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4 ways companies can use process intelligence, AI, ML, and digital twins to get more out of Salesforce

 Almost every enterprise organization uses Salesforce. In fact, many have done so for decades, making the platform an integral part of their business, helping the sales, marketing, and service teams carry out, track, and plan day-to-day activities.

 But no matter how much your business relies on Salesforce, chances are there are ways your company can better use the platform to solve new challenges and deliver more value. The problem is that the Salesforce platform is often fed by incomplete or inaccurate data gathered by outdated human processes or legacy systems, making it challenging to execute advanced use cases and scale initiatives. 

Further, complexity across the organization, particularly regarding the tech stack, makes it challenging for companies to handle their data using manual processes and systems. With thousands of transactions within Salesforce applications and dozens of legacy solutions deployed across multiple geographies and teams, identifying where and how to change can sometimes feel like an exercise in guesswork. But it shouldn’t be – and it doesn’t need to be either.

 Enter Navigate – the process intelligence platform from Globant that leverages AI and ML to create a digital twin of your organization to pinpoint bottlenecks, identify automation opportunities, apply benchmarks, and improve visibility. By leveraging real data from across the business, Navigate enables companies to review processes, transactions, and surface recommendations not based on hunches and anecdotal evidence but on accurate insights. Ultimately, this helps companies use Salesforce to its highest potential by ensuring that the platform is tapping the power of clean, timely, and complete data and that surrounding processes ensure that data is adequately maintained, governed, and updated. 

 In this post, we review four real-world use cases for how Navigate can help companies reduce the uncertainty and guesswork from their operations and evolve their Salesforce instance using data, AI, ML, and digital twins. 

Stops and starts: 4 ways Navigate drives value in Salesforce

 Stop: Being surprised by bottlenecks and delays.

Start: Proactively identifying and addressing points of friction within the customer journey.

 Every organization knows the pain of bottlenecks. Unfortunately, they can be as varied as they are frequent, wreaking havoc during the picking process, last-mile fulfillment, or virtually any point in between.

 Consider, for example, any time your team needs to request data or validate it with a third party. That pause can create a bottleneck, especially if teams across your organization send multiple requests simultaneously to the partner.

 That’s where Navigate comes in. Our tool helps companies rapidly identify their current, as-is standard processes in Salesforce in a matter of days, allowing them to zero in on the type of data or request that can create a bottleneck. Using digital twin technology and data analysis, we help companies quickly review their transactions and identify workarounds to address these issues before they delay the process.

 For example, Navigate could mine past transactions from an Order Management process and identify specific products with many different components and services attached, making them highly complex and time-consuming to build a winning quote. In these cases, Navigate can identify areas to optimize within that building and configuring process; it could also help companies understand when and how they need to adjust their operating tasks to optimize their OM processes.

Stop: Relying on manual processes.

Start: Finding opportunities for automation – automatically.

 One of the leading value points of Salesforce is that it can automate routine and recurring tasks, helping teams work more efficiently and enabling them to focus on higher-value activity.  Unfortunately, though the Salesforce platform is extremely good at this, identifying the appropriate tasks and processes for automation can be tricky – and between different systems, it becomes even more challenging. Additionally, some tasks are too complex to automate within the platform as a Salesforce workflow.

For example, one common issue many organizations need help with is cart abandonment. But when, where, and how the company deals with those instances can vary depending on the basket size, customer profile, and other factors. Configuring the order management system in Salesforce to correctly identify and categorize cart abandonment cases and determine the next best actions would require significant code. As a result, most organizations can’t fully leverage the platform to manage this challenge.

 Using a tool like Navigate can allow companies to seize the automation opportunities in this area. Using advanced AI and ML models, Navigate can analyze past transactions and activity to help service agents predict the best path and solution for each case and build the flows that can automatically carry out such activity.

 Stop: Deviating from standard processes in local markets.

Start: Benchmarking processes across geographies and teams to identify and share best practices.

 Salesforce might be a common system across a company’s different geographies and functions, but the enterprise rarely uses the platform similarly. As a result, most large organizations need help keeping track of how their teams use Salesforce and comparing the outcomes of those business units so that they can develop and apply benchmarks to drive overall performance. This is extremely difficult – if not impossible – to do without the process mining and advanced data analysis of a tool like Navigate.

 Navigate is designed to help companies easily compare processes and outcomes from across different teams and highlight which systems to replicate and how. Navigate also uses data to identify and bridge gaps within the current process to enable global excellence.

 For example, Navigate can help a large retail organization recognize top-performing warehouse teams in certain countries or geographies. The tool can then analyze activity at the local level, identifying behaviors, processes, or even the use of other systems and tools that help them drive productivity. To replicate these processes in different geographies, Navigate can identify what gaps to overcome as part of this process and any redundancies that may be created as a result.

 Stop: Working in silos.

Start: Enabling end-to-end visibility across disparate systems to unite the business in common goals.

 Salesforce is one of the most essential tools organizations use to inform business decisions and guide teams – but it is far from the only system companies use day-to-day. Most organizations have dozens or more systems to manage everything from orders and tracking to billing and payment, vendor support, and delivery. Some of these activities take place in Salesforce, and some do not – but companies need access to timely, accurate, and complete data from all systems to operate optimally and make sound decisions.

 This is another way that a tool like Navigate can help. While we focused this article on driving value in Salesforce specifically, our tool is platform-agnostic. It can connect every system involved in your sales and service process, including SAP or Oracle, to enable a 360° transparent view of the customer and your business.

 For example, one of our healthcare clients uses eight different systems to complete a clinical trial. Part of the process happens in Salesforce, while many others must occur in other systems. With Navigate, the client gets one view, no matter how many different tools they need.

Ready to Navigate to new heights in Salesforce and beyond?

 Navigate, in partnership with Salesforce, can help companies simultaneously optimize sales, elevate customer satisfaction, and achieve operational excellence. Based on our past client engagements, Navigate has been able to deliver the following metrics: 

1. Unlock 20% savings by discovering inefficiencies during standardization
2. Deliver 3X faster end-to-end flow by using optimized process paths
3. Enable 25% higher productivity by identifying opportunities for process automation and avoiding re-works

 Are you ready to tap the power of data, AI, and Salesforce? Set up a consultation today to learn how Globant’s Salesforce Studio and Navigate can help your company pinpoint bottlenecks, identify automation opportunities, and unlock revenue insights. Contact us.