We are proud to announce that Perficient, a Platinum Cloud Alliance Partner, has been recognized as a Fullforce Service Cloud Master, a program recognizing Salesforce partners with proven expertise delivering industry and cloud-specific services and solutions for customers. Perficient was selected to join this elite program based on its proven customer service expertise and excellent client track record with more than 300 Service Cloud engagements over the past decade. Read the full news release here.

“We are thrilled that Perficient has achieved the Fullforce Master designation for delivering expertise in Service Cloud,” said Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, senior vice president of Partner Programs, Salesforce. “Fullforce Master partners such as Perficient have passed a rigorous review process and have proven expertise with Salesforce’s Customer Success Platform.”

We’ve entered into a new era of connected customer service where organizations are putting customers at the center of their business – and Perficient is helping to lead the charge delivering innovative Service Cloud solutions. Below are a few highlights of some of our recent Salesforce client success stories. To learn more about Perficient and how we can help you unlock new connected customer service opportunities with the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, I’d encourage you to meet with one of our Service Cloud experts or get a first-hand look at some of our solutions at Dreamforce 2015.

Creating Next-Generation Agent Experiences for Service Optimization

Optimizing the Service Cloud Console can be a game-changer for service organizations to gain competitive advantage. A network security company was looking to use Service Cloud Console as its productivity platform for global support. Perficient deployed Service Cloud and helped identify ways to optimize the Service Console for technical support engineers with a direct GoToMeeting integration within Salesforce. The impact on a team of 150 support engineers resulted in time savings of 3,000 minutes and 10,500 clicks saved per day. The technical support center and managers also benefited from a fully customizable real-time notification system providing a centralized view to help quickly escalate issues, reduce unnecessary email communications, and prioritize cases to effectively run the support business. Overall the UI enhancements have helped align people, process and technology to their strategic support goals.

Using Knowledge as a Strategic Weapon

Agents need contextual information to service customers quickly and effectively. There is huge potential for service organizations to greatly improve how knowledge is captured and shared, yet companies often struggle to get knowledge management right to drive business results. Perficient’s staff of Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) certified Salesforce experts helped a leading high-definition action camera company deliver innovative solutions with Service Cloud to automate knowledge creation, create a 360-degree view of the customer, and empower agents with customer intelligence designed to optimize business processes, specifically return merchandise authorization (RMA) and case creation, as well as personalize the customer experience to increase client satisfaction. Many of our clients are also looking to extend knowledge bases with a self-service community for customers, using Community Cloud, which is something we’re recognized and well-known for in the Salesforce community.

Delivering Omni-channel and Self-Service Support for Customers

Providing seamless experiences in today’s digital-first world is a daunting task for many companies.  However, leading gaming companies have turned to Perficient to help “up their customer service game” using Service Cloud. New self-service support models that embrace social, mobile and peer-to-peer collaboration are becoming increasingly popular to quickly scale the business. Perficient has helped these innovative brands explore using Live Agent, Chatter, mobile and gamification to transform the service experience and empower customers to get engaged and serve others. As a Fullforce Service Cloud Master, clients have the confidence that we deeply understand Service Cloud, and how to leverage its capabilities to deliver innovative omni-channel experiences for customer engagement.

Learn more about the Salesforce Fullforce Masters Program in the full news release.

The life sciences and healthcare industries are no exception to the rise of the “Connected Customer” and the next wave of opportunities are at hand. Patient/physician engagement, agility, regulatory requirements, and product development are just a few of the business challenges these industries face. As a result, successful companies are turning to the cloud to respond to near-term challenges, develop long-term multi-channel engagement models and quickly adapt in an era of transformation.

Tune in to our upcoming webinar on May 7th as I sit down for a virtual fireside chat with Jonathan Green, senior IT director at Apollo Endosurgery, as he shares how the company transformed its business in 8 weeks with Salesforce’s cloud platform. During our discussion, we’ll cover:

Preparing for the ‘Next Wave’ of Innovation 

Websites are the center of digital engagement for most brands and a lot of effort goes into transforming them into a “hub” for customers to engage and find answers to their questions. Websites must be useful, responsive and intuitive, and as a result, building a website is no easy feat. Learn how Apollo built a website in 60 days using the Salesforce platform.

Adapting Business Models for Growth 

While emerging markets, mergers and acquisitions, and product innovation allow for new business opportunities, these activities also pose unique challenges for IT. Companies must be more agile and find ways to become a high-performing business. See how Apollo was not only able to merge Salesforce orgs after an acquisition, roll out Sales Cloud, and connect 20+ data sources in 8 weeks, but hear first-hand how they are unlocking the power of cloud and mobile to support sales and marketing processes to engage patients and physicians.

Conforming to the Changing Regulatory and Risk Environment

The life sciences industry is one of the most heavily regulated industries. With new regulations come new risks for an organization. Companies need secure, reliable and flexible solutions designed to meet the rigorous compliance needs of the life sciences industry. Jonathan will dispel cloud myths and help you better understand the benefits of the cloud and how the Salesforce platform enables them to build secure applications for the business.

We look forward to an engaging conversation and sharing Apollo Endosurgery’s secrets to success with Salesforce! Register for the fireside chat.

Nine years ago when I started in the salesforce.com ecosystem the majority of companies using Salesforce were early adopters from the high-tech ranks. Since then, we’ve seen customers across multiple industries trust Salesforce to solve their business challenges. One of these industries is traditional manufacturing, which I see increasingly using Salesforce to help run and modernize their business.

For manufacturers that view Salesforce narrowly as just “sales,” I want to highlight the various areas where manufacturers use the power of Salesforce to get closer to their customers, run their business more efficiently, and get more productivity from their employees.

1. Application Consolidation & Modernization

Given how long many traditional manufacturers have been around they have accumulated and built a vast inventory of commercial and home-grown applications and platforms. (Excel & VBA, Access,.NET, Lotus Notes, PeopleSoft to mention a few.)

Other than the significant cost of maintaining these technologies, these older technologies could not have anticipated the factors/pressures of today’s businesses, including:

• Customers multi- and omnichannel service expectations
• Geographically distributed workforce
• A new generation of tech-savvy, mobile carrying employees who don’t want to run businesses on clipboards and Excel
• New compliance/audit requirements
• Reduced application creation and development cycle time

CIOs clearly want to rationalize their application and platform portfolio.

Recommendations

Familiarize yourself with the entire set of capabilities salesforce.com provides, including:

• Out of the box products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud
• The development power of the Force.com (one of my personal favorites) when you need to build new or extend existing applications
• The mobile capabilities of Salesforce1
• The growing number of manufacturing-oriented 3rd party AppExchange applications built on Salesforce including FinancialForce, Kenandy, Rootstock, and CPGToolbox
• The platform integration capabilities to connect to vital backend systems

The beauty is that is that it’s one platform, one data model, one set of users, and one set of profiles on top of a powerful set of capabilities.

2. Customer Delight

Many companies including Salesforce talk about a customer revolution, meaning the unprecedented power customers have to choose, to speak, to influence, to detract, and to shop elsewhere if they are not happy. This power demands new tools and techniques spanning marketing, sales, and support.

It means knowing your customers, listening to your customer or in many cases listening to their devices (see the Internet of things), and engaging in a closer 1-to-1 relationship that was not previously possible.

Recommendation

Look at why you are winning or losing customers. What are customers saying about you on social media? How, where, and how regularly are you engaging your customers? Where do you need to apply technology to achieve a closer connection with your customers?

3. Partner/ Indirect Channels Management

Many manufacturers sell through networks of partners and not directly to the public. Relying on indirect channels to sell on your behalf means manufacturers need to stay close to their partners; they need to do all the following:

• Collaborate
• Communicate
• Educate
• Support
• Reward

If partners are your largest sales channel, relying on the age-old methods of email and relationship management alone will likely leave you at a competitive disadvantage. Partners lean toward manufacturers that are easy to do business with.

Recommendation

Provide a Partner Community using Salesforce Communities to give your partners a collaborative environment where they are supported, listened to, and where they can easily transact business with you since you are using a single solution.

Looking at just three areas — systems, customers, and sales — we see the potential to use Salesforce-based solutions and technology in a traditional manufacturing setting. There are many other areas: sales productivity, employee collaboration, and ERP integration to mention a few. See for yourself how innovative companies are already using Salesforce.

Perficient is the newest US based salesforce.com Platinum Partner, achieving the Platinum level as a result of their strong performance over the first part of 2014. The salesforce.com Cloud Alliance Program tiers partners according to strict criteria such as the number of certified people, sales performance, and customer satisfaction.

On a personal level having been part of the salesforce.com ecosystem since 2005, this is very professionally and personally rewarding. In 2006 we started at the lowest partner level and over the years we have progressed up the partner ranks to this important milestone.

We’ve had lots of great people help make this milestone possible:

• Customers: You trust us to transform and improve your businesses using the best cloud based technologies out there
• Colleagues: You do the best work of your lives here, and continually challenge yourself and your peers in your pursuits
• Salesforce.com: You have created an incredible product, ecosystem, customer base, and culture that makes our partnership possible

I know I am breaking the bloggers rule of not being self promotional, but I very excited about the Platinum Level and how we continue to leverage our Salesforce knowledge, our broader technical expertise, industry expertise, large customer base, and geographic coverage for our clients.

Looking forward to seeing many of you at Dreamforce.

Marc Benioff said “Today is about putting the customer first” when talking about salesforce.com and Microsoft announcing a partnership to connect salesforce.com applications and platform with Microsoft Office and Windows. If it is truly about the customer, what does it mean for salesforce.com customers?

1. Access Salesforce on Windows Devices
   Using two solutions –  Salesforce1 for Windows and Windows Phone 8.1 – customers using Windows clients will access Salesforce data just as iOS and Android users have been able to do since the Salesforce1 launch. A fall 2014 preview is planned with a 2015 GA date.

2. Enjoy a new level of interoperability between Salesforce and Microsoft Solutions
   A new solution – Salesforce for Office 365 – plans to have a significant integration between the respective companies offerings, including the ability to:

• Access, share, and edit Office 365 content within Salesforce and Salesforce1
• Integrate Microsoft OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online storage solutions with Salesforce
• Integrate Salesforce and Outlook better using a new Salesforce App for Outlook solution
• Connect Salesforce data to Excel and Power BI for Office 365 for visualization and analysis

It’s exciting new for our customers, many of them who use technology from both salesforce.com and Microsoft. Historically there has never been great integration between the solutions. Customers want it, they need it. They are tired of alt-tabbing between the two solutions. Having a seamless user interface between both solutions brings the best that both companies provide.

A concern I have is that salesforce.com have announced other partnerships like this in the past – with Box.com and Google Apps – and over time those announcements and integrations did not live up to the fanfare. What may be different here is the extent to which corporate America has invested in Microsoft and Salesforce technology. There may be more market demand for these new offerings, and the degree to which Salesforce for Office 365 can seamlessly integrate the solutions will determine its success.

As a cloud advocate what is exciting about this announcement is the degree to which the cloud, ubiquitous connectivity, and open APIs’ allow heterogeneous cloud services to be combined into a powerful solution where the customer can be blissfully unaware of the underlying technology. You can have Salesforce (running on its multiple platforms) and Microsoft solutions integrated from a user interface perspective and thereby “putting the customer first”!

These two acronyms share two of the same letters but are very different in their purpose and history. We share a perspective on how customer relationship management (CRM) and Electronic Medical Record (EMR) systems combined can be invaluable at what they do best and result in the best of both worlds for providers and patients.

CRM and EMR: A Different Starting Point

Despite the acronym similarity, each has a very different focus.

• CRM, such as from salesforce.com, puts the “customer” and the company’s “relationship” with that customer front and center
• EMR puts the technology first with the terms “electronic” and (database) “record”

EMR shows its age as an older classification, with the prefix “electronic”. Can you imagine putting “electronic” in front of any customer facing application or service today?!

Shared Purpose

While they may have different starting points both categories are focused on the customer albeit from different perspectives.

• EMR applications are incredibly complex systems with a myriad of integrations to systems (labs, billing, prescription/ pharmacy etc.) and many have powerful algorithms to predict, detect and potentially prevent adverse events based on patient data. However the primary users are the healthcare providers and not the customer/ patient/ health plan member.
• CRM systems, while they may not provide the complexity of what mature EMR systems provide, put the member at the center of the application.

CRM systems offer providers:

• A way to interact directly with members
• Automated alerts to remind the provider to contact their members based on new data, or the absence of data (e.g. Missing glucose reading)
• An aggregated view of the members history in a more user friendly, and configurable, way than EMRs’ which are very visit centric

CRM systems offer members, when granted access through a patient community:

• A way to interact directly with their care team
• The ability to share additional information – medical vitals, exercise, food intake, etc. – that is relevant to their treatment plan
• Access a wealth of knowledge that their providers have made available
• Manage/ schedule appointments and view results of past visits

EMR + CRM: The Best Of Both Worlds?

We believe there is a place for both CRM and EMR applications. It is very similar to how most organizations have both a CRM and ERP application. They are good at different things. The latter is a system of record that is focused on efficiency and internal users. The former is focused on enabling a more engaged and intimate relationship with its customers, and assume all parties have equal access to information.

In the competitive healthcare environment you need both. For the approximately ~50% of providers that do not use an EMR, we suggest you start with a CRM solution first. You will likely see the business benefits, such as increased member loyalty, faster than implementing an EMR solution.

For providers that already have an EMR, we suggest planning a co-existent strategy where data from an EMR application is selectively and securely integrated with a CRM application where both providers and members receive all the benefits of a CRM application. There are lots of great 3rd party applications like Informatica and Cast Iron to do this.

Perficient is at the HIMMS conference in Orlando this week at Booth #2035. HIMSS is to the healthcare industry what Dreamforce is to the cloud industry. To learn how Perficient can help you implement Salesforce solutions call us at 877-276-2120 or email us at sales@perficient.com.

For more information on Perficient’s expertise in healthcare technology including Connected Health, regulatory compliance, system interoperability, information exchange, and business intelligence and analytics, visit http://www.perficient.com/himss

When I think of major healthcare trends one of the most interesting is that of connected health, the idea that healthcare delivery uses technology to deliver patient care outside of the hospital or doctor’s office. Patient – doctor interactions can now extend past visits to a more engaging ongoing relationship with providers, where patients have ready access to the same information previously only available to providers.

What does this have to do with salesforce.com you ask?

When I look at the technology required to offer a connected health solution such as a patient portal or community salesforce.com has a full solution set to create to create a compelling, secure, and engaging patient community.  Consider this table comparing required patient portal features with commercially available Salesforce features/ products. 

View a Patient Community example provided by Salesforce.com.

Put in a less feature centric way patients need a portal that can provide the following benefits:

1. Improved access to information
2. Collaboration
3. Tracking against personal goals and guidelines

Improved Access To Information

Enabling access to patients medical records – visits, lab results, care team, etc. is table stakes for a patient portal, and without which any patient community will struggle to become widely adopted. 

Collaboration

Many people, especially with a chronic illness, take a very active part in managing their health. They want an avenue to easily converse with their provider team, and other patients with similar illnesses and interests.  They want to be able to schedule an appointment, receive automatic appointment reminders, and other have other collaboration features that allow patients to connect with their providers and others in their network more easily.

Tracking Against Personal Goals & Guidelines

There are variety of popular consumer connected devices and services, such as Strava, Fitbit, MyFitnessPal, and mySentry that track exercise activities, food, calorie intake, and glucose levels. Imagine if you could automatically bring this data into Salesforce so you and your providers could review it against previously set mutual goals, benchmark it to ‘normal’ levels, and generate alerts when data is absent or outside normal levels. Imagine how more productive your doctors visits would be by providing this information?

The business benefits to providers of a patient portal include

1. Increased patient loyalty
2. Reduced expensive hospital visits or reduce office visits
3. Lowered cost of service

Perficient is at the HIMMS conference in in Orlando this week at Booth #2035. HIMSS is to the healthcare industry what Dreamforce is to the cloud industry. To learn how Perficient can help you implement Salesforce solutions call us at 877-276-2120 or email us at sales@perficient.com.

For more information on Perficient’s expertise in healthcare technology including Connected Health, regulatory compliance, system interoperability, information exchange, and business intelligence and analytics, visit http://www.perficient.com/himss.

At Perficient,  we live what we sell. We have long seen the value of Salesforce and the cloud in general to impact a company and its community of partners, customers, and the public. When we think about our business we use Salesforce as the anchor technology  to serve these communities. What started in 1999 as a simple contact management database in the cloud, has evolved into a cohesive solution that can potentially touch millions of people. Many of our customers share this view and passion. So why are so many companies stuck on the “sales” part of Salesforce, limiting its use to the sales team?

When you look at this visual representing major salesforce.com product announcements it is clear that each year the addressable audience that can be engaged by salesforce.com solutions grows.

While the primary use of Salesforce will remain for some time as a sales application, the “sales” part of the equation had a 5 year head start on the rest of the product suite! In the last 6 years we have seen PRM, Service Cloud, Force.com, Chatter, Work.com, and the Marketing Cloud provide incredible benefit to those beyond direct sales. Many innovative companies are extending the power of Salesforce to communities far beyond sales people. Communities of customers, employees, partners and the public, all being engaged using technology from salesforce.com.

Your call to action!  Where is your thinking on how to use Salesforce to engage your communities?

• Are you thinking broadly enough about how Salesforce can touch your communities?
• Do you understand the full potential of Salesforce (beyond sales)?
• Want to get there, but are not sure where to start?

Let Perficient help!

Salesforce.com (The Company)

• The salesforce.com juggernaut will continue at its current breakneck speed
• Service Cloud will approaches a $750m annual run rate, with much of the growth coming from RightNow, Siebel, and Zendesk replacements
• Salesforce.com and Workday will create a stronger partnership

Salesforce (The Product)

• Socially oriented applications – Work.com, Salesforce Chatter Communities, and Chatter – will pick up steam and gain wider user adoption
• There will be a resurgence of Salesforce Automation (SFA) features, in no small part brought on by the True to the core movement
• Heroku – Make or break year:  They will either come in as a core part of the salesforce.com family or go back to being an independent company

Social & Mobile

• Social and mobile apps will mature and provide a level of productivity and relevance   (don’t worry there will still be pictures of what people had for dinner on Facebook) for customers and those serving them

Competitive Landscape

• Oracle will continue to play catch up and acquire companies to compete more effectively with salesforce.com. (Good luck integrating them with the Oracle stack!)
• NetSuite will continue to do well as a strong ERP in the cloud

We have never been so excited about the possibilities that Salesforce and Force.com provides to us, our customers, and our community. Have a great 2013 everyone.

Perficient is incredibly excited to see the continued investment salesforce.com makes in Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Service Cloud, and the Force.com platform. These innovations provide our customers new ways to engage with employees, customers, partners, and the public at large. What does the announcement of Salesforce Chatter Communities have on the future direction of the Salesforce Customer Portal and Salesforce Partner Portal? Do the Portals as we know them today go away?

As a salesforce.com partner that is fortunate enough to have continuous exposure to many of the new products (and as a member of the Chatter Communities pilot program) here are our thoughts:

The Customer and Partner Portals will be replaced by Chatter Communities 

Our belief is that this direction makes sense for the following reasons:

1. Feeds Are In, Records Are Out!Salesforce Portals, regardless of what pretty user interface front ends them, are largely record centric views. With the pervasiveness of Chatter, Facebook, and other Enterprise Social Networks, people are getting accustomed to feed based applications and their promise of productivity gains (e.g. less email, more collaboration).
2. Community Solving Popularity:People are collaborating on problems and sharing solutions within and increasingly across companies lines. The current Salesforce Portals, with the exception of Salesforce Answers and Salesforce Ideas, do not lend themselves to easily enable this type of cross organization collaboration.
3. Application Consistency and  Reduced Cost of Ownership:As an implementation partner that has benefitted from the Salesforce Portals being “different” from “standard Salesforce” to administer I am reluctant to say that making the Portals work more like Salesforce Chatter will likely make the Chatter Communities easier to set up and configure. This is a good thing for our customers!

    

In summary. There are fundamental changes happening in how people sell, collaborate, and engage with their customers, partners, and the wider community:

• Companies walls have expanded to include a larger community
• Hierarchies are less important. All community members have a voice. Community prevails.

A new product that looks through a wider lens, a lens supporting different permission based views, in a collaborative visually appealing way where all users are operating on the same data and platform is needed. Perficient  looks forward to seeing Chatter Communities taking the value of the current portal products and marrying it with the collaborative power of Chatter. Expect a lot of blogging about Chatter Communities between now and General Availability next Summer.

Enterprise social networks have been a welcomed innovation that gives companies the ability to improve how they engage with their employees, customers, and partners.

When these networks are truly integrated within business applications, where people actually do their work, this is simply more than a new feature. It represents a fundamental shift from a record centric application view focused on forms and efficiency, to a collaborative team centric experience where companies see major productivity gains.

With so many enterprise social networks available – Chatter, Jive, Yammer, Lithium, etc.- which solution is right for you?

• Where do you start?
• What business process?
• What users?

The following are some considerations, which may help you decide the right enterprise social application for your company:

So the application you choose really does depends on many factors. We challenge our customers to take a visionary, longer term approach to how social network applications can transform their business across their employees, partners, customers, and the public at large. Not every product will have every feature, but look at the innovation trajectory and vision of each of the vendors to help you make your choice. We believe the most important decision factor to consider is if social network solution is integrated seamlessly with your business applications, where people actually work. If not, we believe that adoption and success will lag.

It will be no surprise to you that Perficient is excited about Salesforce Chatter. What is especially encouraging is the degree to which Salesforce Chatter is evolving to encompass outside constituents. Chatter Customer Groups was a useful first step for external collaboration, but a much more powerful (future) feature is Chatter Communities, which take Chatter to the next level by allowing people to collaborate in a social way with their customers, partners, and any defined community. We will write more extensively about Chatter Communities over the coming months.

Contact Perficient for a free consultation on how Chatter can help transform your business.

We’ve written a lot about Salesforce Service Cloud and service cloud trends in our blog this year. As we wind down the year and with many more service cloud implementations under our belt, we continue to see an unmistakable trend in how customer issues are resolved. The change is due to the parallel forces of increased customer expectations and technology advances.

Putting the change very simply we see:

It’s not just about cases anymore. It’s about a support experience. 

A support experience that gives customers the ability to solve their issues through a variety of channels and experiences. It may be that they log a case, but it could equally be that they chat, tweet, search, and collaborate to solve their issue or contribute to wider user community issues.

Consider the following comparison of issue resolution from circa 2005 to 2012:

It’s not that the 2005 items are no longer important or used, far from it. It’s that modern support models have grown to provide customers more options.

• More places to answer their question, many times in a self serve way
• More convenient ways to communicate, many times via mobile
• More of a voice to express dissatisfaction but also a voice to be a brand advocate

Many customers don’t want to log a case or wait on the phone. They have demanded more convenient ways and the technology has obliged. Where are you in terms of being able to provide this experience? Let Perficient help.

Where are you in terms of making this transition? Let Perficient help you.