Elements Financial is a Federal Credit Union focused on helping their members achieve financial wellness. They don't have many physical branches, so they rely on their network of partners, allowing their customers to access over 5,600 shared branches nationwide plus 78,000 ATMs worldwide. Elements invests heavily in their technology and takes pride in their strategic prowess providing their members with the various financial management solutions which include checking accounts, savings accounts, credit cards, loans and investments. As Brad Kelley, AVP Emerging Technologies states, “We pride ourselves on better technology by taking care of our members through tech.”

In 2013, Elements decided to make the switch to Salesforce after a customer survey revealed that their members didn't like the fact that each rep they spoke to had no knowledge of any of their previous interactions. At the time, there were four different systems in place, with little to no transparency into customer data. Now with Salesforce, they get a 360-degree view of their customers' data, including all past interactions and notes from the reps for more visibility. With Salesforce, they are also able to create a tremendously better experience for their customers. Leadership was very happy with their decision to use Salesforce, so when Brad Kelley was introduced to Lightning Experience at Dreamforce in 2015, he knew it made sense to explore how much added value they could get with Lightning.

“With executives working on phones and business development using apps on iPads, I love that everything on Salesforce Lightning is mobile-ready” -Brad Kelley, AVP Emerging Technologies

Leadership at Elements highly encourages their employees to use technology to become more efficient. Recently, they sought out solutions to connect with customers in faster, more productive and mobile ways, and turned to Sales Cloud Lightning. With Sales Ops in the midst of revamping some of their processes, they knew it was time to make the switch. They anticipated that the move to the Lightning Experience would be necessary to stay relevant in the industry, and the longer they postponed, the more technical debt they would have to eventually rework when the time came for the shift.

Additionally, Brad Kelly saw first-hand the enormous opportunity in Lightning's mobile capabilities. “With executives working on phones and business development using apps on iPads, I love that everything on Salesforce Lightning is mobile-ready,” noted Kelley.

Their project team planned to rollout Sales Cloud Lightning for all of their users in the fourth quarter of 2016. In the rollout process, admins had ongoing meetings to clean up their org. They adjusted the majority of their custom VisualForce pages and customer reporting charts to be ready for Lightning. They used this opportunity to rethink some of their processes. They had a custom opportunity object, which they transitioned to a standard opportunity object.

Regular small group trainings were held with four front-line staff members who walked around helping people as they navigated through Lightning. As they got closer to their launch date, they triaged a list of nagging issues, ramped up their trainings, and started exposing different groups to Lightning to solve any problems in the org.

Their meticulous preparation resulted in a successful launch and major redesign as Lightning was rolled out to the entire company. Brad's team was well-prepared for the go-live issues that inevitably can happen in big technology upgrades. They worked with the users to prioritize concerns and tweak the platform to improve response time that ultimately resulted in a great experience for Elements' staff and members. Because this was such a big launch, they decided not to implement some of the Lightning-only features, but instead to focus on just replacing what they had, then they could roll out new features over time.

With Sales Cloud Lightning, Elements Financial can now connect all departments from anywhere, at any time with ease. Users are attracted to the fresh look and mobile capabilities. Executives can now easily visualize pipeline and closed deals in dashboards on their mobile devices. With Lighting they are able to customize apps to meet their specific needs. Their business development team can take applications and member sign-ups from anywhere with mobile-ready apps. Moving to Lightning was about moving towards the future and using the Lightning platform they can now build for the future. “If we can think of a way to make things better, make their job easier and faster, we have the tech and the people to make that happen” says Kelley. “The biggest benefit, is having a platform we can confidently build on for the future. Lightning changes everything.” They plan to implement new features as they're added to the Lightning platform.