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In part one of this blog series, I introduced you to our newest customer resource: Technical Account Managers (TAM). TAMs are a new technical expert service for customers who are using Salesforce in complex multi-org or multi-cloud environments, and who need our highest level of product expertise and technical oversight so they can run their business better on our platform.
To help us officially launch this team of Salesforce experts and this new services category, we reached out to one of our TAMs — Nandita Shah — and asked for her top tips to help customers run their business efficiently with Salesforce. Nandita has been with Salesforce for 11 years, serving in support, customer success, and technology roles. She’s a rockstar TAM and she offered up some great insights across three key areas. Here they are:
TAMs provide dedicated, continuous guidance on open support cases and are the partner to their customers’ internal help desks. Nandita’s first tips can help you improve the speed of internal support processes.
Maintain customer trust with a disruption plan: Most large companies use digital platforms to engage with their customers. But what about disruptions? “You should set up an automated customer communication plan if a disruption takes place,” suggests Nandita. “Whether this is a mass email or an announcement on a web page, trust is built through transparency.”
Transition from a portal to Salesforce Communities: Portals are old technology that may let you store and deliver information, but people are used to collaboration. “Transition to a community-based model — like Salesforce Community Cloud,” suggests Nandita, “so your customers can work with you, your experts, and with each other. Collaboration, self-service, and peer-to-peer support are hallmarks of the community-based approach.”
TAMs help you take advantage of the steady pace of Salesforce innovation. The TAM can build your three-times-a-year release readiness plan (five times a year for Marketing Cloud). This lets you maximize value and ensure everything runs smoothly. Here are two great tips from Nandita to maximize value from Salesforce innovation.
Use the Sandbox Preview for Salesforce releases: Salesforce delivers innovation three times a year via Salesforce releases, and a Sandbox Preview can give you a head start. “A Sandbox is a copy of the way you set up your production environment,” explains Nandita. “A Sandbox Preview of every release is available three-to-four weeks before the release goes live. This means you can enable features, see how they work, and test your customization and integrations to make sure they’re working. This lets you protect your users from unexpected surprises plus boost excitement, productivity, and adoption.”
Sooner is better; set up a pre-release org: A pre-release org is a “clean” version of Salesforce that has all of the releases enabled but without your data or customizations. “Pre-release orgs are a great opportunity to see the art-of-the-possible,” said Nandita. “It’s a great opportunity for you to test out how the new features will work.”
TAMs are dedicated onsite Salesforce experts who can help you get the most out of your Salesforce implementation. They can help you identify unused functionality and are the technical partner to your Success Manager, ensuring application-wide adoption. Each customer has their own unique journey, so a technical expert like a TAM — with deep product expertise — can be crucial as you adapt to competitors or changing technologies.
Avoid technical debt, always: Especially for multi-cloud, multi-org Salesforce customers with non-Salesforce integrations, as technology evolves and grows, your software or data may become out of date. “It is so crucial to set up an internal process aligned to a Salesforce technical expert to regularly review the use of our platform, drive adoption, uncover unused features, and integrate new features,” said Nandita. “For example, run Salesforce Optimizer — available to everyone — but then use a technical resource to identify and prioritize the fixes that are going to make your business run better.”
Tweak your processes to avoid limits: Limits on API calls, concurrent connections, streaming, or mass emails are in place for Salesforce customers because we all operate in a multitenant environment. “If you hit your limit, you may experience automation slowdowns or even a stoppage,” warns Nandita, “and that can be costly. But did you know that small technical changes can make a huge difference? For example, increasing batch sizes may mean less batch callouts. Less frequent login retries can reduce API callouts. A Salesforce technical expert can help you make changes with a big impact.”
To protect your critical processes, use our brand-new 24x7 Proactive Monitoring service to get earlier warnings about limits, failing automation processes, or email sends so you can act fast before your system becomes unavailable. And, you guessed it, having both a TAM and Proactive Monitoring is definitely a best practice to monitoring alerts, guidance, and long-term technical health.
To learn more about Technical Account Managers and how someone like Nandita can help you run your business better on Salesforce, click here to be contacted or reached out to your Account Executive or Success Manager.
You can get your own tips from a TAM by watching our “Summer '18 Release Overview for Enterprise Customers.” Nandita and Ingo Fochler, a Salesforce Success Architect, walk you through top new features coming in the Summer ‘18 Release. They cover Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Analytics, Mobile, and Platform updates.
