. Become the trendsetter in sustainability. Get ahead of your competition with innovative digital transformation that drives your business during the energy transition. Drive energy efficiency program adoption and help customers reach their energy goals. Educate customers and partner with them to adopt sustainable offerings and services that foster new revenue streams Go beyond commoditization and stay current with new offerings OIL AND GAS Connect stakeholders and assets across every touchpoint throughout the Oil & Gas value chain. Optimize your organization for the new era of energy transformation. Drive digital optimization across the upstream ecosystem. Optimise communication and engagement with stakeholders across the value chain. Seamlessly connect landowners, suppliers, customers, shareholders, and the relevant compliance organizations. Augment staff safety with tools that empower you to attract, retain, upgrade, and engage the dynamic workforce. Reduce costs with analytics and AI to drive smarter connections across the energy lifecycle. Boost on-site efficiency and safety. Optimise commercial processes and deliver better service Empower teams with digital tools that drive safety Streamline operations and optimise asset digitization Transform downstream enterprises. Increase customer retention with a platform that drives personalization and growth Optimise stakeholder relationships across all distribution channels Lower maintenance costs, boost plant efficiency and reduce less downtimes Remodel and enhance oilfield equipment and services. Personalize contracts, quotes and bids and win high-margin deals Operationalize existing investments in IoT with analytics and AI to drive business intelligence and reduce costs Deliver value to customers with simplicity and transparency by investing in digital transformation strategies. Develop and execute an actionable sustainability strategy. Scale Social, Environmental, and Governance excellence to boost stakeholder engagement Fast track progress towards achieving your sustainability goals with optimized greenhouse gas emission tracking and accounting across all your assets and locations. Get ready for a sustainable future with a unified agile platform that allows you to pivot quickly, fast track business models, and adapts to new processes, workflows and integrations. Common questions that we get asked often. Here are the answers. Who can use Energy & Utilities Cloud? Energy & Utilities Cloud is for any energy and utilities provider who wish to revolutionise the customer experience and connect the customer journey across every touchpoint. Irrespective of what type of business model you have, whether a regulated energy company or a retail energy provider, Energy & Utilities Cloud can help you deliver connected engaging, personalized digital-first experiences across the customer lifecycle. How do I use Energy & Utilities Cloud with my current Customer Information and billing systems? Energy & Utilities Cloud is not a replacement for billing or CIS systems.  However, you can easily integrate your existing utility enterprise systems with Energy & Utilities Cloud using out-of-the-box integration solutions driven by utility-specific data models and a repository of pre-built processes to fast track your digital transformation. How is Energy & Utilities Cloud different from competing products? Energy & Utilities Cloud is founded on the design methodology that built the world’s #1 CRM platform. It has been developed specifically for the energy industry.  Now you get faster time to value with data models, custom industry specific apps, and out-of-the-box integrations. Build on the experience of our industry leaders for click based implementation and guidance throughout your digital transformation journey. How so other Salesforce products work with Energy & Utilities Cloud? Energy & Utilities Cloud plugs in easily with Marketing Cloud Experience Cloud, Service Cloud, and more. Now you can innovate faster than ever, with the full power of the Native Salesforce Customer 360 platform. Girikon is a Gold Certified Salesforce Implementation Partner that can help you deliver an engaging digital transformation journey to your customers. Contact us today! Questions? Our reps have answers. CONTACT AN EXPERT

There is a general consensus in higher education that institutions of nearly all types and sizes need to improve persistence and completion rates. While there have been slight improvements in recent years, data indicates that only half of the students complete degrees at the institution at which they start. Studies have suggested that many students complete their degrees at other institutions, taking completion to about 62%. Student departure remains a mystery for most educational leaders. They feel a compelling need to understand and fix the causes of attrition. There is no shortage of knowledge or reference on what works in student retention. Given all that, it is surprising that rates have only gradually improved. This could be for two reasons. First, institutions are flooded with data points and may not be able to identify the ones that must be tracked or which ones help would explain the persistence patterns of their students. Second, we may lack the connections between institutional supports and students who need them to see if we are truly doing something about it. Organize the Data Points with a Model Student success models can be helpful for educational leaders who wish to identify the key aspects associated with student success, persistence and completion. While there are many models to choose from, one of the most talked about is Tinto’s “Theory of Student Departure”. The model helps track the student lifecycle and identifies areas where both student and college attributes can impact the decision to stay in or leave an educational program. Tinto’s model, when analysed and condensed, suggests that there are five key areas where students may encounter challenges that disrupt their educational careers. Likewise, they may identify areas where students may have strengths that boost their success: Academic Integration Academic Integration in a college can be segmented into three parts: preparation, transition, and performance. These three can be connected sequentially, meaning lack of preparation can lead to a poor transition and weak ongoing performance, or they can occur in isolation, disconnected from one another. Experienced faculty and advisors probably know several cases where poorly prepared students were highly successful, well-prepared students failed, and those from both groups realized a trajectory in line with their levels of preparation. Social Integration Social Integration addresses the extent to which the student is able to connect with peers within the educational ecosystem. Adult learners often bond with other adults through common programs. The extent to which students have successfully bonded with their peers can be hard to read; it is not usually a one-size-fits-all model of social integration and student information systems are not typically built to collect and report the data that may be associated with this important area of student success. This aspect may also be useful when working on student faculty engagement.  This form of social integration in which students feel heard, seen and accepted by faculty is important especially for under-represented groups to feel a sense of belonging at their institution. Financial Support Financial Support is critical to enable a student to be able to afford education at that institution.. For those who complete annual aid applications, the resulting calculations serve as a proxy for the ability to pay. The data collected for this purpose does not include factors that can help a student afford costs such as support from family or those that can hamper affordability such as need of a student to work to support a elderly dependent household. We often have a different perception of need-based aid than how students view the issue: the amount of the education bill, less the aid is the amount to be paid or financed. More often than not, it is this bottomline number that impacts students’ real or perceived ability to remain in an educational program. It can also impact the value perception of the educational experience. Is this experience worth it’s price? Goal Clarity Goal Clarity indicates the degree to which a student recognises why they are enrolled in certain college, and the end goal of the program being pursued. Certain institutions might assume that a chosen program or subject translates to goal clarity but data often shows that students change subjects two to three times before getting a degree. A few of the factors that can determine whether a student may have clarity about program they have chosen are its requirements, their personal ability to meet required standards and their practical experience in that field. Faculty and advisors will spot a common situation of students feeling lost when they are unable to pursue a popular program. Support of Family and Friends One of the least investigated areas for measuring student persistence is the support of family. As the number of college students grows, the perception of the college experience amongst their friends and families may differ than those who come from families where college attendance is common. However, that does not mean all families don’t support of first-generation students across the board. In fact, many families place high value on college education. Having said that, there may not be an obvious relation between the program curriculum and career, time spent away from class, student services, and the potential of associated programs for providing key career skills. Create a Framework of Indicators for Lagging Using these five aspects of higher education as a model, it is possible to establish a data framework that measures what we know about students and their probability to continue and succeed. Lagging indicators are most commonly available data points that reflect things that have already occurred. These include grade point average (GPA), which don’t reveal student successes and struggles with certain concepts and skills. They also include the marks of courses finished in a term, unpaid fees that disallow registration for another term, abandonment of courses midway etc. While these data may support analysis of past activities, rarely do they provide understanding of current students. For insight that is “current”, institutions need data indicators that reveal outcomes in real time. Lagging indicator data is important. It allows the institution to conduct detailed, multi- parameter analysis to reveal student groups that may enter into high-risk situations. It may also aid in identifying remedies and support structures to support future students who may have the same characteristics. Too often, these analyses are univariate, such as GPA and one-year retention rate. Even while doing multivariate analyses, the data silos and not sufficient to form regression models with retention values high enough to explicitly establish the differences between students who continue and those who don’t. Human behaviour is complex and is driven by many factors. Consequently, analysis needs to be detailed and based on comprehensive data to allow analysts to investigate multiple factors to understand the patterns of their students. Leading indicators allow institutions to impact persistence in real time. Awareness of a student not connecting with faculty as expected, assignments, fellow students, lets the institution to intervene and attempt to resolve the issue before the student feels isolated to a degree that compels him/her to leave. Identifying students who have pending program fees within the term, which usually happens because loans applied on parent creditworthiness, have not been approved, allows the institution to intervene and find a solution. The institution can support in bridging the gap and mitigate the stress felt by the student before it becomes overwhelming. These are but a few examples of how leading indicators can be used to impact student persistence. Identify and Address Gaps There is typically more data available on lagging indicators than leading indicators, which implies that we have been more attuned to collecting and using data that reflect information on something that already occurred. It must be re-iterated that lagging indicators are help in analysing patterns and suggest interventions for future students. There is far less data available and used as leading indicators, however, and this implies an emerging area of practice that demands more attention. Analyses need to have robust and comprehensive data, yet those tend to exist in various systems/data silos. Institutions that have data warehouses are one step ahead; identifying the important data and extracting them from those systems may still be a challenge, even with solutions in place. Many other institutions that lack these data tools find themselves wishing for better insights and tools to help them collect, assemble and analyze their data. Certain areas suggest polls or surveys. While there are a number of solutions available today, these can also have limitations. One of these is the timing of offering a survey to new or current students, when receive the data back and place those into the hands of those who need it (especially advisors). Some of these instruments allow comparisons of student responses at your institution to others, which can be helpful, but that may be outweighed by the timing, where these data then become lagging, not leading, indicators. Short polls, such as those that ask students to rate how they are doing that day with facial emojis, may capture those who are feeling overwhelmed. Longer polls, that tease out the nuances of family and friend support, shouldn’t exceed 10 questions and five would likely increase response rates. Survey overload can be avoided by good planning and timely distribution of short polls and surveys. Connect the Dots (and the Data) Collecting, assembling, analyzing and acting upon a robust dataset is an evolutionary process. Institutions should start with what they have and gradually augment and enhance their data and its usage as part of a quality development process. Knowing what the desired state looks like is important to creating a strong road map toward it. Assembling a robust set of lagging indicators means getting data from multiple systems, modules and tables in to a unified dataset. Once aggregated, data analysis and visualization should reveal the interaction of the data categories within the framework. Human behavior is often complex and more often than not the decision to stay or leave a program is a mix of multiple factors originating from various parts of that experience. And there may be outside factors as well such as childcare, work pressure etc. External factors may be harder to capture through these data collection mechanisms and may not reveal the true picture. A proper assessment of the internal factors within the control of the institution will augment the analysis and sidestep simplistic, one dimensional solutions about why students are staying/leaving. Assembling and using a robust set of leading indicators is often a tremendous challenge at the most forward-thinking institutions. Is anyone following up to check if any student needs help on unpaid balances? Does the financial aid office, who may be equipped to discuss solutions, even know that this has occurred? Is financial stress causing the student to look for additional outside work, such that they have less time to read and complete assignments? Is the early alert system complicated to use by faculty?  Do residence hall advisors have a similar alerting mechanism for issues they might spot? Who is following up on these and what data do they have that will help them facilitate an empathetic and inform conversation with the student before they make a decision to leave? Adopting a case management methodology to understand student persistence and success has been used by institutions in first-year programs. Some of the more remarkable results have linked students to institutional resources, as well as community services and supports, in a “wrap-around” approach to student success. These approaches can only work when cases are surfaced and those empowered to act have sufficient information to meaningfully interact with the student. It requires that the information from disparate systems is brought together. Improving student outcomes also requires that the care teams and staff can see the relationship between suggesting services and resources and the student’s engagement or lack thereof. Higher education. student support has been based upon a “build it and they will come” approach, as well as an invitational approach to student referrals. Become a part of the Innovation eco-system Girikon is a certified Salesforce Consulting Partner with extensive Salesforce Consulting experience. Get access to experts who can help you adapt fast and achieve success. Contact us today. Questions? Our reps have answers. CONTACT OUR SALESFORCE CONSULTANTS