Salesforce for manufacturing industry
A lot of manufacturing companies treat Salesforce as no more than a tool for sales – but what if we tell you that it can boost your business, increase productivity and enhance your customer relations? In this article we’ll highlight the processes in manufacturing business that can be improved with Salesforce.
The nature of the manufacturing industry requires complex and credible Salesforce functionality. And nothing proves solution’s credibility better than successful implementation and its further usability. Therefore, we’ve picked some of our most efficient Salesforce solutions for manufacturers and ready to share them with you!
To understand where to start, it’s vital to understand your needs. Think about the standard business case we receive from our clients:
- employees distributed at the geographically scattered areas;
- multiple channels of customer service;
- abundance of paperwork and Google-docs;
- solutions expected to be delivered fast;
- need for mobility.
Here comes the “industrial revolution” with Salesforce – highly usable, all-in-one CRM solution with an endless set of capabilities. One data model for each set of users – all pre-built into the one platform. However, experience shows that after Salesforce system is implemented into your organization, things got stuck, and “revolution” fails. To avoid this, the first rule for you to remember: always hire a competent Salesforce development team, with an expert consultant to analyse your business needs and deliver the solution perfectly tailored for you.
But let’s take a closer look at the solutions for each requirement:
Geographical distribution
When it comes to field services, mobile solutions are indispensable. Try Salesforce Field Service Lightning which allows you to connect service dispatcher, field technician and customer. And as always, customer delight is paramount – provide right technician with maximum relevant skills, estimate accurate time and even collect customer signature using mobile app!
Multi-channeled customer and partner relations
You can get a thousand of product items on sale but unless you give your customer the chance to choose, to discuss, to estimate, to influence, to buy whenever they want it and to be properly supported during this process and afterwards – you got no profit from them.
To streamline communication with customers and partners, we can suggest you exploiting three anchors of Salesforce platform: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Community Cloud and Marketing Cloud. Check out the following solutions from these clouds that are perfectly tailored for multi-channel relations:
- Salesforce Communities for spreading Ideas across the company (Community Cloud);
- Salesforce Chatter for messaging within the company, with customers and partners;
- Live Agent for customer support and real-time online help;
- Territory Management from Sales Cloud for organizing your customers and sales reps across the map so they can efficiently collaborate;
- Advertising Studio to ensure your brand is properly marketed and delivered to a customer.
Paper abundance
Multiple Salesforce integrations do amazing things to relieve you from miles of red tape – integrate your ecosystem with Conga Composer to generate Word, PowerPoint, Excel, HTML email & PDF directly from your Salesforce organization, integrate it with Wave Analytics to keep your reports up to date or make integration with Docusign to save the time on downloading/uploading, or even scanning documents.
Going mobile
Though the solution to bring mobile experiences to your company is evident and represented by Salesforce1 app, your customers can suffer from lack of connection. To give them insight into the processes related to their order, offer them Service Cloud Snap-ins.
Looking across the use of Salesforce based solutions and technology in a manufacturing setting, there is a lot more than we can place in one article. Check out how other companies are already using Salesforce and contact us for professional consultation.
