Salesforce for Manufacturers — Empowering the Engine of Growth
One of the key technology-aided solutions adopted by most manufacturing organizations is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. A robust CRM system helps manufacturing businesses to deliver excellent services to their customers and build strong relationships with the latter.
Salesforce is one of the most widely used CRM systems in the manufacturing sector. Today, we will examine how Salesforce enables manufacturers enhance their productivity and pave the way to their success.
Hassle-free Coordination with Channel Partners
A major problem encountered by several large manufacturing firms is managing the activities of their channel partners with high efficacy. Many a time, it becomes difficult to communicate with dealers in a timely fashion, and this could result in missed sales opportunities due to delays in making the right decisions.
You can overcome this problem with a high degree of efficacy using Salesforce’s Partner Relationship Management (PRM) solution. The PRM solution allows you to develop a highly customized portal to meet the specific communication needs of your dealers and other channel partners. You can utilize the portal to share learning materials and provide access to other sources of useful information.
You can also use the portal to obtain real-time data pertaining to the sales made by your channel partners. The portal can be seamlessly connected with Points-of-sale (PoS) terminals, facilitating hassle-free transfer of the data.
Smooth Delivery of Top-notch Field Service
Many organizations in the manufacturing sector encounter challenges in delivering good field service, resulting in low levels of client satisfaction. Often it becomes hard for managers of service teams to allocate a task to the right representative who has the required knowledge and skills to provide a resolution to the customer’s issue, without delay.
This problem can be overcome very effectively using the Salesforce product Field Service Lightning (FSL). FSL allows you to automatically assign a task to the right technician; the novel tool allows you to list the criteria to automate the assignment of customer tickets to suitably qualified personnel and enable them to collect all required spares and equipment to resolve issues faced by customers.
Another major advantage of using FSL is that it helps you provide service technicians a comprehensive view of problems faced by customers. FSL is highly mobile-friendly, and your service personnel can access the complete information about a customer ticket anytime, anywhere. This allows them to get a good understanding of the problem faced by the customer, enabling them to provide an appropriate solution.
You can also use FSL to ensure field service of high quality by your dealers and distributors. You can use the innovative application to monitor the status of a customer ticket and track the progress made in resolving the problem. Furthermore, FSL helps you track the quality of services delivered by your channel partners. This is possible because FSL comes with an intuitive in-built app that enables service managers obtain real-time information about each customer issue and collect feedback from the customer.
Data-driven Business Insights
A business executive rightly remarked data is the fuel that propels the growth engine of the new-age company. Effective use of data goes a long way in getting invaluable insights that help make the right decisions. Unfortunately, many manufacturers (and firms in other industries, for that matter) face issues in utilizing their business data with high levels of efficacy.
Salesforce can help manufacturing organizations fully leverage their data to achieve business success. Einstein Analytics (EA), a robust AI-powered data analytics product from Salesforce, can be used by executives of manufacturing companies to come up with super-accurate estimates of demand for their products — the Salesforce solution allows you to make sense of massive quantities of marketing and purchase data to identify key trends that help you develop highly precise demand projections. This enables you to formulate proper production plans, thereby facilitating optimal use of your resources.
You can also use Salesforce EA to score your leads very effectively. The data analytics powerhouse enables you to leverage predictive lead scoring, a novel AI-enabled sales paradigm that utilizes marketing data to rank prospective customers based on their likelihood of making a purchase. Predictive scoring removes intuition and guesswork in the evaluation of leads, enabling you to zero-in on people who are most likely to purchase, with very high levels of precision.
Furthermore, Salesforce EA allows you to build business and risk data models, very easily, with little coding. Unlike most other data analytics applications, EA comes with a host of intuitive features that allow you to develop data models of any complexity with just a few clicks.
Delightful Omnichannel Buying Experiences
The customer of the 21st century is extremely demanding. He intends to have hassle-free interactions with organizations he deals with and doesn’t hesitate to switch organizations if they don’t deliver delightful experiences. Therefore, businesses must make sure they provide excellent experiences to their customers.
Salesforce enables you to deliver top-notch experiences to their clients. The powerful CRM platform allows you to deliver the information sought by clients through their preferred channels. Salesforce empowers you to always remain in touch with your customers and help them get all information they require about your organization and product offerings.
You can use Salesforce to help customers find the information they require by themselves; a survey by Forrester showed more than 84% of consumers in the USA used an automated self-service. You can use the enterprise IT platform to provide first-rate self-service. It allows your manufacturing business to develop a portal and a mobile app that can be easily used by your clients to find the needed information.
Salesforce also allows you to develop customer communities to provide the information required by your clients; these online communities enable prospective buyers to pose their queries about your products and get answers from your customers who have already used the products. You can moderate and approve the answers, thereby helping your customers find the right information. You can also use Salesforce to collate the content produced by users of a customer community to create a knowledge repository.
As you can see, Salesforce empowers manufacturing organizations to delight their customers and forge strong relationships with them, thereby paving the way for rapid growth. You must tie-up with a reputed Salesforce partner to harness the immense potential of the CRM platform. Make sure the organization understands your unique needs thoroughly and has an impeccable track record of helping manufacturing firms utilize Salesforce effectively, before you ink a deal.
Hope you liked this post. How do you plan to use Salesforce? We’d love to know.
