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At Salesforce, Nichola Palmer works with customers to bring their stories of innovation and transformation to life. In this blog series featuring Trailblazers, Nichola introduces Trần Việt Thắng, a Salesforce Specialist at VinGroup in Vietnam. Thắng leads the Salesforce deployment across VinGroup’s B2B and B2C subsidiaries, and has a passion for helping others.
Trần Việt Thắng has always wanted to help people. His vision was to be a caring person. As a young boy, he dreamed of becoming a doctor. His motivation was simple — he wanted to make people feel better. But studying medicine at university was expensive. So, he chose another path.
“I had a good teacher who convinced me to study IT,” Thắng says. “I was very lucky to meet him. He taught me that, as a developer, I could help many people.”
Thắng moved from his hometown to attend university in Hanoi. During his studies, he helped to develop patient admissions software for a local hospital. He quickly discovered that the scalable nature of software development enabled him to help many more people than he could as a doctor.
“There were long queues at the hospital and people had to wait a long time to see a doctor,” he explains. “We made a back-end program the admissions office could use to quickly check-in new patients, collect information about their symptoms, and share that information with the doctor with one click.”
Thắng’s program significantly increased admissions efficiency and reduced patient wait times. The young developer saw the positive impact his program had on the patient experience at the hospital, and he was hooked.
“It was amazing,” he says. “It was a simple program but it helped so many people. I could see how technology can be used to help hundreds of people — maybe even thousands or millions of people. The program made doctors happy too because they could help more people every day. I was inspired by how one program could help doctors and patients together.”
Thắng took those learnings into his early career as a developer. He understood that he was in the solutions business. He was passionate about developing software that helped solve problems — and made life better — for businesses, employees, and customers. So, it was a natural fit for him to work for a Salesforce independent software vendor (ISV).
“I saw that Salesforce is a very powerful platform,” he says. “What took us a month or a year to develop ourselves, we could deliver in a week with Salesforce. I could develop custom components within the Salesforce platform with very little code in a very short time.”
Thắng says that building applications on the Salesforce platform also ensured he could deliver more stable solutions. “To develop custom software without Salesforce, we might have to make 10 versions before it’s stable. But Salesforce gave us a stable base we could more easily build on.”
This kind of agility and stability meant Thắng could help more customers with much shorter development timelines. But the speed of deployment doesn’t guarantee the success of a project.
“We must understand how to best utilise the benefits of Salesforce for each customer,” he explains. “We need to think about the customer’s pain points, understand their workflow, and identify Salesforce components that will best fit their requirements.”
Building that knowledge has made Thắng a sought-after Salesforce Architect. He joined VinGroup as a Salesforce Specialist and now leads Salesforce deployments across the company’s B2B and B2C subsidiaries.
This presents its own challenges. VinGroup is a diverse corporation with many subsidiaries across the technology and industry, trade and services, and social enterprise sectors.
Prior to Salesforce, VinGroup had no centralised 360-degree view and no collaboration across the group. Part of Thắng’s role is to maximise usage of Salesforce and drive change management within the company’s business units.
Thắng has already led Salesforce deployments for subsidiaries in the company’s hospitality (VinPearl), automotive (VinFast) and healthcare (VinMec) sectors. However, what works for a five-star resort operator is very different from the needs of an electric vehicle manufacturer. That’s why Thắng says he treats every business unit as a new customer with a different set of needs.
“Salesforce provides a stable architecture, but we must meet a range of different needs within that structure,” he explains. “To do so, we must understand the pain points of each stakeholder and the processes behind them. In other words, we need to know what the employees do so we can create a system that helps them do it better.”
Thắng knows that at the core of any technology-based solution are humans helping humans. He says the best way to succeed is to collaborate and share knowledge with each other.
That’s a central value of the Trailblazer community in Vietnam, and Thắng is a passionate member. Since the pandemic started, he has organised several virtual meet-ups with Salesforce Architects across Vietnam.
“I’ve met many people like me through the Trailblazer community,” he says. “The core value of Salesforce is using technology to help people work together. All of us in the Trailblazer community work together to help each other find better ways to leverage the Salesforce platform for our employers and customers.
“We are not in competition with each other. We share best practices and learnings, and help each other to make the platform better every day and deliver more value to the end-users.”
The young Thắng dreamed of making a positive impact on his community as a doctor. While he may have taken a different path, Thắng has remained committed to helping others. He uses technology as a healing medicine for business, and makes his colleagues and customers feel better.
Check out these other posts from our Inspired Trailblazers series:
Meet Joanna Teo: Customer-Focused Data Evangelist
Meet Francisco N. Collantes Jr. : Delivering Energy Through Collaboration
