Salesforce | How to overcome Red Flags that indicate harm to your digital strategy?

Choosing CRM is life-changing, and this is not a joke. The way a software adjusts to your customer management approach; its ability to scale and adapt to your customer service routines determines the outputs, measured in conversion, LTV, retention rate, and NPS. Wise Man said business has only two types of problems: losing customers and others. And “losing customers” here is not about several harsh mistakes or bad decisions; it is about the whole system having lots of holes and bottlenecks. Most of such holes never look critical, moreover, teams get used to them as if they were simple operational inconveniences. Routinization makes people non-sensitive to poor interfaces, lack of features, and bugs, so they let sleeping dogs lie.

Roughly saying, imagine you lack just one button in a customer management interface, and this button controls the reminder system for your customer care teams. Your sales & service teams have to control contact frequency and output manually, and they inevitably forget to interact, as too much effort is spent on bureaucracy and accounting.

You lose contacts, you lose personalization - you totally waste money and effort invested in building the relationship.

First thing to say, it is totally normal and common, that out-of-the-box CRMs don't work ankle-deep, as they are developed to fit as many businesses as possible. Simply speaking, standard features were never meant to adjust to custom needs and embody business processes precisely as they are designed.

Using the case with the button as a metaphor, how to detect the missing buttons in your CRM, estimate their impact on the whole business architecture, and fix the problems? Let's take a look at the most common red flags that indicate your Salesforce harms your digital strategy and try to figure out how to deal with them.

Top 10 Red flags that Salesforce might harm your Digital Strategy and How to Overcome it?

1. Your Go-To-Market is limited or blocked by standard features

Launching a new product requires a bunch of new processes. And the more innovative the product is, the more you need to think - and serve customers - out of the box. It is OK to outgrow the basic features, and it's not OK to still try to fit in.

2. You have to adapt business processes to the CRM

No matter how good your CRM is, it is still just a tool to serve your digital strategy. Don't risk your operational advantages to fit in the standard flows!

3. You lack tools to measure or influence key customer service metrics: NPS, CSI and CES

If CRM is a spaceship, the metrics are navigation parameters. No matter how good your processes look, you only know they work for purpose, when there's customer feedback and measurable outputs.

4. You find it hard to run your omnichannel strategy

Omnichannel marketing allows you to remain relevant and competitive in a crowded market. In a digital landscape, an omnichannel strategy allows you to connect with your customers through a personalized experience and turn them into lifelong customers.

No matter which stage of the life cycles your product is, Customer Decision Journey includes plenty of channels and interaction point. Narrowing your presence or ways to interact with a client cuts conversion, Clients’ NPS, and your revenue.

Don't forget to check out: Accelerate Digital Transformation Initiatives With Salesforce Lightning Implementation

5. Integrations don't look good

If you regularly spend time and effort fixing API integrations and related bugs in the data exchange process, the problem requires a more thorough and systematic approach.

6. Your teams find it difficult to cooperate via Salesforce

The bigger the company, the harder it is to navigate processes scattered across the departments. If your CRM fails to provide the environment for efficient communication and cooperation, this is a red flag.

7. Your customer support department grows by leaps and bounds

It turns out that the average customer support response time is over 12 hours, while some companies need more than a week to respond! By that point, customers either lose the need (or even interest) for such a service or look for more dexterous competitors. What is worse, nearly half of the customers (46%) expect companies to respond faster than 4 hours. At the same time, 12% expect a response within 15 minutes or less.

If you hire more and more people to maintain the primary customer service processes manually, you're ignoring automation. And therefore lose big money! Chatbots, automated flows, and AI-based tools may save you tens of hours per week.

8. You have higher standards for UI than Salesforce can offer

When it comes to user experience, a good-looking, intuitive, and convenient interface is a must. If you regularly go on compromises and have to put aside interface upgrades due to Salesforce limitations, you’re losing your competitive edge.

9. You lack the tools to embody new or existing customer experience flows to Salesforce

People love brands which are just attentive to their desires. To make the customer journey seamless and pleasant, the CX manager and team should have an impressive bunch of instruments. Does your Salesforce provide enough of them?

10. You have to say “NO” to digitalization and new services for your customers

Falling out of what customer demands is the ultimate way how to lose your market share. While your clients spend weeks on papers and bureaucratic hustle in your bank, a competitor will launch online banking, including automatic underwriting and employee benefits. What does Salesforce have to do with all these challenges of the digital era? If configured and developed, it can be an ultimate tool to drive your automation but don’t expect standard functions to be enough.

Check out another amazing blog by Sparkybit here: Salesforce and Microsoft Teams Integration

If you face such challenges, consider custom Salesforce adjustments:

How to make Salesforce work for your goals?

If at least one statement above is right about you, consider Salesforce consultancy and development. Custom technology strategy, hence custom engineering, fine-tuning, and adjustment, is the way that makes CRM a mirror for business processes in which you’ve invested tonnes of effort. The more fitting it becomes, the clearer the reflection, and the clearer the results you get.

But doesn’t Salesforce itself meet custom expectations, you may ask? Salesforce has 150,000+ customers in various industries. And one, even the best one in the world, the plug-and-play model can't perfectly fit each of them.

CRM is like a good tuxedo: you only feel perfect when it fits perfectly. Moreover, it is tuxedo to be adjusted to a gentleman, not vice versa. The same is for any CRM and business it is created to serve.

But why still all those companies prefer to work with Salesforce? Because it is flexible, highly configurable, robust, and customizable. Remember our tuxedo? So, Salesforce in this story shouldn't be considered as a tuxedo of your size bought in the mass market: don't expect to run it as soon as it is bought. Salesforce here is a fabric with a premium sewing kit. Companies that have chosen Salesforce CRM should have an available Salesforce expert who will understand your organization's unique needs and configure, customize, and implement CRM according to those needs.

Sparkybit is Salesforce consulting and development company. We make Salesforce perform at its best by fitting it to Clients’ custom business needs.

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