Unleashing the possibilities of Salesforce Customization - in CRM, UX, and CX
Salesforce CRM has proven to enhance the user and customer experience for businesses through its implementation involving configuration, customization, integration, and data migration processes. Salesforce configuration and customization are two steps that must be performed to improve functionality to suit the business needs. Salesforce configuration implies utilizing and modifying the system’s existing capabilities to improve business outcomes. Salesforce customization differs from configuration as it involves the addition of new functions and features that are not available in Salesforce systems. Salesforce Customization allows a company to have features that are unique and only available to itself. Customized features are statistically proven to improve internal workflows, and client relationships, while also providing an incremental Return on Investment.
“Customizing the Customer experience through Salesforce returns an average of $8.7 for each dollar invested.”
Salesforce Configuration vs Salesforce Customization
Salesforce Configuration
- Allows us to use UI for developing Salesforce applications.
- User-defined values enable a required feature to function and operate.
- A new field is added to a salesforce object in the process of configuration.
- For obtaining the result of configuration, a preset formula or operation is performed.
Salesforce Customization
- The process of writing customized operations and functionalities on top of the Salesforce Configuration using Visualforce pages and Apex
- Salesforce development creates new functions in Salesforce customization.
- A code is added to the salesforce object to perform an operation or function.
- Apex code addition generates a vCard from a given contact, resulting in customization.
Need for Salesforce customization
Salesforce customization is required when a company plans to implement a specific set of operations and features that are beyond Salesforce’s current capabilities. To enable those operations, Salesforce provides a wide range of customizations in every part of the system, allowing a business to fulfill its needs. This allows a business to perform customized operations and gain access to additional capabilities based on their needs and industry of operation. Salesforce customization is accomplished through the use of APEX code extensions.
When to Customize Salesforce?
1. Lack of Automation:
Salesforce’s goal is to bring automation by accelerating the current operations of existing systems. The greater the number of manual operations, the greater the need for Salesforce. Data entry, data handling, and follow-ups are a few examples of manual operations. These could be fixed with Salesforce configuration, but in the case of conditional automation, customization is required for automating processes.
2. Difficult UI:
Salesforce implementation may cause unexpected difficulties for employees in adapting to and performing system operations. These issues could be resolved with drag-and-drop options, but Salesforce Customization is used to solve complexity by creating customized portals and dashboards in accordance with the needs of the employees.
3. Inefficient and Insufficient Reporting:
Businesses may need to consider customization if the existing reports do not provide them with the relevant set of data they require, as standard reporting may not include it at all. Salesforce customization revises data models and customizes reports based on need and relevance.
4. The Third-Party integration:
Third-party integration may require salesforce customization because the systems must be aligned in order to share data and features. Due to customized operations and workflow, such alignment may occasionally fall outside of existing configurations, resulting in salesforce customization.
Workflow of Salesforce Customisation
1. Understanding the need for Salesforce Customisation:
Surveying end-users or clients is the most effective way to determine the need for customization. Understanding the difficulties that the employees face is a good place to start. Employees may explain the challenges they face, as well as the features that add value and those that do not. The proper surveying protocol is to prepare a set of appropriate questionnaires. These internal surveys, feedbacks, future planning, and audits provide valuable information for Salesforce Customization.
2. Building a Team:
Salesforce customization is a complex process that demands the participation of an expert team in order to add new features and operations. Bringing in Salesforce Consultants can help with this. Salesforce Consulting services are the most efficient way to achieve the desired results. For successful salesforce customization, an expert team of salesforce developers, business analysts, and data scientists completes each task perfectly.
3. Prioritise:
- Customization is done for internal reasons and to improve the customer experience.
- The required features' priority list should be sorted by criticality.
- It should be determined whether the required feature is critical and, if so, whether the work suffers as a result of its absence.
- If all of these conditions are met, the impact on the Return on Investment (ROI) should be evaluated.
- Since the feature can add more value to the business while also saving time and money, it should be prioritised for customization.
- Salesforce customization should be prioritised together with proper budget allocation because it may cause conflict in other areas of the organisation.
- Unnecessary salesforce customization should therefore be avoided.
4. Test customization before implementing:
Internally, various objects and features are linked, which may result in unanticipated consequences involving errors and impending operation. Live customization may take time and may interfere with current business operations as these changes may cause the business to slow down. Counting on every minor detail is time-consuming, so the best way to be safe is to perform customizations in the sandbox. Customization should be tested in a sandbox environment before being executed to ensure success. There are several sandboxes available, including the Developer Sandbox, the Developer Pro Sandbox, the Partial Copy Sandbox, and the Full Sandbox.
5. Avoiding over-customization:
Businesses that want to make their systems more functional and suited to their specific needs are prone to over-customization. Over-customization can sometimes complicate UI further by increasing budget and time consumption. To resolve this, effective planning, feature prioritization, strict deadlines, and proper budget allocation should be implemented as the foundation of salesforce customization.
6. Training:
Salesforce customizations can be difficult for employees to use when dealing with day-to-day tasks. As a result, team members must be trained to make effective use of customizations.
Salesforce customization scope and possibilities
Salesforce customization enables a company to perform precise operations that align with the persona of the company and meet its needs.
1. Additions to the current system:
Adding more objects, fields, features, records, and reports beyond Salesforce’s current capabilities improves the existing systems. The addition of custom objects and portals to the existing functionalities depends on the industry in which the organization operates.
2. Embedding Business Rules into CRM:
Apex Triggers automates sales, marketing, and services. More features are added to the processes, making operation and management easier.
3. Automating manual tasks:
Workflows and Apex triggers automate daily and recurring tasks. Using workflow tools such as process builder or apex code reduces the manual load while automating day-to-day tasks improving productivity and saving time.
4. Automating Business Processes:
Marketing, sales, commerce, and service processes are all automated and accelerated.
5. Handling Bulk Data:
With more customized options, large groups of data can be handled, processed, and updated. With customization such as records, ledgers, and so on, mass data loading, transferring, updating, deleting, and analyzing data is possible. Bulk triggers are used to load, process, delete, and re-update a large amount of data.
6. Custom Email Templates:
Emails that are customized to the brand that the company wishes to project, strengthen B2B and B2C communications.
7. Custom Reports:
Using Apex Instructions, custom reports that present the relevant data reflecting the required figures and numbers improve the functionality of the business.
8. Salesforce with Einstein AI:
Data analytics, also known as Einstein Analytics or Wave Analytics, is a critical component of Salesforce CRM. It has a comprehensive set of dashboards dedicated to accumulating data about customer operations on the organization’s website and social channels. This data is compiled and customized in the analytics suite for understanding the lagging areas and achieving better results quickly. AI-powered features suggest email open rates, sales forecasting, sales-related action, and routing service cases, among other things.
9. Third-Party Integration:
Collaboration with a third-party tool improves operations and makes them more efficient to meet the requirements of the business. New features are added, omitted, and modified at the time of integration using SOAP/REST APIs.
Benefits of Salesforce Customisation
1. Reduced manual load:
Employees are overburdened with unnecessary work due to tiring and time-consuming tasks. Customization helps to reduce workload, save time, and increase productivity.
2. Return on Investment:
Every dollar spent on customer experience customizations generates an average of $8.7 dollars.
3. Revenue:
Salesforce customization has been shown to increase an organization’s revenue by a certain percentage.
4. Incorporates business rules:
By automating sales, marketing, and services, the organization’s business improves.
5. Data Analysis:
Organizations perform data analysis at a faster rate to ease business functions by analyzing relevant data and ignoring irrelevant ones.
Conclusion:
Salesforce customization is a standard step in the salesforce implementation process. The primary reason for customizing salesforce is to match it to the needs of the business and to customize more operations and features. To achieve effective customization, a workflow must be followed within time and budget constraints. A company must assess the reasons for customization, form a team, prioritize tasks, test in the sandbox, and implement customized features. Furthermore, there is indeed a lot of scope and advantage in salesforce customization as it provides a return on investment. The key to Salesforce’s emergence as a business’s preferred system for improving customer experience and UX/UI for ease of business operations along with revenue generation is customization.
