Leveraging Salesforce.com with Business Process Management

In the customer service space, CRM applications are essential in providing the quality of service customers expect.  Without a quality CRM application, customer service representatives are separated from the vital, up-to-date information to provide the best service to the company's customers.  Take for example Salesforce.com, the worldwide leader in on-demand customer relationship management (CRM) services.  Salesforce streamlines customer relationship management and boosts customer satisfaction by providing an easy to use, zero-footprint application for client users.  By using Salesforce, companies can not only manage their customers, prospects, and opportunities, but also streamline their sales and revenues.

But how do you leverage this valuable CRM information inside your company?  Who in your company needs to know when key information in Salesforce changes?  And how does the data in Salesforce relate to the other data you have in your legacy systems?  This is exactly where business process management comes to the rescue, as true customer satisfaction cannot mature without end-to-end process improvement.

Consider the example where a company acquires a key new customer.  Of course this information will be recorded in Salesforce, but there are many other systems that require updating as well once the customer has been "won" in Salesforce (and there is a specific order in which these updates must be done).  By leveraging a BPMS, once the new customer is recorded into Salesforce, the following additional activities should occur in an organized automated way:

• Sending alerts to key people in the company (sales manager, finance, manufacturing, distribution) informing them of the new customer
• Creating a record of the customer and key financial data in the company's Accounting systems
• Informing the right people in the company to send a "Welcome Packet"
• Finally, updating Salesforce itself that all of these actions have happened (to ensure the most up-to-date information regarding the customer activity is recorded)

As you can see, by using a BPMS like Ultimus Adaptive BPM Suite, not only are the lines between CRM and BPM blurred (thus virtually creating a single cohesive solution), but also the company is able to provide a high level of service to their new customers by quickly and efficiently on-boarding the new customer.