Best Practices for Implementing Salesforce CRM - Cloud Experts

4 questions to answer for a successful portal implementation• Get the expertise you need – Once your internal team is in place, make sure there are no gaps in yourimplementation expertise. You have several options—remote guidance or on-site support, delivered bySalesforce.com Consulting or our implementation partners. These organizations can help make sureyou’re on the right path from the start.Both of our example companies brought in consulting partners to make their projects successful. Prior todoing so, their progress was slowed by stalls and blunders. Both companies give substantial credit to onsiteexperts for their projects’ success.Question #2: What are common roadblocks to avoid?Common challenges include complexity, managing change requests, training partners, and keeping up withwhat those partners want.• Keep access rules simple – In most cases, less is more. Just as with your initial CRM rollout, determinethe levels of user access, record types, and the custom fields and tabs you need.Initially, the software company mapped out the individual requirements and access needs for eachpartner as well as for the different access tiers of users at each reseller. The result was dozens of differentpartner profiles. As you can imagine, this approach was very complicated to implement and even moretime-consuming to maintain. The company revisited that arrangement and turned dozens of profiles intoa just a handful, without sacrificing the user experience.• Manage changes – During the early pilot phases, there are bound to be dozens of updates, tweaks, andchanges. It’s a great opportunity for soliciting user feedback and making changes in an organized way.For example, you can use the ideas functionality of Salesforce CRM to solicit user feedback and vote onchanges. And consider creating custom objects or a special case record type to log change requests.As you define your change request process, keep in mind that Salesforce CRM includes a setup audittrail to track changes made in your system. Go to Setup | Security Controls | View Setup Audit Trail toget started.• Train for high adoption – Building a training plan for your partners—or public documentation for yourcustomers—will bring adoption rewards. For more information about setting up a training plan, see theBest Practice document “10 tips for a successful training plan.”One highlight of the software company’s implementation was the creation of custom documents andtraining plans for its global partners. The company wanted to increase partner participation from 30% to80%, which it achieved in just a few months. The company credits training, increased collaboration, andtransparency for achieving these results.• Don’t forget your users – To continue your change management process, be sure to keep in touch withwhat users want. The medical records company used this approach with great success. By walking thehalls and interviewing end users (both internal employees and customers), it gathered valuable feedbackthat helped reduce data input errors by 17% and case turnaround time by 15%. With that feedback, thecompany was able to improve the overall process as well as specific fields and page layouts that affectusers every day.Question #3: How can we extend the portal’s value?As you design your portal, don’t forget about the hundreds of AppExchange applications—both free andfor a fee—for virtually any area of your business. Looking for a survey tool? You can find a pre-built appto poll your customers about their portal experience. Want to create documents based on information yourcustomers and partners provide? There’s an app for almost anything you can think of.The medical records company took advantage of partner apps to listen to its customers by integratingsurveys into its portal. In addition, the company turned its portal into a revenue-generating machine byBEST PRACTICE 2