Are you a sales manager that has no idea where a customer feature request is? Are you fed up with chaser phone calls and firing off countless emails to get a status update? Are you afraid of letting your customer down? Then you’ve come to the right place.
The problem
Once you’ve made a sale, it’s all about delivering on that promise. In software delivery, this can be tricky. You’ve listened the customer’s needs and worked hard to demonstrate how your software product or service will solve their problems. You’ve convinced them. The deal is signed.
Now it’s time to walk the walk. Every second counts as the customer has entrusted you with their business. Get this right and you may have a customer for life. You’ve logged a feature request in Salesforce and notified the Product team by email. A few weeks pass. Then the customer calls – “What’s the latest on the product?”
You don’t know. Your sales tool (say Salesforce) does not automatically provide real-time product status updates, so you’re forced into a frantic scavenger hunt for information. You’re ill-informed, and dangerously close to letting down the customer. Your reputation – and the organization’s – is at stake. And all this manual work takes time – precious time where you could be turning more leads into sales.
The cause
You work in a different system (a Sales tool such as Salesforce) from the product team (who uses an Agile Product Management tool such as Targetprocess), and developers (who use an Agile Planning tool such as Jira). And these tools do not naturally integrate or automatically share product-critical information.
What this means is that once a request is opened in Salesforce, it can go into a black hole. You’ll need to call, message or email Product to get an update, who will be working on many feature requests.
Product may not have even started your request yet, despite you including “URGENT!” in the subject of the email. When isn’t a customer order urgent? Or you’ll need to log into Targetprocess or Jira (if you have access) to see the request status there. Likewise, product owners and developers will have to tread the same laborious path to obtain the information they need to assess and progress the job at hand.
This is all time where a customer isn’t receiving value from a product, and time where they may be developing buyer’s remorse. What’s more, your practitioners are becoming frustrated with all the pesky manual admin required to get an idea of what’s going on. Ultimately, such a set-up is inefficient, unprofessional, and it’s damaging to your existing and future sales.
Solution
Sounds simple, but you need to integrate Salesforce with Targetprocess and Jira to obtain a visible and traceable feature request and implementation process.
Using Tasktop Integration Hub, you can quickly and easily integrate these three tools (and others), enabling all feature request (and all associated attributes, comments, attachments and relationships) to automatically migrate and synchronize bi-directionally across all three tools.
You can see how to connect Salesforce with Targetprocess and Jira in the video below to improve customer success:
Further reading
Optimize customer success by integrating Salesforce and Targetprocess
