Improve your customer acquisition and retention process

At one of my clients, getting a new partner registered and able to order products and services requires the coordination of multiple groups such as Customer Support, Legal, Tax, Credit, Collections, and Theatre Operations.  Currently, partner data required for tracking the integration process is managed using spreadsheets from these groups and a wiki.  Manual notifications and updating of data causes delays and repetition in the process, produces unreliable or inaccurate data, and poor partner experience.

To reduce costs, improve the process and partner experience, the partner integration team investigated various options from deploying a new database from IT to a customized Microsoft Access database.  After a small pilot with Customer Support Operations, it became obvious that a Salesforce solution was the way to go!  The Salesforce solution provided low development and user subscription costs, easy customization, addressed all the requirements, and can integrate with my client’s partner database, CVENT, and Salesforce application used by Sales and Channels.

Initially, Salesforce will be used as the central repository for partner integration data, email notifications and task workflow, reporting and dashboards.  Integration with other systems such as the partner database comes next.  Then additional Salesforce features such as Chatter (enterprise social media) and workflow approvals can be implemented to further improve the process.  As of this writing, workflow requirements are being finalized with the various groups involved with partner integration.

In summary, the Salesforce implementation for partner integration will:

• Improve team productivity
  • Automate partner tracking
  • Eliminate redundancy and lower errors in data management
  • Reduce number of status meetings
  • Leverage existing applications
• Improve the partner experience
  • Reduce multiple touch points & requests for data
  • Reduce partner set up delays
  • Streamline communications
• Improve revenue acceleration
  • Improve time to bookings
  • Reduce partner set up delays

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