Perficient, a leading digital transformation consulting firm serving Global 2000® and other large enterprise customers throughout North America, recently announced it has been designated a Salesforce Platinum Consulting Partner. 

In a large and diverse partner ecosystem, Salesforce consulting partners are rated based on the total value contribution to Salesforce’s business, their cloud specializations and certifications, and, most importantly, customer success. As a result, Salesforce has seen an increased need for partners, like Perficient, that take a holistic approach to CRM and customer experience strategies, and place a greater emphasis on the need for speed and business innovation in the Age of the Customer.

Testament to Perficient’s tenure and client track record as a Salesforce partner, the company has the highest customer satisfaction score – 9.94 on a scale of 10 – among all 49 Platinum partners. Additionally, Perficient has delivered more than 3,000 successful Salesforce engagements, and earned numerous honors and awards including a Fullforce Service Cloud Master designation and the 2016 Partner Innovation Award in Healthcare and Life Sciences at Dreamforce 2016.

“The elevation to the prestigious Platinum Consulting Partner status marks another milestone for Perficient and demonstrates our commitment to Salesforce,” said Tom Munley, Perficient vice president of field operations and leader of the company’s Salesforce business unit. “Our focus has been on using the power of the platform to help the world’s most innovative brands enhance their customer experience and run their business in the cloud. Clients turn to Perficient for our broad portfolio of services, wide range of skills, and our in-depth functional and technical expertise with Salesforce.”

Perficient partners with customers like NextGen Healthcare, Cox Automotive, and Activision to transform customer, partner, and employee experiences using Service Cloud Lightning and Community Cloud Lightning that have resulted in, on average, a 30% increase in customer satisfaction. To learn more about our Salesforce practice visit our website.

Perficient, a Salesforce Gold Partner and leading digital transformation consulting firm serving Global 2000 enterprises, is excited to announce it has received the 2016 Salesforce Partner Innovation Award in Healthcare and Life Sciences for its work with NextGen Healthcare.

The Salesforce Partner Innovation Awards are given annually during Dreamforce to honor Salesforce’s consulting partner community and to recognize the contributions they make in helping clients innovate and connect with customers in a whole new way. 

Helping Healthcare Organizations Become Service Trailblazers

NextGen Healthcare provides electronic health record, financial, and health information exchange solutions for hospitals, health systems, physician practices, and other healthcare organizations. Perficient partnered with NextGen to simplify and streamline support processes, enhance the agent experience, and bring transparency and self-service capabilities to their customers using Salesforce.

The multi-cloud Salesforce solution included implementing Service Cloud and customizing the Service Console to streamline case management processes for more than 250 support agents, migrating their legacy knowledge base over to Salesforce Knowledge, applying Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) principles, and rolling out a self-service Success Community using the Community Cloud platform. Since going live, the NextGen service organization has experienced the following business outcomes:

• improved case deflection by 10% with Community Cloud
• reduced the average number of days to resolve a case by 50%
• cases resolved in less than 24 hours increased from 40% to 52%
• improved customer satisfaction scores by 31%

Having delivered more than 3,000 successful Salesforce engagements, we take great pride in the quality of work we deliver to customers like NextGen Healthcare. This recognition from Salesforce directly reflects the commitment we put forth to help customers succeed with our solutions and services. As the cloud platform continues to grow and expand, we are excited about the opportunity at-hand to help our clients become Customer Trailblazers in the industry by continuing to deliver innovative solutions built on Salesforce. Read the full NextGen Healthcare success story.

A few members of the NextGen project team celebrate the Partner Innovation Award during our team kickoff on Monday night

Where to Find Perficient at Dreamforce

Is your healthcare organization interested in exploring new ways to enhance patient engagement or member self-service by implementing an online community? Would your service organization benefit from boosting agent productivity or transforming the healthcare customer support experience? Not sure if Health Cloud is right for your business? Perficient is the go-to Salesforce partner helping the world’s most innovative brands to seamlessly blend Service Cloud, Community Cloud and Salesforce Knowledge solutions together to deliver a self-service experience that will make your customers love you.

As a Fullforce Service Cloud Master and Community Cloud Ambassador with more than 350 implementations under our belt, we look forward to helping you explore how to become a Customer Trailbazer at Dreamforce by engaging with us in any of the following ways:

• Visit us in the Cloud Expo at booth #1835
• Look for our customers speaking at Dreamforce
• Attend one of four breakout sessions led by our Salesforce experts
• Schedule a private meeting with our team

Come Find Us at Dreamforce!

Back by popular demand, Perficient will be partnering with Salesforce to host the 2nd annual IPO Readiness Roundtables Luncheon at Dreamforce 2015. 

Preparing for an IPO is no easy feat. That process typically runs parallel with the routine demands of building and managing a high-growth business. This exclusive event is designed for IT and operations folks at organizations looking to realize the “IPO dream”.

Roundtable discussions will focus on things like:

• Roles and responsibilities leading up to IPO
• Evaluating your business infrastructure to ensure IPO readiness
• Modernizing CRM and evolving business processes
• Creating the elusive “360-degree view” of the customer
• Lessons learned from blockbuster IPOs

…and more!

Our Salesforce customers that have traveled down the road to IPO have undoubtedly learned some valuable lessons and have reached out to us along the way to help solve many of these business and technology issues. We’re grateful that several of our great customers have volunteered their time and are so willing to share their IPO journeys and best practices to integrate, automate and operationalize their business to experience growth after IPO.

Learn more about the event and Perficient’s presence at Dreamforce 2015.

Meet the Moderators

We’ll be joined by a panel of speakers representing companies that have recently gone public, and will share their IPO journeys and perspectives on aligning people, process, data and technology.

Peter Bardwick, CFO
Nitro, Inc.

Christopher Nelson, Senior Director of IT Business Applications
Splunk

Now as a Bay Area transplant I walk down the street and hear words and acronyms like “IPO, cloud, freemium, crowdsourcing, democratization of software,” etc.  Are folks talking about the weather, politics, maybe sports?  No.  We live, eat, breathe and dream technology innovation in the west, with an IPO being one common measure of success. How should companies think about their technology solutions to support their IPO?

As a salesforce.com platinum implementation partner and national consulting firm it is no surprise that we work with a lot of fast growing companies in the West that have realized the IPO dream.  We have seen a number of our customers grow quickly from a few hundred employees and then suddenly hockey stick and begin moving to 500 and 1000 employees with revenue going from 50M to 100M to 200M in an 18-24 month period.

What is interesting though is as you look inside the sales, service and marketing operations of these companies they look much like the 50 person startup of two years ago, but are now 10 times that size.  Hallmark signs of this include:

1.  A lack of systems integration:

A classic example is where marketing automation solutions (Marketo, Eloqua, ExactTarget, etc.), the CRM solution (Salesforce), and the ERP solution (SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, etc) are not integrated in a material, automated, and auditable manner.

2. No evolution of CRM processes:

The sales team is using Salesforce as their CRM but they have not evolved their configuration to handle the new complexities of their expanded product lines, service/support offerings, geographies, customer segments and departments.

3. Disconnected quoting process:

Quoting and e-commerce solutions are often both standalone, highly customized and/or proprietary and are manually intensive to a point where they begin to acutely hamper deal velocity. Highly customized Excel worksheets are common.

4. No 365 degree customer view:

Customer service solutions such as Zendesk, RightNow, Parature and others are siloed and not connected to the CRM solution nor the customer master preventing sales and service to work together to serve that precious set of customers in a cohesive manner.

As our customers have traveled down the 2-3 year road leading up to IPO they have engaged us to help them solve the types of issues and challenges above.  It does not happen overnight, it is not magic, but it is brutally important work.  You can’t scale through people, Excel and work arounds.

Those that realize and embrace that fact get help and win.  Those that don’t end up as a flash in the pan.  So, if you actually want to ever realize gain on that IPO stock you have to integrate, automate and operationalize your business so the public sees your consistent growth after you IPO and not a headline restating earnings.

By the way, the Red Sox won the World Series last year and Perficient has been a profitable public management consulting firm for the last 17 years.

What kind of help do you need?

A services business is highly dynamic.  New projects can land all at once, existing projects get put on hold, and projects often require additional resources to hit a deadline.  Without strong visibility to the pipeline of new projects, work in progress and open resource capacity, many services organizations find themselves operating between resourcing fire drill and hiring freeze knee jerks.

The unfortunate impacts of this are lower revenue, increased expense, and less profit.  We believe with a few basic principles in place there is a better way.

Just 5 years ago, I would have killed to have access to the metrics we’ve built today.  At the click of button I can easily see:

• What new projects are coming and when
• What type of resource and skill mix is required for these new projects
• Billings and utilization across the entire team across whatever time period I desire
• Which accounts and projects are key drivers of our bookings and revenue
• What resources have capacity opening up when
• The total backlog of project work in flight

The world was not always like this. I have worked in many companies where it would have taken a small village to get even a few of the items above working on a real time basis. There are a few core steps that have enabled us to apply such great leverage to our business:

1. Establishing a solid Professional Services Automation (PSA) solution and using it for everything it’s good at – project tracking, resource tracking, time tracking, invoicing, etc
2. Maximizing the strengths of Salesforce in opportunity management and forecasting, workflow, reporting, dashboards, etc.
3. Integrating PSA summary data back into Salesforce so it is highly accessible and can influence front office execution

Sound really simple and straightforward? It generally is, however, few companies invest the time in process definition, system integration and forethought around summarizing actionable data to the right audience.

Time is what a service organization sells and arguably is our most valuable asset.  We recommend investing a small amount of it to put the right information front and center and it will pay you back tenfold.

We work with a number of clients who’ve come to us after initially rolling out Salesforce on their own.  At first, things were fine, but growth, change, new process, new people, and multiple administrators over time have started putting pressure on their initial configuration.  Perhaps you’ve faced this exact dilemma.

They come to us with a variety of challenges in areas such as reporting, data quality, lack of visibility (sales pipeline, case management), user adoption, quoting consistency, pricing approvals—the list goes on.  Some common things we hear are:  

• “I have taken over as the head of sales operations.  There are hundreds of reports in the system, but not one that I actually need to run the business.”
• “We have tons of leads in the system that are old and have not been touched in months”
• “The data in our system is an absolute mess.  Can you help clean it up?”
• “Our direct and channel sales people don’t have adequate visibility, and end up competing against each other to win business”
• “There are 50 fields or more on the opportunity, account, and contact pages, but we’re only using about 10 consistently.”
• “We are not able to get a clean pipeline and understand the revenue forecast along the lifecycle of a deal.”
• “There are no controls in place.  We have deals that are sold with the incorrect combination of products and incorrect pricing that end up getting caught very late in the game by our finance team.”

These are symptoms.  The real “disease” behind them often is that the client did not actually use a structured implementation with a trained Salesforce implementation partner – the dreaded “self-implementationitis” disease.

To avoid self-implementationitis we suggest focusing on 5 key areas.

1. Identify your key operational metrics
2. Define the business process
3. Make sure your data model is sound
4. Streamline the UI – less is more
5. Validate permissions and visibility

The reason that these 5 items are so critical is that you must understand what key performance indicators you need or want to run your business.  Without those, you have no idea what process (#2) you need to execute and the data (#3) that you have to capture to support it.  We have seen clients execute processes and data modeling only to arrive at the end and determine that the key report or dashboard they need is not possible.  Very unsatisfying.

Assuming you get the first three right, a CRM system is not just an application, but rather a living, breathing tool that requires care and feeding.  Users touch it, data gets dropped into it, reports are extracted from it, and so on.

Given the above, it is key to actually think through all the user interaction and make sure the UI through which your data, process, and reporting are executed is simple, easy, and intuitive.  It should fit your business.  Don’t forget your end customer (sales, services, support teams, etc.) when delivering a great CRM application.  It has to make their job better.

Lastly, visibility and permission are so critical, you must ensure they’re not forgotten, either.  Like sterilization in a hospital, it is often just assumed.  But it’s really important to ensure it is properly done.

There is no cure-all for every business problem in the marketplace, but if you want to make sure you have a successful Salesforce implementation make sure to use a partner, and one that has a track record of success addressing your specific needs.

There is often great debate on which implementation methodology – Waterfall or Agile – is the best approach to use when tackling a professional services engagement. The answer is…BOTH!

With the rise of SaaS and Cloud Computing there has also been a rise in the desire to use an Agile methodology: get basic requirements, prototype, get feedback, refine, and continue to iterate the process. This approach has great merit and can be very helpful in enabling folks to visualize their requirements. However, the downside is that you risk ending up with an organically-grown solution that burns up a lot of budget, misses the mark and is a product of a “mouth-to-ears-to-keyboard-to-screen” process with little documentation and understanding of how you arrived where you did.

On the other side, you have a more rigid Waterfall approach. The Waterfall approach can be extremely valuable in making sure there is clarity on requirements, appropriate documentation, and planned steps that in turn ensure the solution is configured, tested, and deployed on-time and within budget. The downside risk here, however, is that you deliver a solution on-time and on-budget that users have a lukewarm reaction to. The operation may be successful, but unfortunately the patient still dies.

So what is the answer? Using the best aspects of each approach in the right places in the implementation process. We have seen a Waterfall approach around requirements definition, design review, testing, training, and rollout be very effective when coupled with Agile-like iterative reviews during solution configuration and development. This has provided the greatest success.

Structured but nimble is the best approach, in our opinion. And it’s our way of providing innovative solutions that delight users and are delivered on-time and within budget.