Remote working may be here to stay. Is your Salesforce instance ready?
It may have been a global pandemic that forced the issue, but now that employees and their employers have had a taste of the benefits of a remote workforce, many don’t want to return to traditional pre-COVID-19 offices and commuting.
“Most office workers (83%) want to work from home at least one day a week, and half of employers (55%) anticipate that most of their workers will do so long after COVID-19 is not a concern.” (PwC remote working survey, June 25, 2020)
The question is: is your Salesforce instance ready for continued remote working?
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While Salesforce naturally lends itself to online work, several factors should be addressed to ensure its users are free of any stumbling blocks to doing their jobs efficiently and able to provide customers with a good experience regardless of the employee’s location.
Lead management and UX
Your company’s lead generation machine needs to keep the leads moving through the sales funnel independent of what else is going on in the world.
Make sure your sales and marketing teams understand the entire lead generation process and have the training and tools in place to keep those leads moving toward conversions. Lead forms that capture which marketing channel the lead came from and a clearly defined process for routing leads to the right team or sales rep are crucial to creating a resilient lead management process for your company.
To keep employees engaged with Salesforce make sure Lightning has been turned on across your organization. Lightning was designed to create a much more user-friendly experience for Salesforce users, and encourages users toward more efficient and productive work styles.
With all the potential distractions of remote work, having a customized Salesforce experience will remove some common barriers to getting work done.
Governance and security
Speaking of common barriers to getting work done, not having access to the best Salesforce tool for the job, or having an out-of-date instance of it, is a big one. Work with HR and your management teams to audit which employees need which tools with what access level in order to complete their job functions. Then make it so. With remote work becoming more common than ever, monthly or quarterly audits are a good idea.
Security is another top priority for keeping your Salesforce instance ready for anything. Remote employees need secure environments so that your company’s data and work are protected. Here are a few things you can do to maintain security for your SFDC instance.
- Use Salesforce Authenticator to add a second layer of security. Enable multi-factor authentication whenever it’s available.
- Encourage employees to use strong passwords for all apps and devices.
- Store all files and emails in a secure cloud-based location.
- Provide a VPN (Virtual Private Network) and ask remote employees to enable WPA2 or WPA3 encryption on their routers.
- Encourage weekly reboots of all devices so that software and browser versions are up-to-date.
Internal communication and collaboration
Another big challenge with remote working is finding ways to foster communication and collaboration among employees who no longer share the same space. Salesforce has the right tools for the job as long as they are implemented correctly and employees have the training needed to use them.
Remove barriers to employee internal communication and collaboration with a proper implementation of these Salesforce tools:
- Implement Marketing Cloud and integrate it with all other lead and data sources. More than just a platform to engage customers across all channels, SFMC also provides a way of streamlining marketing campaign processes so employees can access all aspects of the campaign in one place (content, design, and execution) and collaborate efficiently on each step of the customer journey.
- Leverage Quip available to employees to make collaborating on documents easier. As a bonus, Quip integrates seamlessly into Salesforce, eliminating the need to toggle between systems.
- Encourage the use of Chatter for sharing information, ideas, and files company-wide, office-wide, or project-wide.
- Keep employees’ skills up to date with Salesforce using Trailhead. Trailhead can be used to create internal surveys, publish reports, and share tips for successful remote working, too.
Salesforce implementation for remote working
Remote working, in some capacity, is here to stay. Getting your Salesforce instance ready to meet the needs of remote employees and your organization will ensure a resilient, disruption-proof business no matter what life throws at us next. This starts with a smart, strategic implementation of Salesforce catered to the unique needs of your company.
Ciberspring provides elegant digital solutions to any MarTech challenge, including a remote workforce. As a Salesforce Partner, we know the platform inside and out, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Health Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and more. We’ve have helped many companies get the most out of their Salesforce investment.
Fill out the form below to learn more about how we can disruption-proof your organization with a strong Salesforce implementation.
