Simplyhealth is redefining the customer experience with its ‘One Simplyhealth’ initiative. We spoke to Rebecca Hall, Head of Salesforce, who is making great things happen at Simplyhealth. Rebecca’s the proud owner of 160 Trailhead badges and seven super badges, which demonstrate how Salesforce is at the heart of the company’s digital transformation.

Tell us about the One Simplyhealth project

One Simplyhealth is a project powered by passion. Simplyhealth is a person-centred organisation; to scale our business and develop new products for customers we needed a new strategy to centralise data and operations on one platform and start operating internally as One Simplyhealth. As with all digital transformations, the project relies on people, processes, and the platform – which, in this case, is our Salesforce platform. We use Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Experience Cloud, Tableau, and Shield. We are in the middle of rolling out Interaction Studio right now.

The project kicked off in March 2020. How did you manage to successfully roll out a whole new platform during a global pandemic?

We’d always been a very office-based company, so switching to remote working was an adjustment for everyone. This was a big project with 45 people working on it, including business users, our internal Salesforce team, and consultants. We had a virtual meeting every day, and although it sounds crazy to have 45 people on a conference call, it usually only took 15 minutes to sort out the plan for the day. The first six months were super intensive to get the basics defined and implemented, and now we’ve stepped back and have sprints with new releases every two weeks.

What were the biggest challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?

To get everyone working the same way, you have to get buy-in from the top down, especially for sales and service. Change management is always difficult, and it’s hard to convince people to trust us that the solution will make their lives easier in the long run. Our dental business, Denplan, had its own separate CRM, and we moved 200 users across to Salesforce at the beginning of last year. To help encourage user adoption we essentially created their old CRM within Salesforce, but there’s a trade-off between making people feel comfortable and potentially missing out on some of the best features of Salesforce, so now we’re looking at ways to adapt it to be more efficient. We’re picking our battles and taking baby steps, but luckily people respect my leadership and know I’ve got their best interests at heart!

How can you build that level of trust with people when you’re not in the same office?

Before the pandemic, I would have sat with end users, found out what they wanted from their system and how we could adapt what we were doing to suit their needs. The best way to find out how to make life easier for people on the front line is to actually talk to them and watch them using the system. Remotely, I can do that to some degree with shared screens and online calls. We have even found a way of listening in to the calls remotely which has been a huge step in us supporting our users. I am constantly looking for ways to improve, so I love listening to our users’ suggestions on what is working for them and what is not, as all of these are ideas that can be put forward for change – under the proviso that I will veto ideas that I don’t think will work for everybody.

How do you decide which user suggestions to implement?

I’ve been a Salesforce administrator for ten years, so I’ve got a good base knowledge of the system and best practices. I know what’s achievable with the system and what’s likely to be beneficial to most users. If I can’t implement an idea, I always try to suggest an alternative solution for people that I think will work better. The Salesforce community is really helpful for bouncing ideas off others before trying to implement changes – if you have a question, you can get a response in minutes. It’s fantastic.

With so much on your plate, how do you keep up with the latest Salesforce innovations and learning?

Salesforce’s online training platform, Trailhead, is really useful for keeping up to speed on the solutions. I’ve got more than 160 badges and seven super badges, which you can earn by taking your skills and applying them to complex business problems to get real-world experience of the solutions in action. We use Trailhead in my team and have some super users across the business to help and encourage our colleagues to get to grips with the platform. We’re a highly motivated bunch and even ran a competition to see who could do the most trails and win the most badges. We work hard but it’s important to make time for fun as well.

To find out more about the One Simplyhealth initiative to transform the customer experience read the full story here.