Keep Up With the Big Guys.
One of the things that we at West Coast Consulting Group like about working with fast growing businesses is their almost singular focus on customer service. And fast growing businesses aren’t always this way by choice; they often feel they have to make trade-offs with their limited resources when conducting their daily activity.  And when your resources are limited, the best fast-growing businesses will put their customers first.

This leaves them little time, if any, to focus on improving their business and taking advantage of technologies that have transformed companies with much larger budgets.  Data science.  Predictive analytics. Artificial intelligence. Cloud software and platforms. Mobile apps. The Internet of Things. The list goes on and on.  But who’s got time to figure out what this all means when you’re dealing with inventory management, promotions, customer communications, payroll, financial reporting, and just keeping the lights on?

Here’s a Secret:  Look to the Cloud
The good news is that there is a growing list of cloud systems that can help businesses of any size in any industry.  These platforms are constructed to make it easy for small businesses to acquire, deploy and use them and get value.  They could be cloud accounting and payroll systems, cloud file sharing and storage, cloud malware and security services, and perhaps the biggest cloud of them all, cloud customer relationship management (CRM) systems.  Fast growing businesses that have adopted cloud solutions – and on average a business has adopted at least 5[1] – are to be praised.  They are benefiting from offloading most IT management functions, from cost effective infrastructure that readily scales as their business grows, and from 24×7 availability of their systems used by employees and customers alike, keeping those lights on around the clock.

A Partly Cloudy Forecast?
At West Coast Consulting Group, we work with organizations across the country to transform their businesses into digital businesses.  And here’s a little-known fact:  the majority of our clients started working on their digital processes, including Salesforce cloud deployments, long before reaching out to us.  They were doing the right thing, they took the right step to deploy a particular use case or support a particular line of business. That first taste of what a cloud platform could do for their business left them wanting more.  And that’s where West Coast Consulting Group comes in.

Business cloud platforms like Salesforce are both broad and deep.  And for one subscription price, a business can get access to a lot of capabilities.  In our experience, the companies who come to us are taking advantage of just a fraction of their cloud platform’s capabilities. With Salesforce, for example, they started with, and haven’t gone beyond, doing one thing:

  • Managing their sales pipeline
  • Optimizing their forecasting
  • Centralizing their customer service processes
  • Managing their workforce
  • Tracking customer accounts, orders, bills and payments

Managing a Digital, Distributed Customer and Partner Value Chain
SmithRx is a start-up pharmacy benefits provider and launched with a technology-centric mission. To get a jump-start on all parts of their operations, they began by deploying separate instances of Salesforce Sales Cloud and Salesforce Service Cloud, and after a couple of successful years of growth had reached a point where they struggled to manage the entire customer lifecycle from sales to acquisition to service.  West Coast led a consolidation of their processes into a single, integrated instance of Salesforce and delivered processes that supported the operations not only of their internal staff but provides secure access to sponsors, members, third party administrators and consultants, all compliant with HIPAA rules.

Centralized Customer Service – Out of the Box
YesVideo is in the business of digitizing people’s memories, and it’s a big business.  They handle 10s of thousands of customer calls and inquiries a week, and they were using Salesforce Service Cloud and out-of-the-box functionality to log customer inquiries , but lacked the processes to associate all conversations for a single customer or order together into cases.  West Coast took their customer service processes to the next level, enabled them to rapidly find a customer or an existing inquiry through numerous parameters to build on or link discussions, and integrated Service Cloud with their ERP to provide real-time status updates to the customers when they called.  YesVideo saw immediate gains in call center productivity on the order of 35% when West Coast Consulting completed their Salesforce uplift.

Summary
If you’ve taken the first steps towards becoming a digital business, then you are to be congratulated.  But chances are a lot of the journey is still to come.  If you find yourself struggling to assess the value of what you’ve done already investing in pipeline management, customer service, workforce productivity and more, or you need advice on what to do next, contact us.  West Coast Consulting is committed to helping your business get the most out of its digital transformation journey.  Let’s make a difference in 2020!

Contact West Coast Consulting Group today.  You can email us at info@westcoastconsulting.com or call us at 415-626-3493.

[1] https://hostingtribunal.com/blog/cloud-adoption-statistics/

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