Financial Services Cloud is a Salesforce.com product that has been designed to support wealth management, retail banking, commercial banking, and insurance carrier markets. When FSC was first released, it was initially designed to support wealth management. Since then it continues to be enhanced to support other aspects of financial services. (Banking, insurance, etc.)
FSC comes with a pre-built data model that is used to help advisors, bankers, and captive insurance agents better track their prospects and clients, putting them in
a position to provide excellent service to their clients.
We periodically get asked if we can rebuild the FSC data model on Sales Cloud (Salesforce’s traditional data model) and while the answer is “well, kind of… yes,” the best answer (and the answer that we provide) is “no.” The reasons for this are:
I was a Goldmine user (and LOVED it) from 1995 – 2007, and I thought it could do everything I needed. I was ignorant about my needs, and although Goldmine had flaws, it worked pretty well. One of the things that I struggled with was customizing the application (user interface) to best meet the requirements of our users. Goldmine did not offer a lot of flexibility, limiting my ability to adapt the screens to meet their needs. With FSC, you have a lot of flexibility regarding which tabs you want to expose to your users. For example, you may have a sales team that needs to see leads, but your service team doesn’t need to see that tab. While this is not a new capability with Salesforce and FSC, this feature is often overlooked.
I love studying CRM User Adoption (both good and bad adoption!). As a Salesforce Partner, we often get calls from existing Salesforce customers, with whom we have not worked before, asking if we can provide more user training. When we ask why they need training, we often hear “because we are not using the system and it doesn’t meet our needs.” Our next step is to do a screen share to see their application, and more times than you can imagine, their Salesforce screen/application is flooded with tabs and fields that are not relevant to their business. When we ask them why there are so many tabs, the answer we often get is “because if the tab is not displayed, the users can’t see the data.” This is a common misconception.
One more Goldmine reference and I’m done (I promise!): When I used to get the Goldmine CD upgrade in the mail, I used to get nervous because I knew that the upgrade would not go smoothly and it would monopolize my week. I share this because with Salesforce FSC, you will get automatic upgrades. There is good news and bad news with these upgrades.
The good news is that three times a year, there are new capabilities that you can enable to take advantage of new features. You do not have to worry about the upgrades as they magically happen over the weekend while you sleep. Each release has a unique logo/icon so that when you log in on Monday and see a new/different logo, you will know that you were upgraded that weekend. The bad news is that because there is so much innovation going on with FSC and Lightning (the user interface), many of our clients are not able to keep up with the enhancements. As part of your subscription with Salesforce, you are already paying for these enhancements, so you may as well take advantage of them, right?
We know that people get busy and you have to prioritize their time, but remember that implementing a “CRM” system is not a project, it is a program. Projects have a start and an end date, whereas programs are ongoing. If you are not keeping up and enhancing your application, you will see adoption suffer. If you don’t believe me, did you consider buying a CRM system that didn’t have mobile access in 1990? Would you buy the same system now that didn’t have mobile functionality? Please keep up with the new functionality. You will be very glad that you are.
Each chapter going forward is going to talk about some of the main features and/or tabs of Salesforce. At the end of most chapters, you will find a section called Items to Consider. These are provided for you to both think about and discuss with your Salesforce implementation vendor.
FSC has a Leads tab that can be renamed to however you refer to leads, prospects, suspects, etc. Regardless of what you call them, it is very important that you understand how Leads fit within the FSC data model. As I tell our clients, Leads sit on one side of the room (i.e. database) while Accounts/Households, Contacts and Opportunities sit on the other side of the room (database). There is no relationship between Leads and Accounts/Households or Contacts. There is no relationship between leads either. You could have two people from the same company as leads and there is no way to see that they are related (work at the same company). So, when it is appropriate to use Leads? It depends…
The key word is “actively.” If you have a large marketing focus where you are doing a lot of events, trade shows, buying mailing lists, social media, etc., the Leads module will probably be a good fit for you. In the banking world, there are a lot of referrals provided by banking peers as well as third party referral sources. In the wealth management world, they typically find that referrals are their only source of leads and in this case, may not want to use the Leads tab. If you don’t use the Leads tab and decide to enter “leads” into the Account/Household and Contact tabs, we would default a field to “lead” so that you can still segment your prospective clients on the Account tab.
One other item to consider is your marketing efforts. If you are actively involved in marketing via marketing automation programs, speaking at conferences, having booths at trade shows, etc., you may receive a lot of unqualified leads. If that’s the case, the Leads tab is a great place to put them so that they can be qualified first before you start working with them further.
We are seeing many more financial advisors wanting to track their marketing spend to measure the ROI. These financial advisors put on prospecting dinners, radio programs, conferences, etc. and have made a huge commitment to marketing. Within the banking world, it is a huge requirement to track your marketing spend and measure your ROI. So how can this be done in Salesforce?
There is a Campaign module that allows you to set up all of your campaigns and track information associated to each campaign, such as start date, end date, expected expense, actual expense, expected revenue, etc. Campaigns can be unrelated to each other or they can be associated via a parent/child structure, where the revenue and expenses for a child campaign can roll up to the parent campaign.
As you spend money on marketing through conferences, trade shows, mailing list purchases, social media advertising, etc., you want to track the leads that you receive. That is very straightforward—but what if the same lead attended multiple conferences? When a lead becomes a client, how do you associate the revenue to each campaign? Additionally, you may want to use a marketing automation tool like Pardot to warm up prospects before you call on them. If you do, how do you manage these email campaigns?
As a lead moves through the process and an opportunity is created and eventually won, that revenue figure in the Opportunity record is used to calculate your Campaign ROI. In banking, you can sell a number of products and when you total up the revenue for the closed won opportunities for checking accounts, car loan, home equity, mortgage, CD, etc., the revenue number will be totaled into the campaign. For RIAs, you may want to use that Opportunity revenue number to track new Assets Under Management.
To Person Account or not to Person Account? That is the question. What the heck does that mean??
Within FSC, there are two (2) preferred ways to represent your individual client. You can use either the Person Account model or the Individual Account model. Both models allow you to create the individual record from the standard Account tab and both models store data on both the Account and Contact tab. By using the Individual Account model, you will have two separate page layouts on the Account page whereby the Account fields will be stored separately from the Contact fields. What this means is that you can’t move the phone number from the Contact layout to be next to the name field on the Account layout. Additionally, if you want to create a view of your clients from the Account tab, you would not be able to see any data that is stored on the Contact record unless you created a number of formula fields to copy the fields from the Contact record to the Account record.
In using a Person Account model, you would have much more flexibility in that you can move around fields on the page layout (i.e. Contact fields can be interspersed with Account fields) and all data will be visible from any Account view that you create. Given these differences, we would recommend going with the Person Account model; however, part of the decision needs to come down to which model your financial software provider (i.e. Custodian) writes to. Many of the vendors that wrote integrations to FSC early on, built it to support the Individual model, since that was the only model that was available. In early 2018, Salesforce announced that it is supporting the Person Account model, but many of these vendors have either not started or not completed building their integration to support Person Accounts. This decision about Person Accounts vs. Individual Accounts is a very important decision to make with your vendor.
Householding and Relationship Groups are a great feature of FSC as it gives you the ability to associate more than just family members to a household. One of the biggest challenges that advisors and bankers face is keeping the business when assets get passed from one generation to the next. If you don’t know your client’s kids, chances are high that they will work with someone else when they are in a position to invest and/or inherit.
Within FSC, there is a very robust householding feature where you can associate many people to a household. Naturally, the parents and kids would be associated, but what about an aunt or grandfather? For each person associated to the household, you are able to determine who is the primary head of the household and whether the household they belong to is their primary household. What this allows you to do is to associate more people to a household and better understand the relationship between each person. For each member, you can specify what information rolls up to the household. Should each person’s financial accounts roll up? What about the open and completed activities? You may have an aunt that lives with your client, but her financial accounts should not roll up. FSC provides this capability.
Additionally, you are able to designate for the household, or for each member of the household, the names of their CPA, lawyer, etc. In setting up these relationships, you can use reciprocal roles to define that Fred Smith is your lawyer and you are his client. By doing this, you then have the capability to look at Fred Smith’s record and see all of his clients.
With every contact, you have the ability to associate them to more than just the household. Your contact could work at a company, be on the board of a non-profit, and volunteer time for a charity. This gives you the ability to see all of the touchpoints that you could have with your client to build more meaningful relationships.
Many banking and other financial systems already provide the householding feature, which is great. Assuming you are migrating data in from one of these systems, it should be easy to set up the household within Salesforce. However, you will want your users to go into each household record (as time permits) and update it to include other family members, their CPA/lawyer, their business relationships, etc. Just because you have a husband and wife (or a single person) associated to their own household in your financial system does not mean that you are done setting it up in FSC. By taking the time to set up these relationships, you will see your business grow because warm referrals will be much easier to come by. We often get asked if a household should be created for a single person and our answer is typically yes. The reason is that there are a number of fields we recommend tracking at the household level, such as review frequency, start date, etc., instead of the individual client record. If you have a husband and wife, you would not want to track this data on both of their individual records.
If your initial data migration is from a CRM system, it often has a householding model. However, since no two data models are alike, this data will need to be transformed so that we can load the household separately from the individual records. Although Sikich will migrate your data, the data migration often requires a lot of data preparation by the client before we can load this data into FSC.
Having migrated data hundreds of times into Salesforce, there are a number of items that occur during the data migration that may not be known to people that have never done it. They are:
Preparing data is something that clients need to do during the project to ensure that the data is in a format that can be loaded into Salesforce. Since consultants like Sikich don’t know your data, it is impossible for us to prepare it correctly, and this is why the task falls on our clients. What this means is that we need to have your data separated into separate Excel tabs. One tab needs to contain businesses/households, another needs to contain contacts, another needs to contain opportunities, another needs to contain activities/notes, etc. When preparing this data, it is important that all of your records have the correct relationship in place so the data can load properly. Unfortunately, some older CRM systems don’t enforce data integrity whereby if you change a company name, for example, the completed activities related to that company may still be associated to the previous company name. When you load the new company name in Salesforce and match on the activities, they won’t match and thus, won’t load. Often when migrating from another CRM system, you first need to do a complete data extraction. Some systems do not export the data in a format that is easy to work with. Instead of exporting the households/accounts in one Excel tab, contacts in another, etc., the system just puts the data wherever it wants, making data preparation a nightmare.
Salesforce gives you a lot of options for how you want to set up the data visibility model. You can have an open visibility model where everyone can see all data, all fields, and update all records; an extremely restricted visibility model where you can only see certain records and some of the fields are not visible; or something in the middle. What drives visibility initially is ownership of records, so that if we set the visibility model where you can only see records that you own, you must be the owner of that record to see it. When setting up a role hierarchy, you can allow people above you in the hierarchy to see your data, even if they are not the owner of the record. What does this have to do with data migration? As part of preparing the data, it will be important to specify who is the record owner for each client if you want to restrict who can see what data.
You may have client data in your financial system along with data in a CRM, and while your CRM system has all of your activity data, etc., your financial system (Schwab, TD, LPL, Orion, etc.) may contain the most up-to-date address information, in addition to all of the financial accounts. If we need to combine non-financial account data from two systems and put it into Salesforce, we need to have a common key (i.e. SSN, etc.) that is in both systems so that we can load the data from one system and then update data from the other. Without that common key, it will require more time of the client to prepare the data for loading.
If you would want to migrate contact data from your email system into Salesforce, you will definitely need to allocate more time to prepare your data. A case in point: In my contact folder, I have John Smith at ABC Company and in your contact folder, you have Johnny Smith at ABC Co. If we combine the data and load it, we will load two companies and two contacts. If you also migrate CRM data, you could potentially have a third person or company.
Migrating attachments can be very time consuming as the file storage is often quite a bit larger than the data. If you want to cut over from your existing system to Salesforce in one day, there may be a delay in getting all of the attachments migrated. Many clients are keeping attachments outside of Salesforce (i.e. Box, Dropbox, S-Drive, LaserFiche, etc.) and integrating them into Salesforce. By doing this, these attachments are accessible to non-Salesforce.com users also.
Salesforce gives you a lot of options for how you want to set up the data visibility model. You can have an open visibility model where everyone can see all data, all fields, and update all records; an extremely restricted visibility model where you can only see certain records and some of the fields are not visible; or something in the middle. What drives visibility initially is ownership of records, so that if we set the visibility model where you can only see records that you own, you must be the owner of that record to see it. When setting up a role hierarchy, you can allow people above you in the hierarchy to see your data, even if they are not the owner of the record. What does this have to do with data migration? As part of preparing the data, it will be important to specify who is the record owner for each client if you want to restrict who can see what data.
One of the areas that we see many bankers and advisors moving to is proactive management of their pipeline. Advisors want to see all of the new money that they could potentially manage (AUM) as they work with both existing clients and prospects. Bankers have a number of products that they could sell (checking, CD, Mortgage, Car loan, etc.) and can leverage the Opportunity object to track their sales funnel.
For Advisors who are not used to proactively managing this in their existing CRM system, we recommend using the Opportunity tab but not putting a lot of fields in the record. Advisors (and management) typically want to know who the client or prospect is, how much money they could be managing, what type of account it is, when they may get the money, and how far in the process they are. Sure, there may be a few more fields of data they want to track, but that is typically all of the info to track. The rule of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) is best in this scenario because if you require too much data, the advisors will probably not keep it updated. I like to say there is an inverse relationship between the number of fields and their willingness to update the records.
For bankers it is a different story. Because banking relies on a lot of referrals from people inside and outside of the bank, they are dealing with a higher volume of opportunities and a lot more products/services to sell. Because of this, there may be different page layouts based upon the type of product/service that is being proposed. There could be more information you would want to capture for a mortgage loan compared to someone that wants to open a CD. Additionally, there may be workflow processes that need to be built to support the pipeline management for bankers.
Regardless of how big or small your pipeline is, you will want to use the Kanban feature to view all of your open opportunities based on the stage they are in. Kanban gives you the ability to move opportunities between stages and by doing this, the total amount of all opportunities in that stage is automatically updated.
You may have advisors or bankers that want to mass update their opportunity pipeline. For example, there might be several opportunities where the close date needs to be adjusted. Instead of using the Kanban, you can use the traditional list view, select multiple records, change the date, and have it reflected on all records. This is very beneficial to users who don’t want to open every record every time that a change needs to be made.
The Financial Accounts tab comes standard with FSC and it allows you to break out all of the financial accounts by individual and by household. As you can see in the graphic to the right, there are a number of related lists to the Financial Account object where you can classify these accounts. For RIAs, they will primarily use the Investment Account related list. However, for retail and commercial banking, they will want to use many of the related sections below, such as bank accounts, auto loans, credit cards, mortgages, etc.
Populating this data will typically be available for RIAs in a feed that they get from their financial software provider; however, for banking organizations, this data will often come from their Core Banking System. Unfortunately, the Core Banking Systems do not provide easy access to their data, so we have built a Core Banking System Integration Module that allows us to take many files (i.e. 15-30) and, after applying business rules to this data, upsert (update or insert) this data into Salesforce nightly. Core Banking Systems typically do not offer a great API, but if they can provide these files on a nightly basis, we can manipulate the data and load it.
Goals can be associated to an individual or a household and give the advisor or banker a great way to list and measure each client’s goals for the future. Goals change because “life happens,” and by providing the capability to add, modify and delete goals, you can have one place to view them.
Goals are not linked or associated to your Financial Accounts, so if your client has a goal of having $2M in assets by the age of 50, your goal “actual” amount will not be updated from the financial account tab.
Reciprocal Roles are used to help define the relationship between two individuals. As stated above, Fred Smith could be your client’s lawyer and your client would also be Fred Smith’s client. Client <-> Lawyer is an example of a reciprocal role. FSC comes with a number of these roles already built; however, some of your clients may want additional roles.
This is the easiest to build; however, it is also the least flexible. Workflow gives you the ability to create a task, send an email, do a field update or send an outbound message. When I create these rules, it is very difficult to dynamically assign a task, for example. In the Winter `19 release, Salesforce enabled Action Plans that allow you to string together workflow rules to create a workflow process. Action Plans allow you to designate which tasks are dependent on other tasks such that when one task is done, the next task is created. It also allows for multiple tasks to be worked at one time.
This is a tool that allows you to build more complex processes with a lot of flexibility. With Process Builder, you can add logic into your processes so the output can vary based on a number of factors. Many of our clients have dynamic assignment of processes whereby a task needs to be assigned to the CSR that is listed for a client. Process Builder gives you the capability to do a real-time lookup on that client and the CSR field to determine to whom it should be assigned. While Process Builder can be set up with “point and click,” there are some nuances that would need to be taught if our clients want to maintain these processes.
This is the most flexible and complex tool to use to manage workflow. Flow can be used to build processes around dynamic data collection and also for creating call scripts. Flow definitely requires a technical background to set up and maintain.
Many clients have a number of processes that need to be built out, such as client onboarding, change of address, new account opening, etc. While these are very common, each client seems to have a few nuances in his or her process. For example, do you dynamically assign tasks to your team based upon their role for that specific client, or do you always assign the same task to the same person, regardless of the client? This can have an impact on how the rules are built and deployed. Additionally, we would need to discuss if your tasks are dependent or independent of other tasks. If they are dependent and there is a 5-step process, the second task won’t be created until the first task is marked as Completed. If they are independent, all five tasks would be created when the process is launched.
For example, you may have a Contact listed as a “prospect” and when you close your first opportunity with them, you want to have their Contact type changed automatically from “Prospect” to “Client”. When you are submitting a proposal to your manager for pricing approval, you will want to have the record locked until the manager provides the feedback. These are two of many examples as to how you can use workflow to drive User Adoption.
In the Wealth Management space, many RIAs want to provide different levels of service to their clients based upon their AUM. Whether you classify clients as A, B, C or Gold, Silver, Bronze, you often want to provide more frequent touches to your biggest clients/households. Within FSC, you can update your household records to reflect the service level. As you complete certain activities for that client, FSC can create a future task for scheduling the next meeting with that client.
It will be important when we gather requirements to understand the timeframes associated to each service level and what activities count towards the service level. For example, calling a client and inviting them to an event may not count as a significant activity, but doing an annual review would count.
If these processes are not well defined but you would like to deploy them as part of Phase I, this will take an implementation partner more time to work with you to define these processes and have them fully tested.
Prior to having the annual reviews, many of our clients leverage a third-party document generation tool to merge client data into a document so that the client can review the data to ensure it is still accurate.
Cases mean different things to different industries. In healthcare, a Case refers to working with a patient. In insurance, it refers to working on a new policy. In the Salesforce world, Cases refer to managing client issues or managing a business process across multiple people, including clients. Standard Cases allow you to track the issue type, assign it to someone (manual or automated) who can resolve the issue, and when completed, document what was done. This gives everyone in the system visibility into what issue the client had and how it was resolved.
The Cases module comes with a lot of additional functionality that can allow interaction with the client. There is Web to Case functionality that will allow clients to submit new issues directly into Salesforce. It can be used to communicate with your client as you are working an issue or a process.
In the banking world, we see Cases being used for tracking client issues. As a call comes in from a client who needs a password reset or a question about a charge, these can be documented and by doing so, you can easily see through reports and dashboards which Case types are trending. You can also see by client how many cases they have had over time. This information could be an early warning sign that someone needs to get involved as the client could be a flight risk.
When using Cases, you may want to provide the Service team with a different user interface than the traditional Lightning Interface. While they would still work in Lightning, the Service Console has been built to provide more information to the service agent with fewer clicks.
The first dashboard provides you with information on managing your existing book of business. The second one focuses on growing your business and better tracking your opportunities, while the third dashboard focuses on engaging more deeply with your existing clients to grow. While FSC comes with these three pre-built dashboards, you can also create custom dashboards or you can customize these existing dashboards.
When you view a dashboard, you will see a number of components (graphs or numbers) that can all be resized to meet your needs. In order to get a component to show up on a dashboard, there needs to be an underlying report with data. This is why reports and dashboards work so well together.
Reports do not need to be displayed on a dashboard, but each Dashboard Component must relate to a report. When you are on a Dashboard and you want to see the data behind that component,
you need to click on the “View Report” link. By clicking it, you will be transferred from the Dashboard Tab into the Reports Tab and will be looking at the underlying data. While other CRM systems sometimes have a delay between data being entered or updated and being reflected in a report, with Salesforce, it is instantaneous. If you add a record and run the report, the new record will display in the report, if it meets the filter criteria. That record will not be reflected in the Dashboard until the dashboard is refreshed, which can be done either manually (up to every minute) or automated (once daily). If you do not refresh your dashboard and click on the “View Report” link on a component, you will see all of the data that meets that criteria, even though the dashboard component may be out of date. It is important to determine how you are going to automate the refreshing of the dashboards. One challenge that people encounter is scheduling dynamic dashboards to be refreshed. If you set the visibility model where each advisor or banker can only see their own data, you will want to build a dashboard to reflect this data visibility model. Each advisor or banker, when they go to the dashboard, can only see their data, which is ideal. The challenge lies in automating the refreshing of that dashboard since you have one dashboard with multiple views of data (each person has their own view). Therefore, you can’t schedule the refresh of a dynamic dashboard.
Many times, we do not recommend building any reports for wealth management users when going live with Phase I. While this may sound odd, the pre-built reports and dashboards are very good, and until you start using the system, you won’t know what reporting you are missing. We will often write reports 1-2 months after going live, should there be a need.
A user may want to notify a client’s service team if a change is made to a client during the day. Because the clients’ service team is made up of multiple people, you want to automate a process for everyone to stay in the loop without using email for this correspondence.
Salesforce has a module called Chatter that is used for collaboration, and while Chatter runs within Salesforce, it has various ways of notifying you about a change. We have been deploying Chatter to our Wealth Management firms who want to provide an FYI notice to a service team based upon a change to the client. While on the client’s record, you can create a Chatter post and by “at mentioning someone (@mmountain) or a group,” the service team can be notified within FSC.
You can create surveys that can be sent to any person in your Salesforce environment. As expected, these surveys can be launched either manually or via automation (i.e. close out a Case, etc.) and when the survey is completed, that data can be stored in Salesforce, and associated to the person who completed the survey, so that you can report on the data. As you build these surveys through the point and click interface, you add questions and select the type of answer that you want to accept (text, picklist, checkbox, radio button, date, Net Promoter Score, etc.). They are very easy to build/maintain and can provide a lot of great information after a client/prospect meeting or to ensure you are providing the right level of service to each client.
In the Spring ’19 release, Lightning Scheduler became available, Einstein Analytics for Financial Services helps advisors and bankers manage their book of business by getting more insightful data about their clients. Your team can review and evaluate individual and regional performance with these pre-built dashboards. Some of the dashboards that are available are:
In the Spring ’19 release, Lightning Scheduler was available and for those organizations that struggle to get the right person/team available at the right location and the right time, this is a great solution for you.
Let’s pretend that you have an existing bank customer that wants to apply for a new loan and they want to do it during the day, close to where they work. As a banker, you are not familiar with the branch near their work and would need to find an employee at that branch with the expertise and availability. After leaving a message for the branch, they finally call back and leave you a voicemail but not with all of the data you need. Sound familiar?
With Lightning Scheduler, you can select the location/branch, the skillset required and the time, and Lightning Scheduler will verify the availability of the right people and put it on everyone’s calendar. This is a huge time saver for a geographically dispersed workforce.
With the Summer ’19 release, we are able to deploy FSC to insurance carriers and their captive agents and customer service reps. The Insurance Agent Console is a customized Lightning application that helps agents and service reps monitor their goals and accomplishments. There are a number of pre-built metrics and report charts to allow you to customize the home page to best meet the users’ needs. Agents can see the number of new and renewed policies, total premiums and their lead conversion ratio while customer service reps can see the number of claims settled and closed.
Also included is the Person Life Event component which is awesome. As you pull up a client record, you can see on a timeline when all of their major events have happened in their life. The days of having to scroll through a lot of data to find out these major events is over!!!
You also now have the Policy component which allows you to see all of the policies, claims and other related information about your client. This page can be customized to reflect how the user wants to see the data.
AI is going to take over the world – right? Well, maybe not take over the world, but it will have a huge impact on how decisions are made going forward. In the past, we have built a number of business rules for our clients to score opportunities and evaluate their data. The output is based upon rules that we define, whether these rules are right or wrong.
AI takes this modeling to the next level where there are no business rules that we write. While we think that a household with $2M in Assets or a homeowner looking to upgrade to a larger house are great prospects for us, what we didn’t know was that the household with $2M in assets has a brother-in-law managing the money or a homeowner who only buys mortgages online.
AI looks at all of your past data and interprets it. It can then tell you
that homeowners, for example, between the ages of 27-35 that are upgrading from their first house are excellent prospects, while someone that manages his or her money through an online brokerage is a poor prospect. In business, many advisors and bankers are excited for new prospects and they treat each of them the same. The reality is that we only have so much time to focus on our prospects and clients, and having AI tell us where best to spend our time is tremendously valuable.
User Training is not a one-time event and it is critical to have someone at your firm that will work closely with your users immediately after training. Users will have questions, want new reports, etc., and if you don’t have someone that works well with your team, it can really stifle adoption. Ongoing support and training cannot be understated; if you don’t have anyone internally that can do it, leverage your implementation vendor for this task. Our recommendation is to use someone internally, as such a person would know your users better, could respond quicker, and would be more cost effective.
The AppExchange is an App Store where you can find applications that plug into Salesforce applications. Not all applications integrate with the Financial Services Cloud; however, there are a number of great applications that you can take advantage of. There are industry-specific applications such as Orion, Addepar, Skience, Tamarac, Smarsh, nCino, etc., as well as applications, such as marketing automation tools, survey tools, document generation tools, etc. that work across all industries.
Even if you have vendors that are not listed on the AppExchange, they may still have a pre-built integration with Salesforce.com. If this is the case, your third-party vendors should be able plug in their solution for you at no or minimal cost. We have found that organizations that plug in one or more than one AppExchange application will have better adoption of their Salesforce application.
This publication contains general information only and Sikich is not, by means of this publication, rendering accounting, business, financial, investment, legal, tax, or any other professional advice or services. This publication is not a substitute for such professional advice or services, nor should you use it as a basis for any decision, action or omission that may affect you or your business. Before making any decision, taking any action or omitting an action that may affect you or your business, you should consult a qualified professional advisor. In addition, this publication may contain certain content generated by an artificial intelligence (AI) language model. You acknowledge that Sikich shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by you or any person who relies on this publication.
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In The News
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