Uniting every team around your customers with Customer 360

The amazing customer experiences you (and your customers) have been waiting for are now possible.

At VRP Consulting, we’ve seen a dramatic shift in customer expectations during the pandemic. Even in a post-COVID/COVID-safe world, people will still want to continue the digital conveniences that helped us make the best of these difficult times. Across all industries, the continued trend of providing exceptional customer service continues to be a challenge.

On top of this, the laws around privacy have affected businesses worldwide. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has changed a lot of things for organizations, including how sales teams prospect and how marketing activities are managed. Companies have had to review business processes, applications, and forms to be compliant with double opt-in rules and email marketing best practices.

All of these factors have forced many companies to rethink their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategy.

How Customer 360 solves today’s challenges

Salesforce_^® has a wide range of products and solutions in its portfolio, and Customer 360 is what ties them all together. Customer 360 is a way to unite all your teams—marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT—on one integrated platform with a single view of your customer, helping you grow relationships with your customers and your employees.

We’re especially excited about the recent Salesforce acquisitions of Tableau and Slack, putting advanced data analytics in any employee’s hands and providing a new way to streamline collaboration. This increases alignment among everyone, which leads to more connected, personalized experiences for your customers and helps you build stronger relationships with them. It also results in more satisfied employees, who are freed up from repetitive tasks so they can focus on doing their best, and most rewarding, work.

By keeping your team connected on a single, scalable platform, you’ll be able to make real improvements in every phase of your customer’s journey. Marketing becomes more personal with the ability to listen to customers and engage with them across multiple channels with customized messages, even with the loss of cookies and third-party identifiers. Following up on sales leads becomes faster and easier with tools that help you manage information, automate processes, and gain insights from real-time analytics. Customer service becomes more rewarding as agents gain the ability to know each customer and resolve issues faster.

Here are some of the most common ways a Customer 360 approach helps our clients achieve their goals:

• Many of our mid-sized clients leverage Salesforce data in an Experience Cloud solution. This might be a portal where customers can access knowledge bases and support information, see their customer data, and manage their bookings or purchases.

• Another way to use Customer 360 is to create a portal for partners to access information, log data, and communicate with the parent organization.

• Nonprofits often want to start their digital transformation on Salesforce and integrate with their payment processing systems as the first step before adding more platforms. Customer 360 allows them the flexibility to do this.

So what’s holding companies up?

Although most organizations recognize the importance of CRM, the decision to move ahead with a better system is often delayed by concerns about cost. But when you consider the cost of wasted time searching for the right doc or the inefficiencies of a slow process, Customer 360 becomes an attractive investment. And the value compounds once additional platforms are integrated and you gain the benefits of more data insights, delivered faster.

Organizations with legacy systems already in place sometimes assume they’ll need to replace everything to get Customer 360 to work. Once again, this can stop them from moving forward. Fortunately, Salesforce is made to easily integrate with legacy systems. This means you can get up and running quickly and then look to move to alternatives that will ultimately save costs and increase efficiency.

The takeaway

Few would argue about the importance of effective CRM in today’s marketplace. Some see it as a challenge, as they struggle to keep up with customer expectations. But those organizations using Customer 360 are discovering new opportunities in CRM, forming stronger relationships with their customers than ever before, and fostering enduring loyalty.

By Alex Levin

Alex Levin is a Senior Account Manager at VRP Consulting.

Alex started his career in IT as a business analyst in a product development company building hotel management software. He’s driven to challenge himself by engaging in complex problems with a strong focus to deliver excellent results. Alex applies his skills and knowledge to strengthen customer retention, collaboratively identify customized solutions and focus on services expansion, while building and maintaining a productive relationship with VRP’s current and potential customers.

VRP Consulting is uniquely positioned to aid clients with implementing and enhancing their Customer 360 platform. Whether you are an ESMB business looking to leverage our QuickStart program to gain a single source of truth fast, or an enterprise client navigating multiple legacy systems that need to be integrated correctly, we have the experience to help. Our rich knowledge of the Salesforce ecosystem across Cloud and mobile applications as well as partnerships with third-party solutions and the top three integration platforms enable us to find the right solution for any industry, need and budget.