Saving Time With Salesforce

The more I learn about what Salesforce can do, the more I wish I knew about it earlier in my career. The amount of time it could have saved me as an Account Manager would have been huge, which would have given me more time to cultivate relationships and better help my customers.?

Here are several solutions that I would implement immediately, given what I know about Salesforce, that would have saved me hours and hours in my previous job. I’m not going to make a comprehensive list, because that would turn this simple article into a hybrid Salesforce user manual and business plan.

The ways that processes can be automated in Salesforce are limited only by your creativity. This is an area that is seeing new features with each release. In the Winter ’22 release, for example, it will be possible to run asynchronous flows. Using automation tools like Flows, Process Builder, formula fields, or even Workflows, will save time and reduce the chance of errors.?

I was always curious whether a contract/customer was profitable and current on their payments, in order to learn this I had to go to another employee, have them run the report, and share it with me. Not only did it need to be done manually but I had to interrupt a coworker and have them take time to get the information for me. This can be solved with a couple of components on a dashboard that can generate reports that are sent automatically each month to the relevant people inside the organization, alerting them of the AR status of their customers as well as showing the profitability of each customer. The dashboard can be viewed whenever the most up-to-date information is needed and the report will be delivered to your inbox just to make sure you are aware of the status of your customers if you aren't checking your dashboard. This saves time and ensures that people have the needed information to make informed decisions.

Another solution that Salesforce offers that would have saved me SO much time and effort is case management. I worked in a high touch point industry where things were constantly changing and requests were constantly coming in. To manage these, I worked with 2 other co-workers for about a month to put together a solution with way too many manual steps and with data in multiple systems.?

If I were asked to make a case management solution today, I would be able to do it with Salesforce, by myself, likely much faster than 2-months. We receive cases via phone, email, and web, all of which can be easily combined in Salesforce. Once collected, the case can be assigned based on the details of the case and there can be auto-responses used to keep all parties in the loop when there are changes. There can also be a set of conditions for which a case would be escalated. Having a case management process that could collect cases from phone, web, and email, that could also use rules to move the case along, would have saved me HOURS. More importantly, it would have helped my customers get better and faster help because of the reduced friction that is possible with case management in Salesforce.

The final example of what I wish I could have used Salesforce for in my most recent position as an Account Manager is utilizing a knowledge base. This might not be an automaton tool per se, but boy would it have saved me time! A knowledge base is a collection of short articles, each that answers a common question or issue. The beauty of these articles is that they can be written with thought and care to ensure a complete answer (something that a quick email will likely lack) and once they are written, they can be reused over and over. Knowledge articles save time and provide a top-notch answer at the click of a button.

These examples of how I would leverage Salesforce to save time at my old job are just a couple of the many things that Salesforce can help within your business to enable you to spend time doing what matters and provide an amazing experience for your customers. ?