Put your Salesforce licenses to work

As we have moved into summer, there’s more economic uncertainty, vacation schedules, grounded employees, and more to deal with. We all know what comes next. Budget season is just around the corner! This will be your golden opportunity to demonstrate the value you have received from your IT spend and licensing usage.

If you have unused licenses eating away at your budget, please understand that you are not alone. All organizations are well-intentioned in their Salesforce rollout strategy. When real-life events, such as 2020’s global pandemic happen, it can put a damper on your progress and result in some projects being cut or postponed – all while those licenses sit eagerly on the sideline waiting to be assigned to someone whose life should be forever changed … for the better.

Here are five quick wins designed to dust off those unused licenses, enable your workforce with Salesforce tools that can change the way they interact with your organization and customers, and help you gather some quick wins to demonstrate return and justify your licensing spend heading into next year.

1. Compliance

Compliance has certainly not taken the hiatus that the rest of the economic world has taken this year. Bring your compliance teams into Salesforce with workflow and business processes to perform things such as required periodic reviews, onboarding, and other activities that are typically done outside CRM. Have customer-facing employees ask the required data points, questions, and other details from the customer, creating a record in Salesforce that can be reviewed and approved by compliance teams. This will result in rapid feedback to the front lines when data elements are amiss, reduced risk associated with incomplete compliance reviews, and a more generally amiable compliance team. You’ll likely see the ability to retire some of the many systems currently employed to accomplish these tasks and help justify the Salesforce licensing spend with activities that will ultimately save your organization risk and potential fines. There’s no reason compliance shouldn’t live in your CRM system because ultimately compliance is at the center of every customer interaction.

2. Human resources management

This year has been wrought with human resources challenges. Furloughs, layoffs, and expedited hiring immediately come to mind but there is so much more. Recruiting new talent, performance reviews, rewarding top performers, documenting great (and poor) productivity, recognizing anniversaries, benefits communications, and all the “normal” stuff not associated with a global pandemic take up more than the allocated time in your HR team’s budgets. To get lift from licenses you own, you can easily move these activities into Salesforce by building your own workflow and business process to help accomplish these activities.

But let’s not stop there! When you hire new employees, consider the process that goes into provisioning their technology access, laptops or workstations, phones, badges, training schedules, all of the “stuff” that enables them to effectively do their jobs. Where does all of that live today? Once a hiring manager hires a candidate, enable rapid deployment with all the workflow fired off to the applicable departments ensuring your newest teammates have a seamless onboarding experience. On the flip side of that, when someone leaves for a different opportunity, because of irreconcilable differences, or retires, there’s still a ton to manage; ensuring receipt of company-owned materials, separation documents that need execution, technology access that needs to be shut down, and more. Build that workflow into Salesforce and help your Human Resources partners expedite requests, reduce cumbersome systems, and ensure a positive experience.

3. Break down the silos between your lines of business

As a former relationship banker, I was always amazed at how difficult it was to make an introduction of one of my clients to another area of my organization for additional products and services. I always weighed the pros of stickier, more profitable client relationships who utilize more products and services with the cons of poor client experiences, lack of follow-up by teammates, improper expectation setting (sometimes on my part), the fear of losing the relationship due to lack of follow-up, and a general sense of loss of control of our clients’ perceptions of the organization. There are so many reasons why your top performers may not be the best at making introductions to other areas of the bank.

With Salesforce that can all end. Create basic workflows and processes to help your associates tear down the walls between the lines of business. Enable customer-facing employees to create referrals for clients based on client interest to other areas within your organization, maximizing the investments your organization has made into other products and services that will drive revenue and ensure highly satisfied clients.

Recipients of the referrals will get real-time notifications for rapid follow-up, interact with the referring associate, understand the client’s needs, have client contact information readily available, and ultimately win the business. Referrers will never wonder if the customer received the follow-up they were promised.

Revenue will be driven based on successful communication between your lines of business and that’s ONLY the beginning. Here are a few more benefits:

• Quickly identify and recognize top performers who leverage the breadth and depth of your products and services across your lines of business or identify associates who may need additional coaching and training to fully leverage different partnerships.
• Manage follow-up SLA expectations and reassign referrals when necessary to ensure a seamless customer experience.
• Learn what products and services generate the most interest; where you win; and in unlikely situations where you lose, enable leaders to ask the question, “Why didn’t we win?”
• Directly measure and report on the tangible ROI of cross-sell wins!

4. Client self-service

With the need for remote workforces and closed branches, call centers have been inundated with incoming calls from customers trying to accomplish service requests. Poll your call centers and determine five activities where they spend a lot of time (and expense) submitting service requests for your customers. Enable your customers to accomplish the requests through a community. Customers can create service requests (cases) and receive real-time updates on status and disposition. You can also serve up knowledge articles to help answer customer questions. There is a ton of opportunity to help facilitate easier service requests; reduce call center burden and expense, and drive client satisfaction. A huge portion of this “Amazon-conditioned” society wants the ability to interact with you more digitally. Give customers what they want while you reduce expenses associated with common requests and drive client satisfaction which will result in more loyal and more profitable client relationships.

5. Vendor management

When your organization decides to do business with a new vendor, there’s an entire area of your bank dedicated to properly onboarding that vendor ensuring compliance with your business process. Vendor management is an ongoing activity. Use Salesforce to onboard new vendors, maintain relationships with existing vendors, and ensure compliance with internal guidelines for vendor relationship management. Here are a few ideas that will help you justify the licensing spend.

1. Measure initial bid amount compared to negotiated amount and reward employees who ensure you are getting the best deal!
2. Ensure conflicts of interest are minimized by routing vendors through multiple processes during onboarding; and escalate outliers for approvals with leadership.
3. Collect periodic review documents that are required as part of your vendor management process.
4. Reduce risk by ceasing vendor relationships where risk outweighs the reward.

In this crazy year of uncertainty, giving your organization the opportunity to reduce systems and complexity, and utilize licenses already bought and paid for will put you in a favorable light for those 2021 budget conversations. I hope you will consider employing some (or all) of these suggestions to get some quick wins, drive revenue, and save some money by retiring systems that require ongoing maintenance.

Capgemini, an acclaimed Global Strategic Partner of Salesforce, has an eleven-year history of delivering successful Salesforce projects world-wide. We have 3,000 Salesforce experts with 5,000+ certifications with expertise in every cloud. If you want to learn more about ways Capgemini can help you put your unused licenses to work to start driving ROI, please drop us a note: salesforceleadership.fssbu@capgemini.com.

You can also connect with me on LinkedIn: Natalie Waggett.

Natalie Waggett

Expert in Cloud Services, Financial Services – Banking – Insurance, Salesforce

With nearly 30 years of experience in banking and financial services, I enable organizations to transform and innovate by offering solutions across various lines of business in the financial services sector using Salesforce as the transformation platform.
As Banking Practice Lead in the Capgemini Salesforce Center of Excellence, I am responsible for developing accelerators, enabling Account Executives with industry specifics and meeting with customers and prospects to understand the ever-changing needs of the financial services industry so that we can transform banking experiences for customers, employees, and shareholders.
My key areas of expertise are:
• Retail, Small Business and Commercial Lending and Deposit Gathering
• Specialty Finance
• Cash Management Services
• Branch Operations
• Wealth Advisory Products
• Insurance
• New Customer On-boarding
• Compliance