Empowering Business Users Through Salesforce

I once was leading a requirement-gathering session to eventually rollout Salesforce at a client location. During a coffee break, I asked a business user, “What do you think of Salesforce? Isn’t it a neat application?” The answer I got was not sugar-coated at all, but rather, very candid.

The business user said, “Throw us any tool to use, and we’ll learn it. But, we’ll use it only if the data makes sense to do daily business, so I can get back to my customer with current order status or shipment location.” Upon hearing the business user’s prompt response, I asked myself, “How do I WOW this user, and others in the room, after the coffee break?”

So why Salesforce? Is it because it’s a trend in the market to implement a cloud application?

Salesforce has the distinct advantage of showing instant results, as it requires low coding, which helps deliver visual description much faster than coding. This, combined with relevant data from multiple data sources; integrating with Salesforce makes a business user all the more powerful.

In fact, a key success factor to increasing user adoption is having a harmonized application. This means concentrating on seamless integration with relevant data sources, and reducing data redundancy by not replicating data in multiple places. Giving a business user the assurance of accurate and consistent data is the greatest return on investment one can expect from an empowered Salesforce user.

In figuring out which tool to use for automating your organization’s repetitive business processes, Salesforce stands out as it provides multiple tools needed for the type of business process you want to automate with clicks.

Mastech Digital’s Salesforce practice has helped many of our customers eliminate the swivel-chair interface between applications, by rolling out one Salesforce application and integrating with multiple data sources.

Later, during the User Acceptance Testing (UAT) phase, I ran into the business user I met previously, and enthusiastically, he said, “I can beat the competition and get the product to market faster than before, as I have all the data to support me!” His excitement didn’t stop there as he likened the Salesforce search feature to Google search, to which my instant response was, “Yeah, it’s amazing, but it can’t help you order a pizza.”

Bringing best practices by experience, along with industry business process knowledge, is the key to rollout a successful Salesforce application, which Mastech Digital provides to many of our customers.

The benefits don’t stop here, however. New and exciting technologies including predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are now empowering professionals in ways unimaginable 20 years ago. That leads to the question, “What is Salesforce Einstein?”

Shirish Ashwat
Salesforce Practice Director