Salesforce, as we know and use in today’s business landscape, has far outgrown its categorization as just a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool.
It has now accelerated to something many organizations worldwide are trying their best to optimize operations at scale, cultivate more meaningful customer relationships, and deliver the utmost sustainable growth within their ecosystems.
But Salesforce, the strength and versatility in its name comes with complexity. To capitalize on this necessary and future advanced technology, businesses require seasoned professionals on a go-forward basis, with a single focus to cater to the ever-increasing roster of features & functionality.
Well, Salesforce Managed Services will do a great job if you enlist Salesforce Managed Service Provider in your battle strategy by providing a partnership that is practically an entire transformation, of course.
I’ve seen the revolutionary impact of purpose-built managed services deployments from a seasoned Salesforce CRM consultant who has deep-rooted himself in this demanding ecosystem for years.
Partnerships of this sort go way beyond being limited to just technical support; it is a declaration of continued interest and the corresponding investment to be sure that, as a client, their Salesforce environment is optimized for success in a rapidly changing business environment.
In this extensive post, we will discuss 15 critical things organizations must consider when contemplating or using Salesforce Managed Services for their competitive edge.
1. Understanding Salesforce Managed Services
Salesforce Managed Services at a deep level is the strategic outsourcing of the operational, proactive tuning and management or support of an organization’s Salesforce instance to an external consulting services organization.
It can be seen, in terms of conceptualization, forming an actual (read external) Salesforce department but one that is offsite and thus circumventing the expense of a comparable in-house team.
The services are meant to resolve immediate technical issues from the ground up, provide holistic support, and orchestrate the proactive well-being of the Salesforce environment in strategic alignment with the company-wide goals.
The ‘traditional break-fix’ response is extended here to a proactive and strategic way of positioning to optimize the return on investment in the Salesforce platform.
Managed services have full-spectrum ramifications. Instead of only reacting to problems as they occur, a managed services provider will adopt a proactive approach, apply best practices, conduct regular health checks, and discover likely weak areas.
This ensures that the Salesforce Instance runs well, has minimum disruptions, and evolves to meet the business’s needs as and when required.
2. What’s Included in Managed Services?
The variety of services procured from a Salesforce Managed Services engagement may depend, at least partially, on the chosen provider and the target organization’s highly personalized nature. Still, some standard inclusions tend to form a base for these types of agreements:
System Administration: Everything from basic user administration (creating, modifying, and deleting or decommissioning user accounts), small details of security configuration (by looking after profiles, permissions, and roles that determine what data any user can see or do), Big data management (ensuring data quality and maintaining backup/recovery operations) and in its core; preventive maintenance (monitoring system health and upgrading on a schedule).
Immediate Technical Support: Quick response to end-user problems, dedicated troubleshooting on errors, and fast technical support in resolving operational impediments by fixing the issues early so that it does not eventually cause OS/System to become ineffective.
Typically, that equates to some mixture of the many support methods (phone, email, and ticket systems).
Personalized Customization & Developments: To address the individual requirements of every organization, this would involve adding new features and functionality, building custom workflows/automation rules, and developing any necessary to ingrain the platform better into an organization’s business process.
Uninterrupted Upgrades and Planned Improvements: Salesforce releases and updates are challenging to maneuver around. In the context of platform upgrades, MSPs help ensure the new functionalities and features are strategically implemented into Salesforce innovations being offered at that moment so a seamless transition, etc.
Providing effective training and full documentation: End-users must be able to use the Salesforce platform to its full potential. These covers creating specific training content and instruction, as well as any documentation needed for users to get configured and stay up to speed.
Strategic Consulting and an Attitude of Prevention: Going beyond just tactical support means getting solid advice from Salesforce Experts on best practices, ensuring alignment between your CRM’s capabilities and strategic business goals, and creating a roadmap for future Salesforce enhancements/integrations.
3. Why opt for Salesforce Managed Services?
The choice of hiring Salesforce Managed Services is not just a limitation of task delegation but a strategic necessity due to an array of interrelated and influential factors that can massively alter operational efficiency and strategic agility for an organization:
Consistent Vigilance of Traditional Business Function: With the help of third-party experts to handle all Salesforce governance, organizations can move their internal assets such as (IT pros, Business analysts, etc.) too often from working on the minutiae and empower them for core business activity such as innovation and strategy that help in generation of revenue or competitive advantage.
Extensive & Skilled Resource Access: Managed services providers build strong teams of certified Salesforce practitioners who have a very focused approach and depth of experience working with each component of the platform (i.e., all the clouds (the different clouds are called Sign In, Sales Cloud or Service Clouds, the Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, etc.) the breadth of customizing possibilities)
This enables precisely the right skills to be brought in, applying best practices consistently and handling challenging work with pace and precision.
Substantial & Predictable Savings: It is often found to be cheaper, in the long run, to use a managed services provider rather than the aggregate costs of staff, recruiting fees, hiring (and producing) salaries and benefits, including onboarding training, retention, etc.
This would include not only salaries and benefits, but also continuous finance investment required to strategy an in-house team.
Expedited Operational Risk Mitigation and Improved Compliance: The provider-side management enshrined in managed services allows organizations to reduce service risks such as data loss, security breaches, and compliance missteps (i.e., the proverbial three-letter acronym-related things).
Firms with industry knowledge and hands-on experience deploying industry-level security processes and independently managing compliance with the applicable regulatory environment.
Increased Scalability and Unparalleled Flexibility: The business nature of scaling frequently comes along with business technology support infrastructure requirements adjustments. The managed services configuration, by nature, is flexible.
Therefore, an organization can add or reduce spending on services supporting quickly changing business requirements/growth paths, ensuring that it can have expertise in hand at any point in time without the complexities of hiring and laying off internally.
15 Key Advantages of Salesforce Managed Services
In this article, we cover the 15 compelling benefits that explain the rationale for working with a Salesforce Managed Services expert like this one:
4.1 Immediate Hands-on Access to Salesforce Certified Pros:
Managed Services means that an initial onboarding of certified Salesforce specialists is available for addressing immediate issues in near real-time.
They are experts, current with the Salesforce Platform and all the clouds that come along with it (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, etc.).
Industry best practices are therefore applied as a matter of course, and highly complex technical problems are handled with meticulous excellence due to their domain of expertise.
4.2 Proactive, Preventative System Checking:
Top managed service providers dig in and take a proactive approach by constantly watching the client environment in Salesforce to stay ahead of any intrinsic issues, performance bottlenecks, or security risks and by resolving all before this situation affects core business processes from regular system health checks performed daily or weekly to proactive performance monitoring to make a drastic decision.
4.3 Execution of substantial cost reductions with predictability:
When it comes to Salesforce operations, the key realization in outsourcing their management is that organizations are shielded from large recurring and inherently unpredictable costs of recruiting, hiring, onboarding, training, and retaining an internal workforce to manage the Salesforce solution.
This means expenses on the total direct salary & benefits aspect, personal costs such as money spent on maintaining continuous education/investigations and software licenses for the development environment, or possible recruitment costs.
4.4 Exceptionally Flexible and Scalable Along with Business Growth:
An organization will have a different Salesforce requirement as and when it grows.
Managed services also deliver the core flexibility necessary to dynamically scale the size of support and development resources with business growth, eliminating the complexities of internal hiring and resource management.
4.5 Round-the-clock, 24×7 Support Availability:
More established managed services providers have all-encompassing round-the-clock support services intended to assure that no issue will set you out of service or a request will become unattended just because the time is late or where you are located globally.
4.6 Robust Data Security and Improved Security Posture:
Salesforce experts or managed services providers are well aware that data protection and compliance with regulations are of the essence.
These experts diligently operate strong security measures such as strict access control, regular security audits, and compliance with data privacy laws to protect sensitive information in an organization’s system.
4.7 A Visible Winning in GUC and GC Overall Satisfaction:
The delivery of custom training, ongoing user support, and customizations ensures that managed services provide a large boost in user adoption rates and deliver the absolute best overall end-user satisfaction achieved using the Salesforce platform, resulting in higher productivity and platform utilization.
4.8 Development of Highly Specialized Solutions Built for Specific Problem Statement:
Given that each organization has its business processes and needs, managed services providers spend a lot of time immersing themselves in their clients to get a deep understanding of what are the unique capabilities that they aim to achieve and design-build these highly customized Salesforce solutions that cater to their operational workflows along with strategic objectives precisely.
4.9 Integration with Third-Party Externals:
Managed services pros with extensive experience integrate Salesforce into one’s other enterprise-critical business systems as seamlessly as possible (ERP systems, marketing automation platforms, accounting software) and others.
In this case, it guarantees frictionless and reliable data flow within the organization; thus, silos fall, process optimization accelerates, and data utilization is more efficient.
4.10 Strategic Consulting and Anticipation Planning:
Beyond tactical support, many managed services engagements include rich consulting services.
Ultimately, this will entail offering guidance and selling the enterprise on transforming their Salesforce implementation with enhancements to new features, best-practice configuration of Salesforce orgs for performance, and developing proactive strategic roadmaps of what to enhance on the platform and how long in the future they could do so that aligns with stated business goals.
4.11 Regular System Examination and Systematic Audit for Managed Services:
The managed services provider’s system checks shall be regular and systematic, following best practice methodology and covering the Salesforce environment’s surface details.
Taking a preemptive approach, the platform keeps at high-performing levels with a proactive capability to identify bottlenecks or understructure inefficiency before they can later hinder operations.
4.12 Ongoing Performance KPIs tuning and tuning optimization:
Training tools for proficient hands-on analysis and configuration optimization of your Salesforce instance led to performance improvements, reduced page load times, faster system response, and a more efficient platform, which led to higher productivity/satisfaction levels from users.
4.13 Consistent Maintenance of Innovation and Futureproofing:
Managed services providers that are always up-to-speed on Salesforce releases, trends, and advancements in the platform ecosystem can help their customers utilize new features and capabilities whenever they are out in the wild to drive innovation, keep a competitive edge, and future-proof their Salesforce investment.
4.14 Achieving the Maximum ROI of the Backlog in Salesforce:
Managed services ultimately deliver the massive return-from-a-big-investment type of value to their customers as they focus on optimizing usage of Salesforce, driving operational efficiency, and aligning all tool utilization with enterprise-level goals while trying hard not to break stuff on purpose.
4.15 To Ensure Peace of Mind for Everyone in the Business:
Entrusting the Salesforce platform to experts and experts only, business leaders’ boss of the internal team gets Unwavering peace of mind. This enables them to prioritize their core operations and strategic initiatives, not because of the worry and complications of adequately managing a Salesforce flavor.
Conclusion
Salesforce is unquestionably a compelling and flexible platform. Still, its power and transformational ability can only be achieved with expert on-going management, proactive tuning, and periodic business strategic alignment.
Therefore, it is indispensable for any organization to have an in-depth knowledge of the descriptive features of Salesforce Managed Services, as pointed out above.
Businesses can work with the right Salesforce Managed Services provider to establish a collaborative partnership and access specific skills, deliver significant cost savings, boost operational agility, and provide them with better and more lasting success within a continually changing dynamic Salesforce ecosystem.
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