Without a doubt, Salesforce is known as one of the best CRM platforms available for all kinds of business. However, like with any other tool or software, companies may face several challenges when implementing and integrating CRM into their IT environment. In this article, we’ll cover the most common issues and challenges faced in the Salesforce project and how to avoid them.
What are the Challenges of Salesforce CRM?
Salesforce is a multi-purpose platform that offers its users a great variety of products and services to cover key business needs. To take maximum advantage of Salesforce use, it’s important to plan and prepare for CRM implementation properly. Here are some of the most common challenges a business can face when planning to implement Salesforce CRM.
Non-Technical CRM Issues and Challenges
Costs
The price of implementing any software has always been one of the biggest concerns of any business owner. Will this investment pay off quickly? Is it worth using this tool at this particular price? To answer these and other questions make sure to learn more about Salesforce before considering applying it to cover your needs. It is worth addressing all of your concerns to Salesforce consultants to get a full picture.
Choosing your Salesforce Integration Partner
Even though Salesforce has a great number of out-of-the-box solutions, we think they might not be as efficient as the individually customizable ones. Find a perfect Salesforce partner to walk you through all the pros and cons of CRM, as well as to tell you more about the options available for your specific requirements.
Lack of Support From Salesforce
Even though Salesforce has a free support plan, it usually takes up to 2 days for the team to respond. Besides, they don’t always fix the problems, but instead, they only guide you to the possible solutions.
Salesforce does offer free online resource videos, and guides, and has a dedicated user community, but it’s sometimes still not enough to deal with complex technical issues. This is why most companies seek Salesforce integration partners to overcome various CRM issues and challenges. Otherwise, the company has to risk having serious Salesforce problems and issues that could cause big trouble.
While any user can learn to handle Salesforce major issues that are quite common, there are many technical challenges that require a certain level of competence – Salesforce experts or partners that share their experience of fixing various CRM problems. Moreover, the Salesforce integration partners are specialized in customizing the platform according to specific business needs that can take your CRM to the next level.
Technical CRM Issues and Challenges
Implementation Problems
As soon as you’ve found the right partner, it’s time to talk about the implementation of the new software. CRM implementation can be challenging due to the great number of functionalities and tools available within a single platform. Not all of these features are needed for your particular business case and there is no point to pay for something you won’t even utilize. Customization plays one of the biggest roles in this case as it allows you to pick only functionalities that are beneficial to your company.
Salesforce Integration Challenges
Salesforce integration with the company’s existing software and other third-party systems could be challenging. Enable seamless integration between Salesforce and other tools used within your organization to exchange valuable data and get extra functionality. Make sure to come up with a proper integration strategy with your partner to decide whether any of the existing software will be used even after the Salesforce setup is finalized. This particularly concerns paid tools. No need to overpay for a tool whose functionality is fully covered by the new CRM.
Data Mapping
Some of the common Salesforce integration challenges arise during the data mapping. During the Salesforce CRM implementation, there might be a lot of data and field mismatches. In most cases, the field types vary on different applications. For example, the address fields in Salesforce CRM may include separate fields for the street name, city, state, etc., whereas other applications may have different fields for the address. This could lead to various problems while writing code and mapping data.
As part of data and field mapping, you must make sure to map the right field type. Another great practice while mapping the field is to convert the data to the supported field of the targeted application and avoid the mismatching of the data.
Duplicate Records
Duplicate records are another common Salesforce integration challenge that leads to various data-related issues. It’s important that you develop a system that can identify duplicate data entries and reduce the data challenges faced in Salesforce projects.
While importing data, field types, or personal accounts, you can use external unique IDs to prevent duplicate records from importing. An external ID is a custom data field that contains unique record identifiers from systems that are outside of Salesforce CRM. When you use this method to import the data, the import wizard runs the existing records in Salesforce CRM along with the external IDs and identifies the matching values in the import file.
For example, if you want to import data from Oracle Financials System to Salesforce CRM, you can easily avoid data duplication by using the Oracle ID records within the Salesforce CRM, instead of using the Salesforce IDs. Leveraging the external IDs to update the records into Salesforce can help you overcome this particular challenge.
Data Migration and Data Quality Issues
Salesforce is a cloud-based solution which means that all of the data is stored in the cloud. If your company’s information has been previously stored on physical hard drives and servers, the first step would be to migrate all of this data to the cloud. If you are switching to a new CRM, proper migration should also be executed by data migration specialists. Make sure that all of the data is complete, and that there is no duplicate data in the system. In this case, a dedicated team of data experts will help you to prepare data for migration and make sure no information is lost.
Lack of in-House Salesforce Expertise
User adoption issues are one of the biggest Salesforce challenges your entire organization can face. Not every company hires an in-house Salesforce expert to complete the implementation process from the ground up, as well as to teach the others how to use the new CRM. As a result, your team is not utilizing Salesforce properly, making mistakes, and failing to improve its productivity. The goal here is to make Salesforce clear and available to use for each member of your team who is planning to work within the platform. Take care of the Salesforce training for your employees in advance and your team will know exactly what to do with it by the time the new CRM is implemented.
Usability of Reports
This Salesforce problem stems from the previous challenge. If your employees keep using reminders on their phones or store data outside Salesforce, final reports generated by the system won’t be accurate. Salesforce was made to share insightful information with the team, thus allowing using this data to improve your company’s products/services. Salesforce empowers teams with detailed information about how your business is doing and helps find new ways to grow and evolve.
Difficult to Customize
Salesforce is a massive CRM platform that is serving companies of all sizes and types. Therefore, to function correctly and efficiently, the platform should be customized according to the specific business needs and goals. Such customization is another one of many Salesforce integration challenges.
There are a number of tools that are available to customize the Salesforce platform. But just like any other robust platform, it takes time to find and learn about all the possible tools that can help the business and bring those possibilities to life within the application.
To get the most out of the platform, you may need assistance from a Salesforce integration partner who has the perfect understanding of the platform and can offer you dedicated support to customize it according to your requirements.
Need for Ongoing Support
Believe it or not, like any other system Salesforce requires ongoing support to make sure the platform works perfectly under any circumstances and covers your business goal completely. Finding a professional support team might be challenging but is worth the effort. Salesforce administrators will help to keep your platform’s performance on top of its possibilities and optimize its functionality when it is needed.
The More Support You Have the Fewer Challenges You Face
So how to avoid all of the above-mentioned Salesforce issues? The answer is to find a professional Salesforce partner who can help you customize, implement, integrate, and support the new CRM.
If you are experiencing any of the CRM issues and challenges we’ve mentioned, or if you just need a partner who can help with your Salesforce integration, we’ve got you covered. The OMI team can fully support you in all of these processes. We have years of experience helping companies get the most out of their CRM investment and would love to put our expertise to work for you. Get in touch with our team to discuss your project and will help you avoid any Salesforce problems and issues now and in the future.