Content relationship management (CRM) systems are the backbone of today’s digital marketplace. From customer service to recruitment and business development, a CRM creates a hub for businesses to manage relations and identify growth opportunities. There’s no more popular CRM company than Salesforce, which currently holds roughly 20% market share, but continues to rise. Salesforce commands such a significant market share due to its flexibility and customization features. Businesses find they can customize Salesforce in ways not offered on other platforms.
From workflow creation to task management, collaboration, analytics, and customer engagement, the platform allows users to customize Salesforce and unlock the true power of a CRM.
Why is it Useful to Customize Salesforce?
To add personalization to Salesforce, users create new functions or features that aren’t immediately available in the out-of-the-box default version. This can be as simple as changing preferences or moving fields in the CRM’s settings or as involved as writing code to implement new functions specific to a business’s needs. However it’s accomplished, Salesforce can be optimized to work with businesses.
Before venturing too far down the road of customizations, a consultation with a trusted consulting and development partner can help expedite customizations and unlock features you either didn’t know existed or didn’t know could add value to your business’s operations.
How to Customize Salesforce
To get the wheels turning, here are some simple yet impactful, Salesforce customizations your businesses can easily tackle.
1. Customize Your Salesforce Organization
Much of the power and user-preferability of Salesforce’s CRM is in its organization. Everything should have a place, a look, and a purpose. You should tailor the structure of your CRM to the preferences of the people who use it. Taking it a step further, individual users are also empowered to create customizations unique to their accounts. When they log into the CRM, they see a view tailored to their unique preferences.
Some of these customizations include:
- Find Object Management Settings: Personalize your object model with features like custom fields, validation rules, and layouts.
- Control Access to Fields: Take your security down to the field level by customizing which users have edit permissions. This allows open access to viewing data while limiting who controls the data flow.
- Page Layouts, Fields, and Tabs: Every job has a different approach. Salesforce allows organizations to customize tabs, fields, and page layouts, so users or customers experience a different hierarchy of information depending on their need. For instance, a business might opt to choose a different layout for billing than customer service.
2. Personalize Data and Information
Information isn’t useful unless it’s accessible, and there are plenty of ways to customize Salesforce to position your company’s information, so it’s optimized for access—or in the case of security, not.
Salesforce allows users in the backend to manage big objects, which store massive amounts of customer data. Out-of-the-box, users can customize big objects with fields and indexes. Companies, therefore, can organize their consumer data management however they need.
To truly leverage big objects, users can employ Schema Builder to create new, customizable data models to gain insights into customers. Schema Builder allows you to add custom objects, relationships, and geolocation fields.
3. Create Custom App Pages
For SMBs that want to provide a different user experience for customers via their app page, Lightning App Builder provides the tools to customize those pages. This empowers businesses to create a hierarchy of information that makes the most sense to their customer base.
From tabs to objects, customizing this information can significantly improve the user experience.
4. Manage Notifications
Notifications are a simple, straightforward way to provide information without burdening the recipient with the act of discovery. With Salesforce, businesses can create custom notifications in several ways: in Process Builder, in Flow Builder, using Apex code, or with an API. By doing so, a plethora of notification types become available for use.
5. Custom Domains and URLs
Generic or long URLs are a thing of the past. With Salesforce, businesses can customize what shows up when they market their URLs, which can go a long way toward building brand recognition.
For instance, businesses can shorten what a customer sees if a company is promoting a sub-page on a site that incorporates a number of symbols or words after the domain. This allows SMBs to post just the domain yet direct customers to the appropriate page.
6. Add Custom Links to Intranet
Internal communication works best when you design information as accessible and intuitive. By adding custom links to their intranet, businesses can populate their internal communication platforms with shortcuts to essential information to keep business running smoothly
Partner With a Team to Customize Salesforce to Your Advantage
There are innumerable customizations available for businesses operating on the world’s most popular CRM platform, but that doesn’t necessarily make them easy to discover. Whether you’re interested in better understanding how specific customizations work or curious about discovering customizations that optimize your specific business operations, a skilled and trusted partner can help.
Soliant Consulting is an experienced Salesforce partner that delivers solutions designed to transform the course of your business. Reach out to Soliant today to talk to a consultant and learn more.
