The digital revolution is so yesteryear. Today, companies face technological changes whose velocity, breadth, and impact are unprecedented. A study by Gartner even notes that 72% of customer interactions will involve emerging technologies like AI, applications, chatbots or mobile messaging. Because your customers are more connected than ever before, staying put and not having what it takes to maximize your CRM (or its speed) is no longer an option.

The cost of poor CRM adoption isn’t just about underutilized investments and missed business goals: It’s not being able to connect to your customers in a whole new way. In fact, 58% of consumers agree that technology has significantly changed their expectations of how companies should interact with them through technology. Simply put: Your customers are in the driver’s seat today, so if you don’t lay down sound architectural foundations and more responsive development practices, they’ll just pass you by.

Journeys, Not Destinations

Wherever you are in your Salesforce journey, ensuring that your implementation is set up with top-notch architectural practices is a critical, ongoing process. It’s not just about how you go live — it’s what you turn on, when you do it, and why it matters to your customers. The mix of features and functionalities that your company lays out in the release roadmap represents more than just business requirements: It’s a blueprint of how everyone in the company should work together to transform the customer experience and make sense of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Salesforce Architects, as the most certified platform experts, have been providing strategic and technical guidance on launching epic Salesforce implementations. This series collects tales and key learnings from the front lines of how they’ve helped our most successful customers not only make sense of the cloud, but also lay the groundwork that propels game-changing innovation.

Trailblazer Spotlight: AAA Carolinas

As the regional club serving both North and South Carolina for more than 100 years, AAA Carolinas decided the organization needed to change to stay relevant for its members. After having deployed Salesforce more than 10 years ago, they wanted to refresh their member experience.

“Traditionally we’ve been good at transactions, but not as good at anticipating other ways we could add value to members,” said Dusty Holcomb, SVP of Member Experience and Analytics for AAA Carolinas. “We are sometimes seen as your grandma and grandpa’s motor club. We must change that by going to market with a contemporary experience.”

The organization embarked on a transformation aimed at creating a “broader, deeper, and more enriching experience for the member,” according to Holcomb. One of the core ways of doing that was to consolidate data into a single member record and to align field sales and member management processes around it.

AAA Carolinas expanded its Salesforce licenses and embraced Salesforce technologies as the platform for this transformation. To ensure success, AAA Carolinas engaged with Salesforce Architects, which assigns Program Architects to provide strategic planning, deep industry and product knowledge, and on-the-ground technical advisement and best practices.

“By bringing in Salesforce Architects, I wanted to make sure we had perspective on the best way to deploy cloud services. If we didn’t get it right, we’d always be limping along saying we wished we’d done this better,” remarked Holcomb.

Learn more about AAA Carolinas and other customers’ success in our new webinar series, “5 Tips for Launching Epic Salesforce Implementations.” Register today for the series, and take a sneak peek at the themes we’ll cover:

1. Data, Data, Data: Lay the Foundations That Propel Innovation

Having a single view of your customers across business units, localities, and real-time interactions isn’t a CRM pipe dream anymore. Beyond making sure you’re managing customer data in a technically sound and scalable way, learn how to map business value to org design, avoid technical debt, and build for the future.

2. Socks, Then Shoes: Start Small with Quick Wins

To become nimbler, adopt innovative technology, and increase productivity, organizations need a roadmap to implement and evolve platform governance and modern software development practices at enterprise scale. Join this session to learn how you can overcome the challenges, hurdles, and roadblocks one step at a time to delivering solutions at scale with speed and flexibility.

3. The Leadership Gap: Start with Top-Down Adoption

From securing executive sponsors and managing architectural reviews, navigating change management can make or break the success of an implementation. Find out how Salesforce Architects have helped our largest enterprise customers identify the right stakeholder engagement for their programs to drive adoption and maximize platform ROI faster.

4. Roadmap, Not Blueprint: Better, Better, Never Done

Just because you can deploy a large set of features and functionality out of the gate doesn’t always mean that you should. Hear from our Salesforce Architects about best practices when it comes to phased developments that help unify your company’s digital initiatives.

5. The Rules of Collaboration: Building IT and Business Partnerships

Achieving business value faster on Salesforce consequently requires broader operational changes that impact organizational collaboration and culture. Learn how Salesforce Architects have been successfully advising technology and business leaders on cross-LOB alignment and enterprise CRM integrations that drive transformative changes.

Make epic happen. Register today for our webinar series, “5 Tips for Launching Epic Salesforce Implementations.”