Extend your Customer 360 Across the Opportunity to Renewal Experience

Greg: Hello and welcome.

Today, we’re going to share with you how organizations are using Certinia to extend the Customer 360 that Salesforce provides across the entire opportunity to renewal process.

Whether you’re a product company, a services company, or – in many cases – both, in today’s digital economy, to be successful you must deliver outstanding customer experiences. The best way to ensure each experience is memorable is by putting your customer at the center of everything you do. Your customer’s experience is really the sum of all the interactions that they have with your company. The reality is that experience is everyone’s responsibility. It must be a holistic and continuous process.

We have here an example of a customer journey. Yours may look similar to this. Each stage of this journey really represents either an opportunity or a threat to your business. You’ll note that this journey is not linear. When done right, it’s an ongoing relationship.

Each stage of this journey has its own unique challenges. Your sales team needs to execute seamless handoffs. Whether it’s managing physical goods or staffing projects, your operations team is trying to balance capacity and optimize assignments. As projects begin, you need to build accurate estimates and forecasts while closely managing project financials and customer expectations. Throughout this entire journey, the finance department is trying to accurately and efficiently maintain the books while keeping a lid on costs and keeping the business humming. Your customer success team probably has one of the most challenging jobs of them all. Their goal is to identify the moments that matter in each customer relationship and then drive action off of them that produces results.

If cracks form in any stage of this journey, the experience suffers and losses occur. These issues could be in the form of revenue leakage from inaccurate quotes, missed billings, or poorly communicated work. Customer stagnation or churn from missed opportunities and a reactive approach to account management, or employee attrition driven by inefficient processes and cumbersome tools.

Many organizations make it in this environment, but the reality is it prevents your organization from achieving its full potential. By putting your customers at the center of your business and extending your Customer 360 across their entire journey, you’re able to deliver truly outstanding experiences.

Here at Certinia, we help organizations do just that through a complete customer-centric application platform. You probably already have Salesforce to manage your sales, marketing, and customer support activities, among others. Certinia picks up the customer account record once an opportunity has been closed won, and then manages that process going forward. From services estimating to service delivery to customer success orchestration, inventory management, billing, revenue management, and financials, we help organizations have a single system that brings everyone together; a unique and tailored customer experience for each one of their customers; a complete understanding of the financial impact of the work you perform and a complete understanding of how to drive lasting customer satisfaction.

Companies that use Salesforce and Certinia together are able to manage the entire opportunity to renewal process with the customer at the core. If you add it all together, the result is, Certinia allows you to see your customer in full color.

Now, I’m going to pass it over to my colleague Amy to show us exactly what that might look like for your business. Take it away, Amy.

Amy: Thank you, Greg. Today, I’m going to be walking you through why combining Salesforce with Certinia creates customer-centricity. Together, we deliver a single view across the entire customer experience, focusing on the opportunity to renewal process.

More than ever, companies need a way to combine their sales, services, and finance teams because when we work together and stay connected, we deliver exceptional customer service.

The customer is what it’s all about these days. So, customer-centricity will be the theme for a demonstration.

Let’s start off on the CFO dashboard. Executives love this view because this data is coming from Tableau CRM. We take the power of Einstein and now apply it to financial metrics. We can see items like revenue, expenses, track DSO, and manage cash balances. We utilize predictive capabilities, which drives efficiency. It can even help reduce revenue leakage. From this page, we’re looking at all the financial key metrics, sales information coming from Salesforce, as well as our project for delivery information, all on a single pane of glass.

Now, we’re going to navigate to our engagement record. When we talked about customer centricity, this is it. This is your Customer 360, your Business 360, and this needs to be adopted by every organization. From this view, we can see how profitable a customer is, all the costs incurred, what services and products have been sold. We can also track any active project, active contracts, the invoices that have been generated and sent.

So, from this view, we’re truly breaking down the barriers within organizations and allowing the sales, services, and finances team to all work together, collaborate, view the same data, and put the customer first.

Now, let’s talk about the sales-to-service handoff. We can accelerate deals by bringing in delivery teams sooner. We can generate statements of work, forecast resourcing demand and create projects all from an opportunity record. By combining our sales data with our delivery data, we can create a dashboard that tells us the capacity of our resources and whether they’re going to be over or underutilized. We achieve this by overlaying resourcing needs with opportunity forecasts.

So, for example, we can say what if all the opportunities in the pipeline have a 75% chance of closing, actually closed. What does this look like from a resourcing perspective? We can see that we have a little problem here, which means we either need to hire some more employees or cross-train.

Now, onto resource optimization. We have a planner that provides insight into the pipeline, the available resources, to forecast their future needs. This planner is highly interactive and ensures that you find the right person for the right project at the right time. This also helps you keep your resources happy, as you have visibility into their workload and ensure that their workload is manageable and they’re not over or underutilized.

Project management. Utilizing our project management workspace, we improve project execution by giving project managers visibility into items like actual versus planned costs and overall project profitability. Embedded analytics allow us to track project burnup, manage risk and issues, and create project status reports all on the fly that can be shared both internally and externally using Salesforce Digital Experience.

Now, let’s talk about project delivery. We provide a one-stop shop for consultants through the use of our services delivery workspace. This allows consultants to effectively manage their skills and certifications, project tasks, they can enter time cards and submit expense reports, all as they’re working on executing their projects.

Important to note: this can also all be done from a mobile device. So, as consultants start to get back on the road, we make it very easy for them to accomplish these mundane tasks.

We also continue to help companies with services revenue forecasting. From this view, companies can begin to understand realized and unrealized revenue across the organization. Our live forecast details enable users to make data-driven decisions using real-time analytics that show both best, expected, and worst-case scenarios.

Now, moving on to the ERP side of the house. Accounting teams gain efficiency with Certinia by having the ability to automate the invoicing and collections process. This is typically a very manual process for companies. So, automating this, means that they can spend their time doing more value-added activities.

This automation not only helps companies reduce their DSO, but this also increases their cash flow as they are now able to collect cash faster from their customers. As part of the month-end close process, companies are often bogged down managing various tasks and deadlines. We can utilize our period-end workspace to help companies with this tedious, time-consuming process.

From this screen, accountants can process journal entries, close off periods, and even generate financial statements. Certinia also supports multiple currencies, multi-entity organizations. So, as companies continue to grow and scale, we can grow with them.

So, this now concludes today’s demonstration. I hope you now see the value and power of bringing sales, services, and finance teams onto a single platform. By leveraging Salesforce with Certinia, teams are now working together, staying connected, allowing businesses to become more customer-centric.

Thank you very much for your time today. Greg, I’ll pass it back over to you.

Greg: Wow, thanks, Amy. As you can see, Certinia allows organizations to be truly customer-centric and extend their Customer 360 across the entire customer journey. But don’t take our word for it. Here are just a few things that our customers have to say about how Certinia allows them to see their customers in full color.