Talking of adaptable and robust management platforms, Salesforce is often the first name that comes to mind. Whether it is about managing customer relationships, getting in-depth analysis, managing the sales workforce, promoting digital commerce, or delivering exceptional customer service, Salesforce has a solution for everything.
But when an enterprise first transitions into Salesforce, even the most seasoned professionals need help to get their grip on its new features and upgrades. In short, using Salesforce CRM optimally can be very intimidating without proper execution and support from an experienced Salesforce partner.
So, if you wish to make the most out of your Salesforce instances and get incremental ROI, you must get the help of Salesforce-managed service providers.
What are Managed Services?
Managed services mean outsourcing different processes and functionalities of an organization for administration to specialists, resulting in reduced expenses and optimized operations. Unlike the break/fix repair model, it leverages a proactive approach over a reactive approach. Here, businesses call managed service providers after finding failures in their operations.
The outsourcing company can fix the problem in a few minutes, but it might take time to fix the fault in question and doesn’t prevent future errors or inconveniences. In essence, the managed services model aims to repair what is already broken.
A failure in a system implies time wastage and hinders productivity, leading to a possible loss of income. The break/fix model, thus, becomes obsolete, inefficient, and expensive—creating a need for managed services. This model focuses on the prevention of potential mishaps to safeguard the management system and revenue channels of business.
What is Salesforce Managed Services?
Salesforce releases updates frequently to better cater to the needs of its users. However, not every business has the depth of expertise or the right capabilities to frequently evaluate, improvise, and upgrade their CRM solutions with new releases. This creates a need for Salesforce-managed services.
Under managed services for Salesforce, businesses rely on seasoned professionals’ skills, experience, and expertise to implement, customize, optimize, manage, and expand their Salesforce capabilities. This approach lets the in-house IT team focus on other important business tasks while the extended team takes care of the Salesforce instances, making it a cost-friendly and flexible alternative. In short, it is a proactive method to help enterprises manage and operate their Salesforce CRM smoothly.
There are three approaches in Salesforce managed services as listed below:
- Proactive Approach: The proactive approach keeps a check on the costs of support activities and makes the service offering more reliable. Based on the application data to identify the areas of concern, these can be condition-based, time-based, or even predictive.
- Reactive Approach: As the name suggests, one reacts to the damage/problem after it has happened. As a result, recurrent downtimes are detrimental to end-user trust as it impacts the application’s success and results in revenue losses.
- Predictive Maintenance: This approach performs an analysis of the data collected from different components of the key application workflows. The results help identify which parts might fail so that maintenance teams can fix those issues before they happen. Organizations can optimize their functional strategies by performing maintenance only when necessary.
Salesforce Managed Services Include
- Tailor-made consulting as well as an audit for enterprises to assess the Salesforce instance’s current status along with identifying areas of improvement
- Creating the best road map, an actionable strategy and leveraging the right approach to implement the right Salesforce solutions according to the business needs
- Customizing your Salesforce clouds solutions with enterprise-level capabilities and integrating them with third-party apps to enhance business productivity
- Making room for greater collaboration and yielding incremental ROI by optimizing workflows and incorporating the latest updates and developments in the Salesforce releases
- Providing uninterrupted support and regular training to in-house teams to make the daily business administration task easier
- Creating the right information architecture and defining clear metrics to evaluate business performance across various departments
Perks of Salesforce Managed Services
The major aim of investing in a managed services model is to ensure optimal usage of the Salesforce licenses as well as build a profitable business by implementing relevant use cases into your existing workflows. Other than this, Salesforce MSPs offer a slew of unavoidable benefits as listed here:
- Fill Skill/ Resource/ Functional Gaps
One of the tangible benefits of engaging in managed services is that businesses can get instant access to diversely skilled experts including experienced consultants, implementation partners, remote developers, programmers, and administrators under a roof. Hence, they can easily fill their skill, resource, and organizational voids and get the desired results without spending thousands of dollars or facing hiring hassles.
- Access to Regular Updates
Salesforce comes up with updates often in a bid to enhance its user’s experience. Hence, it becomes challenging for many companies to stay up with the trends and keep up with these updates due to various reasons. On the contrary, Salesforce-managed service providers stay on top of the latest upgrades as a critical part of their roles and responsibilities. They also help you stay clear of security issues by installing the latest updates in your system.
- Opportunities to Upscale Business
Business operations must be expanded with the right technology at the helm paired with a clear vision. A Salesforce-managed services provider saves from you the trouble of hiring and training resources to scale up your operations. Rather, it offers instant access to seasoned specialists to reduce business disruption and ensure a glitch-free transition into the next phase of your business.
- Reduce Operational Expenditure
As you know already, the cost of hiring an in-house team for Salesforce solutions implementation is huge. Especially for enterprises with tight budgets, it can linger on as a financial burden rather than an investment and erode future profits. With managed services for Salesforce at the helm, you can easily overcome this curve to focus on the final objectives without any added financial burden.
Going Forward
In a nutshell, managed services for Salesforce are like the Swiss military knife—these are a reliable, flexible, and economical method of managing and maintaining Salesforce instances. And, to make the most of your Salesforce investments, let that extended team take care of your implementation, development, customization, integrations, and administration while the internal team gets a firm grip on using the platform seamlessly.
