COVID-19 didn’t introduce the adoption of more virtual business experiences to the world; it just accelerated it. This year, we’ve seen countless Salesforce customers pivot and deploy new solutions fast to meet changing customer needs. Like Zoom and Sonos, some have been fortunate enough to achieve record-breaking growth by prioritizing rapid transformation to adapt to new customer needs.
For more than 20 years, our experts within Salesforce Professional Services have worked alongside our customers to provide product guidance and best practices to help them achieve their goals. But, over the past year, much like our customers Zoom and Sonos, we’ve had to evolve our approach to make sure our customers keep up with changing market demands in the current economic climate. We took note of the common questions, such as:
- How do I balance implementing new solutions fast to meet current demands while setting up our platform for long-term success?
- How do I align multiple business units with different objectives around crucial measures of success?
- What are the leading practices for deploying Salesforce solutions fast and at scale?
What is Assurance Services?
Whether you are trying to deliver personalized engagements to customers, improve employee productivity to work from anywhere, or create a 360 view of your customer, our Assurance Services offerings provide the fastest path to achieving your vision with Salesforce technology. The portfolio of Assurance Services offerings was designed based on research from thousands of implementations our professional services experts have delivered and built around five main areas that are most critical to successful customer outcomes:
1. Organizing for success
The hallmark of a successful Salesforce product implementation is when your entire team is aligned and confident in a shared vision and set of business goals for your solution. To achieve this alignment, you must set up the internal structures you need, such as project governance, business value and metrics, and implementation roadmap planning. With these in place, you will have the foundation to execute your vision.
2. Solution and technical design foundation
Successful companies create repeatable design processes that guide future technical design decisions. By developing clear standards for system architecture design, application rationalization, and configuration versus customization, you can ensure short-term outcomes and long-term flexibility before jumping into creating a single line of code.
“Developing design guidelines helps Salesforce customers understand the trade-offs for decisions they make, and ultimately helps us go faster,” said Katie Dunlap, managing director, Salesforce Capabilities and Industries at Slalom Consulting. “With the proper technical foundation, you can ensure your Salesforce solution is scalable for the short and long term and that your operations move at the speed of your business.”
3. Data and integration design
In a world ripe with large volumes of data, identifying and integrating the right data is critical to personalized customer or employee experiences. Developing an approach to data based on Salesforce data model best practices, data integration, and data rationalization helps you create a comprehensive system for surfacing data that allows you to deliver an exceptional and connected customer experience.
4. Infrastructure and user security
A secure and trusted platform is critical to mitigating risk while providing the best experience for users and customers. Developing a security and compliance framework based on Salesforce best practices such as single sign-on or data accessibility and security enables you to lay the foundation for a secure and trusted platform that can align and evolve with industry and privacy laws.
5. Development and release management
Creating alignment around key metrics and building an efficient development and release management process allows you to release new features faster while reducing development time. With critical methods for development, deployments, and quality control, you’ll have the confidence to predictably and continuously release new features to your end-users.
In the coming weeks, we will be publishing insights and best practices from our experts who deliver success with our customers. With the help of experts in our Salesforce ecosystem and our partners like Slalom Consulting, you’ll get the guidance you need to achieve a 360-degree view of your customer.
Learn more about how you can accelerate your path to ROI using Salesforce technology with the help of Salesforce experts.
