By: Daniel Muchumarri, Associate Principal Salesforce Architect, LTIMindtree

What is enterprise collaboration?

Employees and partners from different teams collaborate physically in a room or digitally over a video conference or a message channel on various topics or issues related to creation of a new account, closing of an opportunity, approval of a price quote, or resolving a case. These collaborations will help enterprise teams to resolve issues quickly by considering the views of all stakeholders.

Why is there a need for digital enterprise collaboration?

The Covid-19 pandemic has drastically changed how enterprise teams work together as many enterprises have adopted work from home. Some have adopted a hybrid approach where teams work remotely from the office and home, and from different cities. So, bringing all stakeholders together in a single room is expensive and time-consuming.

Digital enterprise collaboration software enables teams to collaborate digitally through video/audio conferences or channel conversations from wherever they are with less cost and short notice.

What are the diverse ways enterprises collaborate digitally?

Historically enterprises used to collaborate using the modes below.

Emails– These are widely used when someone wants to share information with others, notify the team of some activity, or request someone for some information.

Video/ Audio Conferences – Enterprise teams from different departments can collaborate over video or audio conferences to discuss a particular topic, resolve an issue, or decide on something considering everyone’s views.

Chat– This is where most of the teams collaborate one to one or in groups. This helps individuals multitask and respond quickly to important messages. Recently, this went through many innovations. It is integrated with enterprise applications and business data is directly inserted into chat conversations so that teams have the correct information for making the right decisions at the right time.

Document Sharing– Enterprises use this collaboration mode to work on specific requirements like preparing client agreements that require collaboration from different teams to add their specific information. The software that supports this mode of cooperation has

• File sharing capability: enables only intended users to access the file.
• Version control capability: enables users to go back to previous versions to overcome data override issues.

The new enterprise collaboration mode

Hybrid – As the requirements evolved, a new breed of enterprise collaboration software emerged. These new tools combined the functionalities of chat, video/audio conference, and document sharing into a single platform.

Which Enterprise collaboration software is available in the market?

There are many digital enterprise software available in the market. The commonly used are Microsoft Outlook, Teams, and SharePoint. These software products come along with Microsoft Office 365 product suite. Many enterprise users prefer the Windows operating system (Windows OS) for their laptops or desktops. Hence, the tendency towards using Microsoft collaboration software is quite natural and cost-effective as Microsoft offers these products at discounted prices, which works well with Windows OS.

But, some enterprises use other digital enterprise software for collaboration, like Slack, Cisco Webex, Zoom, etc., because they see additional benefits or features that Microsoft may not provide.

Why is there a need to integrate Salesforce with enterprise collaboration software?

Enterprises use Salesforce CRM to manage their marketing, sales, and service systems. Massive data gets generated from these systems, and data flows in and out. Enterprise users use these systems to perform their daily or specific tasks. When performing these tasks, they will collaborate with other users or groups within the enterprise via collaboration software.

If Salesforce CRM and collaboration software work in silos, much manual effort will be needed to share information. Sometimes erroneous information can also be shared across different teams/channels, resulting in wrong decisions. Integrating Salesforce CRM and enterprise collaboration software shows a 44% improvement in data quality.

Integrating Salesforce CRM and enterprise collaboration software results in many advantages –

1. A Salesforce record can be added to channel conversations, making data available for users right in their channel window, so that they have all the information available in one place to collaborate efficiently. This resulted in a 17% improvement in a faster sales cycle, thereby increasing the deal size by 3%.
2. Conversations can be sent back to the Salesforce record so that Salesforce can become the single source of truth for all the activities.
3. Teams invited for specific decision-making on a particular account or opportunity, or quote price list do not need access to Salesforce because all necessary information is available on the channel, saving the Salesforce user license.
4. Account Teams working on a specific account in a channel can receive notifications about new opportunities or important milestones to react to account record changes immediately, thereby improving response times which is particularly important for any sales operations.
5. New case creation or escalation notifications to specific channels help the team react quickly and close essential cases.

Which features can be built by integrating Salesforce with Enterprise collaboration software?

Approval requests

• Approval request notifications can be sent automatically from Salesforce to specific users or groups of users over the message channel; this will result in quick response times when compared to sending emails.

Notifications for specific Salesforce events

• Send notifications to Salesforce admins when there is unauthorized access so that admins can quickly react and respond to prevent data loss.
• Notifications on governor limits can help admins take necessary steps to mitigate process failures.

Sales Operations

• When a new account is created, create a channel or group specific to that account, including all account team members, and notify them by sending further account details, so that the team can quickly collaborate and invite other units, like finance, if necessary, for better business outcomes. This resulted in a 27% improvement in SMEs’ engagement in closing deals. Notify the accounts team upon creation of a new opportunity by sending a message to the account-specific channel so that team can quickly respond to the unique opportunity.
• Associate the channel conversations back to the Salesforce record so that Salesforce can remain a source of truth for all external and internal activities.
• Send notifications on specific opportunity stage milestones so that the opportunity team can react immediately and take up further actions.

Service Operations

• Send notifications to specific users or groups on high-severity cases so they can be addressed immediately within Service Level Agreement (SLA)
• Case assignments notifications to individual case owners or groups will improve initial response time on new cases. This resulted in a 24% improvement in customer experience.
• When a case misses SLA, send messages to reporting managers so that they can quickly react and reassign it to an experienced engineer.
• Critical customer responses can be sent as a notification so that the individual or a group does not need to verify Salesforce record changes, thereby increasing productivity constantly.

Salesforce User Management

• Integration between Salesforce and Enterprise collaboration software will enable organizations to save valuable user licenses where user access is managed by a central access management system. It will eliminate the need for license allocation to all support associates working in the system as they will be able to fulfill requests from enterprise collaboration software.
• Managers will be able to unlock Salesforce user account if it is locked or frozen.

Slack and Salesforce Integration

Slack is an enterprise collaboration tool that brings enterprise data and people together in one place so that people have the correct information to collaborate and make decisions. Ever since its acquisition by Salesforce, it has been very tightly integrated with Salesforce so that teams from different systems can collaborate and have access to Salesforce data seamlessly, so they don’t have to switch between applications and improves productivity as some basic operations can be performed directly from slack without even need for Salesforce UI.

Slack doesn’t come with Salesforce Sales/Service licenses; it is a particular offering, and enterprises will have to pay additionally on top of existing Salesforce investments.

For more information on slack, please refer to this link.

Microsoft Teams and Salesforce Integration

Microsoft Teams is a commonly used enterprise collaboration tool across all enterprises. Integrating Teams with Salesforce will safeguard existing investments, time, and effort. But integration with Salesforce is not out of the box; there are tools already in place that can be leveraged to construct many futuristic use cases.

Though there is a Salesforce connector in Microsoft exists today, a one-time investment for building the integration solution between teams and Salesforce will be necessary; the effort for building solutions for specific use cases using configuration or customization will remain the same for both Teams and Slack integrations or in some use cases may be a little higher using Teams.

Conclusion

Enterprise collaboration software is critical for any enterprise for better collaboration and productivity. Integration with Salesforce CRM will improve its capabilities immensely, contributing to quick response times, decisions, deal closure, quick issue resolutions, increase in revenue, etc.

Choose the enterprise collaboration software for integration with salesforce based on your current investments, the willingness of the existing enterprise users for a change, and compatibility with the overall enterprise system architecture.

References
https://www.salesforceben.com/4-benefits-of-codelessly-integrating-salesforce-with-slack-or-microsoft-teams/