Supercharge Salesforce.com initiatives with a 360-degree view of the customer

Transcription

1 IBM Software Thought Leadership White Paper Information Management Supercharge Salesforce.com initiatives with a 360-degree view of the customer

2 2 Supercharge Salesforce.com initiatives with a 360-degree view of the customer Contents 2 Common Salesforce.com CRM data challenges 3 Duplicate customer data 3 Incomplete information 4 Data enrichment 4 Poor data quality 4 Security degree view of customers through InfoSphere MDM 6 Efficient customer data search and entry 7 Incorporate social data into customer information 7 Incorporate additional data sources into customer information 7 Display relationships between different corporate entities and customer contacts 7 Provisional list load 8 Conclusion Salesforce.com is an industry-leading cloud customer relationship management (CRM) solution. CRM solutions help manage key sales processes, customers, prospects and contacts at customer organizations and are extremely powerful for managing sales processes and customer relationships. However, the effectiveness of CRM initiatives is limited by the quality of customer and prospect data that is available to these solutions. IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management (MDM) helps organizations gain a comprehensive and accurate 360-degree view of their customers. This 360-degree view, when integrated with a CRM solution such as Salesforce.com, helps organizations improve the effectiveness of their CRM initiatives to help companies: Increase user productivity Improve sales and marketing performance to increase win rate and revenue Mitigate risks associated with poor customer data Common Salesforce.com CRM data challenges Sales and marketing teams rely on customer data that is comprehensive, represents the collective knowledge of the organization and enriched with any additional external information that can be searched and made available to users easily. Key sources of customer data include: CRM solutions such as Salesforce.com Other enterprise systems within the organization such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer service systems, finance systems and so forth External data sources such as Dun & Bradstreet, Equifax and Hoovers Social media sources such as Facebook, LinkedIn and blogs With the proliferation of information, customers have come to expect that any organization doing business with them knows and understands them and they expect their information to be readily available to both the organization and to them as the customer streamlining the overall process. Customer and

3 IBM Software 3 related data is continually added, tracked and searched primarily within CRM applications. At the same time, data is continually added and modified in other enterprise applications as well. It becomes increasingly difficult to tie all this data together to present a comprehensive, single view of the customer to the CRM application. Duplicate customer data Salesforce.com users share a common frustration with duplicate customer records and data that is stored for the same customer. This duplicate data can propagate within Salesforce.com and can negatively affect the productivity of sellers as well as prevent sellers from getting a comprehensive view of the account activity. A few common reasons for duplicate customer records include the following scenarios: Bad quality data from other organizational data sources: Data can be loaded into Salesforce.com from other data sources such as the ERP system, marketing lists and so on, making this customer data susceptible to errors for example, a customer may be known as Saint Joseph in the ERP system, but a marketing list may include the same customer as St. Joseph, causing duplicate customer records to appear. Limited search capabilities within Salesforce.com may cause the seller to find one, but not the other, customer record. Duplicate data entry: A Salesforce.com user may create a new customer record even though a record exists for the same customer. Limited search capabilities in Salesforce.com do not return customer records with similar names, abbreviations, suffixes and so forth. Using the same example, the seller may try to find a record for Saint Joseph, whereas in the system the same customer may be stored as St. Joseph, which leads to creating a new, separate and duplicate customer record. Duplicate records not only frustrate users and lower productivity, but also compromise the use of the CRM application when the data is perceived to not be trustworthy. Users who need to search for customer information have to search for different variants of customer names, which can bring on frustration and lower productivity. This can cause a sales representative who is preparing for a customer meeting to view only part of the customer s account and interaction history, causing the representative to miss the customer s expectations. The same problem manifests itself when the marketing department wants to load prospects from the results of a lead generation or marketing campaign. In this case, marketing administrators must manually import the data into Salesforce. com, checking as much as possible for duplicates and trying to avoid creating an entirely new set. This is a time-consuming and error-prone exercise that significantly delays the time for the leads generated to appear in the pipeline and be ready for follow-up. Incomplete information To a user on Salesforce or any CRM system, getting access to a 360-degree view of customer information that is complete and up to date in all aspects is important from a customer relationship standpoint. Customers today interact with a company at several touch points and channels, and they expect vendors to be aware of every update and request, such as changes of address or revised privacy preferences. When this information is not captured at an enterprise level, these changes are not available to some customer-facing applications leading to decisions based on inaccurate or incomplete information.

4 4 Supercharge Salesforce.com initiatives with a 360-degree view of the customer Data enrichment The lack of flexibility of Salesforce.com can impact sales prospecting and marketing effectiveness by missing out on opportunities to add value to the CRM data. Salesforce.com has no way to automatically enrich the customer information with data from other enterprise systems or third-party data sources. Common examples of the value added by these sources include: ERP and other internal systems: A customer may want to add additional items to a current order. Relevant data from the ERP system, accessible from within the Salesforce.com environment, can provide the sales representative with visibility into the order so the customer can be made aware immediately of the order status. External data sources: Data sources like Dun & Bradstreet provide additional information such as the revenue, size of the company and organization, which help sellers fine-tune proposals and progress opportunities more effectively. Social media sources: Social media sources provide a wealth of information that can help Salesforce.com users become more effective. Recent surveys conducted by IBM found a strong desire among key C-suite executives to use social media to understand and effectively engage with customers. 1,2 Common examples include LinkedIn data to help find new contacts within an organization and Facebook data to understand the customers and competitors. This helps organizations better understand and serve their customers to drive additional revenue. Poor data quality Working with poor-quality data leads to customer dissatisfaction, increased operational cost and less effective decision making. Poor data quality can also drastically affect sales and marketing performance in a number of ways: Lower seller productivity: Sales representatives end up creating new customer records when the contact information is already in the system and incomplete customer information results in wasted time searching for missing data and unnecessary calls. At the same time, sales management wants to ensure that sales representatives can easily and quickly access the information they need to be effective. Lower sales and marketing performance: Lack of a complete understanding of the customer and account history may cause missed customer expectations. For instance, the inability to provide an update on the lead time for a part will cause customer dissatisfaction. Increased risk: Inaccurate data and duplicate customer data can skew sales management reports and performance views, leading to missing revenue or performance targets. Similarly, duplicate records and poor customer data may trigger multiple mailings, making lead-generation activities more costly and less effective. Security Addressing security concerns is usually the number-one priority for companies when dealing with software-as-a-service (SaaS) integration. Challenges related to data compromise, data hacking and data loss can pose serious security risks whenever data

5 IBM Software 5 must be integrated between on-premises applications and SaaS applications. For example, a major concern arises when organizations implement point-to-point integrations using web services or REST that needs special inbound access to be allowed in the company s firewall. This process is usually done to allow the external SaaS applications to make service calls with the on-premises applications and to integrate data. However, doing so exposes a major security flaw that may compromise the company s entire IT infrastructure. Organizations need to evaluate and implement integration solutions that offer secure access to their on-premises application layer and data. Several software vendors today offer specialized solutions that allow a seamless, secure integration between on-premises applications (such as InfoSphere MDM) and SaaS applications (such as Salesforce.com). These solutions have recently undergone significant advances and have largely alleviated many security concerns. For example, a cloud integration solution such as IBM WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration can perform Secure Shell (SSH) tunneling in the firewall for all service interactions. This ensures that only trusted SaaS applications with valid security tokens and certificates can access the company s application and data. 360-degree view of customers through InfoSphere MDM A 360-degree view of the customer enables you to get a single view of your customers across all the data sources to get a comprehensive picture. It enables you to pool your collective knowledge of the customer to optimize your CRM and marketing efforts. A 2012 IBM CEO study revealed that 73 percent of the CEOs interviewed were driving investments to improve their organization s ability to draw additional customer insights from available data. 3 IBM offers the best-in-class InfoSphere Master Data Management (MDM) software, which takes in the data available in various systems within and outside of the organization. InfoSphere MDM scans all the data and applies algorithms to figure out which entries in these systems pertain to the same customer. The algorithm takes into account variations of a name (for example, St. Joseph and Saint Joseph are the same account) and typos (such as Saint Josephs and Saint Joseph are the same account). The algorithm discerns the relationship between different organizations (for example, Dynamo Electric is a subsidiary of Dynamo Inc.) and other common characteristics. InfoSphere MDM can then tie this data to the data from other sources such as from ERP systems, or tie data from the Facebook page of the customer to the actual account. This customer data is then integrated seamlessly within the Salesforce. com environment to provide Salesforce.com users with a 360-degree view of the customer. InfoSphere MDM helps companies improve productivity, increase operational effectiveness (customer satisfaction, sales performance and marketing effectiveness) and mitigate risks associated with poor customer data and governance. Additional benefits include: Increased sales and marketing productivity Faster follow-up by sales for marketing leads Streamlined sales processes Reduced operational costs Enhanced customer service and customer experience An MDM-powered Salesforce.com replaces time-consuming, manual processes with simple, automated processes to search customer records, remediate duplicate records, and upload and integrate external data. The result is that sales, marketing and operations staff are better informed and more productive for improved customer satisfaction and increased sales effectiveness and results, while sales executives have an accurate view of customer and prospect activity necessary for proper sales management.

6 6 Supercharge Salesforce.com initiatives with a 360-degree view of the customer The 360-degree view of the customer is integrated within the user s Salesforce.com environment to improve the effectiveness of Salesforce.com implementations. Efficient customer data search and entry A key benefit of incorporating a 360-degree view of customers in the Salesforce.com application is that all of the customer data can be more efficiently searched. The Salesforce.com search function is significantly enhanced by InfoSphere MDM so users can find variants of an account name, account names with typos and so on. This also enables users to find not only the data contained within the CRM system, but also the data contained within other systems in the organization that provide data into the 360-degree view of the customer (see Figure 1). This has multiple benefits: Improved search results make evident any existing customer records so users can apply the existing information in order to avoid creating duplicates at the point of entry. Improved user productivity when searching for customers, account contacts and other information during day-to-day tasks such as preparing for a customer meeting and other sales activities. Figure 1. Advanced search helps users find customers and contacts rapidly.

7 IBM Software 7 Incorporate social data into customer information InfoSphere MDM, a key component of IBM Watson Foundations, the IBM big data and analytics platform, works with IBM big data capabilities to incorporate data from social media sources into the 360-degree view of customers. For example, this combination can be used to incorporate data from LinkedIn to find additional contacts within a customer organization or to find the right contacts. Similarly, data from blogs can be linked to the customer profile to determine that a certain strategic initiative has been undertaken by the customer. This can help organizations tailor proposals more effectively to ensure that the current opportunity helps advance these customer initiatives. Incorporate additional data sources into customer information Salesforce.com currently does not have an easy way to augment customer data with other enterprise and third-party data essential to sales and marketing processes. Examples include standardizing addresses or matching customers with reference data from Hoovers, Dun & Bradstreet and Equifax. InfoSphere MDM software can match its data against Salesforce.com records and augment those records by feeding in third-party data about a customer. Similarly, data from other organizational systems such as ERP, financial, customer service and so on can be incorporated in the 360-degree view. In this way, InfoSphere MDM helps combine existing Salesforce.com data with other enterprise and third-party information all from within the familiar Salesforce.com environment without requiring users to switch among applications and tools. Display relationships between different corporate entities and customer contacts InfoSphere MDM can also incorporate the relationships between various corporate entities in the 360-degree view to help sellers identify additional leads and better serve customer needs. Understanding that the immediate opportunity exists with a subsidiary of a larger parent company, and that a similar project has been done with another subsidiary, can help a seller fine-tune the proposal. References from the other project can be included in the current proposal to improve chances of the win. Provisional list load InfoSphere MDM enables large volumes of data to be uploaded and merged automatically and accurately, with only exceptions requiring manual handling. This is particularly useful for uploading and merging data into Salesforce.com following a trade show or lead-generation campaign. Typically, it takes excessive amounts of time and menial efforts to manually upload and merge marketing activity data into Salesforce.com, resulting in wasted time, delays in getting leads passed to sales and the increased likelihood of errors not to mention the creation of duplicate records. InfoSphere MDM automates bulk data entry by automatically merging duplicates with existing Salesforce.com data. Provisional bulk data is loaded and matched against the trusted, accurate data in the MDM hub without creating duplicates, because lists are checked against trusted master data to identify and flag exceptions before leads are loaded. A list of exceptions is automatically generated and the appropriate person is notified to review and determine whether flagged records should be merged. As a result, leads generated from marketing activities are passed onto sales more quickly, contact lists are clean, and prospecting data is accurate and resolved against the trusted data in the MDM hub with minimal involvement from skilled marketing resources.

8 Conclusion InfoSphere MDM enables you to get a 360-degree view of your customer and integrate data from CRM systems such as Salesforce.com, internal systems such as ERP, and financial systems and external data sources. This data can be integrated seamlessly into Salesforce.com to dramatically improve the effectiveness and productivity of your sales and marketing teams, ultimately increasing win rates and increasing revenue. For more information To learn more about IBM InfoSphere MDM and SaaS integration, download the IBM Redbook : To learn more about IBM InfoSphere Master Data Management, please contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit the following website: ibm.com/software/data/master-data-management Additionally, IBM Global Financing can help you acquire the software capabilities that your business needs in the most cost-effective and strategic way possible. We ll partner with credit-qualified clients to customize a financing solution to suit your business and development goals, enable effective cash management, and improve your total cost of ownership. Fund your critical IT investment and propel your business forward with IBM Global Financing. For more information, visit: ibm.com/financing Copyright IBM Corporation 2014 IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100 Somers, NY Produced in the United States of America October 2014 IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, Cast Iron, IBM Watson, InfoSphere, Redbook, and WebSphere are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at Copyright and trademark information at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED AS IS WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided. 1 Leading Through Connections: Insights from the Global Chief Executive Officer Study. IBM Institute for Business Value. May From Stretched to Strengthened: Insights from the Global Chief Marketing Officer Study. IBM Institute for Business Value. October Leading Through Connections: Insights from the Global Chief Executive Officer Study. IBM Institute for Business Value. May Please Recycle IMW14739-USEN-02