Over the last few articles, we’ve explored how Salesforce and Digital Process Automation (DPA) can improve the customer experience. At the same time, that focus (Improving the customer experience) isn’t the only impact of DPA. DPA goes beyond keeping the customer informed or streamlining order placement.

 Consider for a moment the opposite - a poor customer experience. The digital age has set customer expectations high, and at a minimum, customers expect data to be correct and consistent. But with the amount of information we are storing, creating, and copying increasing at an exponential rate each year, it’s no surprise that experts estimate bad data is costing organizations in the US $3.1 trillion.

 The daily increase of data demands the simplification of its storage and processing, which Salesforce excels at. You may be asking yourself at this point what this has to do with DPA. The answer is a lot.

 Salesforce’s platform was created and has evolved to be a comprehensive data machine with the tools and features critical to modern businesses. When combined with DPA, Salesforce accelerates service, sales, support, marketing, data processing, and even reclaiming lost customer satisfaction. Salesforce is a critical element in a robust and successful DPA program.

DPA and Salesforce: Examples of Their Combined Value

The adage “Seeing is believing” is true with Salesforce and DPA. Below are several examples of how Salesforce becomes a crucial element to successful digital process automation.

Claims Processing

Customer claims are no fun for anyone. Claims processes inherently involve an unhappy customer are a significant amount of work for the business. Well-styled and easy-to-use submission forms are necessary, but they won’t reclaim a customer’s satisfaction with the organization.

 Submitting into Salesforce gets the claims process moving forward, but so much more can be done when DPA is deployed. Imagine that claim submission notifications are triggered to support, service, and accounting at the same time. Annotation can be added to the customer record. A sales rep can be alerted to reach out to the customer to offer assistance - whether it’s a dedicated sales rep or a regional one where accounts are balanced across the team.

 DPA and Salesforce can go beyond the immediate re-winning of the business, however. Claim tags can be added into the account fields so that reports can be pulled with information about issues with specific products or accounts. This information can then be reviewed by product managers and customer success representatives to proactively improve the product, the process, and the overall customer relationship.

Field Service Management

Field service management is a valuable feature for organizations with field sales or service teams. Salesforce has already made FSM a crucial part of its strategy. Again, DPA can take those features and make them better, increasing the customer experience while helping the business manage better and more effectively.

Married to the field services functionality with Salesforce, DPA opens the possibility to greater customer satisfaction and increased sales. Approvals for sales or discounts can happen programmatically, based on business logic within Salesforce, or auto-routed to the proper approver at the same time a sales rep is reviewing open services times and scheduling follow-up appointments, all while still on-site with the customer. Customer information, already stored within Salesforce, can be auto-populated into a contract created with Salesforce’s Quote-to-Cash system and then managed from the initial lead to a digitally signed contract while the sales team is on-site. Those same contracts can be routed to legal and billing automatically

In truth, this is just the tip of the iceberg with DPA and Salesforce in the field. From scheduling and service updates to work approvals and job site monitoring and management, Salesforce makes field services accessible, and DPA makes them far more comprehensive.

Trials

Clinical trials are complex, with many moving parts from facility information, regulations, participant tracking, and a host of other items. Salesforce can make the processes easier, allowing for tracking of those regulations, supporting project management tasks, recruiting and evaluating participants, and document tracking. Add in DPA, and the process can be more efficient with fewer chances for errors.

For instance, a biomedical firm recruiting participants for a study uses Marketing Cloud Journey Builder to reach out via email to potential subjects and provide them with a qualification survey through Communities. Scoring of those surveys could happen programmatically - regulations permitting - and qualified candidates could be forwarded to researchers at the same time that they are emailed documentation to review about their potential participation. Documentation review and signatures can be recorded within Salesforce, and an SMS reminder sent to participants to complete questionnaires or remind them of crucial information or appointments.

This type of integrated system improves overall performance and return on recruitment.

Conclusion

So, can you implement DPA within a process without Salesforce? Yes. But the value and benefits that come along with leveraging Salesforce’s comprehensive and easy-to-use tools may have you wondering if you’d ever want to. When Salesforce and DPA are used together, the business gains are expansive because of the tools available “out of the box” from Salesforce. Additionally, the ability to develop additional solutions and functionality within the platform, and the ease with which integrations from other solutions can be created, add to the value of Salesforce + DPA.

 If you’re looking for guidance on better using your Salesforce investment with digital process automation, or you need a partner to help you realize the massive benefits DPA and Salesforce provide when combined, contact Six Consulting today. We can provide end-to-end solution development for Salesforce automation, field services implementation, integrations, and much more.