Salesforce Tips and Tricks for Data Integration

User experience is one of the most important aspects of any prominent business endeavor. However, to keep your consumers satisfied with your service or product it’s imperative to have a proper insight into their likes and dislikes, purchasing behavior, and overall experience with your brand. Furthermore, you should have a detailed analysis of your business flow and which portions of your offer need improvement as well as where you’re doing better than you hoped to.

Customer Relations Management software, such as Salesforce, provide business owners with real-time data analysis and a series of other features that help improve your customer support, marketing strategy, and business growth. Furthermore, this awesome piece of tech gives you the ability to connect diverse third-party software solutions or frameworks to further increase the effectiveness of your activities.

Still, working with all the information we can harvest, thanks to modern-day technology, is not always as easy as it might appear. Business professionals often don’t know what to do with all the metrics at their disposal or can’t figure out how to integrate data in the most effective way. For this reason, we’re going to let you in on a few simple tips that facilitate data integration process so you could have the most comprehensive customer relations strategy.

Don't forget to check out: Salesforce Lightning Experience – Five Tips for Salespeople

Use Integration Tools

If you’re a novice Salesforce user but you wish to integrate data properly with minimal costs, it's best to use an integration software that will allow you to perform your actions without any coding experience. Software solutions like Dataloader represent the easiest way to integrate data with your Salesforce.

The main benefit of this approach is that you can go through the integration process using a simple, user-friendly wizard that will take you each step of the way. Dataloader is free, browser-based software, which means you don't have to download any installation files.

Dataloader and similar tools are especially useful for business owners that run repetitive tasks. Therefore, it’s easy to see how this type of software would be useful for custom writing paper service business once you get a glimpse of how easy it is to create, schedule, or edit tasks. Also, this method of data integration is useful for eCommerce businesses, as well as SaaS, and other industries.

Furthermore, data integration tools, offer seamless data export and import from various depositories like FTP, DropBox, and others. Also, this way you can export-related objects automatically and there’s no need to gather multiple datasets in Excel for reassociation.

Help Text

For each piece of data that you integrate with your Salesforce system, there should be as much information as possible, so users could understand the background and origin of the data. Let’s say you’re a professional paper writer and you have a piece of data that says “Average rating” but there is no clear definition if it’s your rating according to client reviews, so there could be a confusion regarding the nature of this information.

This is where Help Text can come in handy to get rid of any possibility for the wrong conclusion that would lead to poorly performed data integration. Through Help Text, you can provide additional information regarding each piece of data that needs to be integrated into your system. This way you will avoid any chance for confusion during data integration that might lead to issues in the future.

Baby steps

When it comes to data integration with Salesforce, it’s best not to rush things and start small. In most cases, Salesforce users start their data integration with a quote to cash in order to automate the sales process. What this means is that you'll export quotes to an ERP or accounting software in order to generate invoice or sales records according to a quote based in Salesforce.

This way you will automate the most important aspect of your business just by integrating one piece of software with the Salesforce platform.

The Import Wizard

Using the Import Wizard instead of Dataloader gives you numerous advantages in certain situations. First of all, Import Wizard is a built-in tool, which means you can access it via an internet browser, instead of downloading a desktop tool. This means you can work remotely as long as you have a proper internet connection, which is an amazing advantage for those of us who are constantly on the move.

Furthermore, this tool allows you to import bulk data as new custom object records. However, unlike Dataloader, this tool is only useful if you’re planning on loading 50 thousand records of less in a bulk. Import Wizard also allows you to avoid duplicate entries for records based on lead email, account name, or website.

It's also important to understand that certain types of records are supported only by Import Wizard so you should try and get the hang of this tool in case you have no alternative but to use it.

Check out another amazing blog by Alice here: Salesforce Lightning Experience – Five Tips for Salespeople

Consider your workflow to organize your data flow

In order to plan your data integration properly and efficiently, it's important to map your workflow so you would have a clear picture of which data requires real-time processing, and which should be sent in bulk. This mapping process depends on your business model and there are no premade solutions that work well with every business entity.

First of all, analyze which data should be shared throughout all departments in your company. If a customer orders a product or service, should HR be notified the moment your product is shipped? Also, it’s important to look from the opposite direction and consider which data should automatically be imported to Salesforce. If your customer service agent receives a complaint, the ticket should automatically go to Salesforce.

Overflowing your team members with useless data has a negative effect on the overall efficiency of your enterprise, therefore it's of paramount importance to map your operations and efficiently integrate data, choosing only essential information and providing an optimal flow of data.

Conclusion

Integrating data with Salesforce is not a simple task, and it requires a lot of technical knowledge, which is why most business owners choose to hire professionals for this task. However, through the use of a specialized software solution and a deep understanding of your business, there’s a chance for effective data integration that can propel your business to the top.