Why a Successful Salesforce CRM Strategy Requires Integration and APIs?
1. Digital Transformation with Salesforce CRM
Digital transformation has been the buzzword in the past recent years and still is one of the top priorities of many business organizations. Many companies have now recognized the importance of digital transformation and are trying to incorporate it as a part of their organizational goals and business strategies.
The emergence of new technologies such as the Mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI, e.g. Salesforce Einstein), and Machine Learning all helped making digital transformation a reality in various industries. And for the time being, mobile and Omni-channel are still essential for business organizations to move and stay ahead of the competition.
IT operations is, obviously, critical in ensuring the success of many companies’ quests for digital transformation. A large number of IT decision-makers are currently implementing digital transformation and many are also planning to carry it out over the coming years.
However, there are also difficulties and challenges when it comes to digital transformation, which might lead to sub-optimal ROI (return on investment) or even failure.
Such challenges include legacy infrastructure and system, siloed apps and their data, misalignment between business users and technical IT, time constraints etc.
Many large business organizations or enterprises are still using, on average over hundreds of, separate applications for their business operations and many of those applications are not interconnected or integrated with other applications.
Business in 2019 is becoming more competitive than ever with a strong demand to transform and provide customers with pleasant and unique experiences, as well as allowing employees and other technical stakeholders with immediate access to business data.
And this can’t be achieved through the continuous use of old legacy systems and siloed apps and their data.
Salesforce CRM, the number 1 CRM in the world, provides many capabilities as well as flexibility allowing business organizations to integrate its system with many other apps (including both cloud and on-premises app). And this would help:
- Increase efficiency of the business organization’s IT operation;
- Improve customers’ experience and interactions
- Increasing their overall business efficiency
As explained in the previous blog articles, Salesforce integration is important and business organizations should consider integrating other applications with the Salesforce system in order to have a 360-degree view of their customers as well as other important business data.
Again, many business leaders as well as IT decision-makers assume that integration challenges are one of the main reasons which slow down or hinder the process of digital transformation in their companies.
In some particular cases, without assistance from professional Salesforce consultants and developers, many business organizations find Salesforce integration a difficult challenge, time, and effort consuming, as well as difficult to manage across cloud and on-premises environments.
Successfully integrating these cloud and on-premises applications with Salesforce CRM is critical to digital transformation. But for a better and faster approach with larger, business can no longer relying on point to point integration. And here is when APIs come into the big picture.
2. Salesforce Integration as a part of Digital Transformation
In many large and enterprise integration scenarios, APIs and API strategies can help make the situation better and easier to manage. It also helps the IT department’s jobs become easier and speed-up the process as well as produce positive results as desired.
As mentioned above, the entire business organization would undergo digital transformation and the IT department plays a significant role in ensuring the success of the transformation. Thus, the IT department needs to consider Salesforce integration in a whole strategic vision rather than view it as a separate project one-by-one.
An integral part of a strategic vision includes integrating a wide range of new technologies and devices with old legacy systems: mobile, cloud, CRM (Salesforce CRM in this case), SaaS, data analytics, and IoT etc.
Here, APIs serve as a connector to unlock data and securely transfer such data between applications within the whole enterprise application system – while at the same time ensuring the flow of data is properly managed and appropriate security measures applied.
In the case of Salesforce CRM, the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform (an SFDC subsidiary) can provide a great solution for many integration requirements for organizations using Salesforce CRM.
Read more: Salesforce CRM: Integration Solution with Mulesoft
Many large business organizations in various industries such as Finance, Insurance, Healthcare, Retail, etc. are already using APIs for their large and complex enterprise integration requirements as well as for Salesforce integration.
Ultimately, digital transformation requires direction from the business, and collaboration between business and IT. Understanding APIs and integration can help when business and IT work together to execute on a true digital transformation strategy, instead of a piecemeal approach.
Conclusion:
Digital transformation requires collaboration between business users and the IT team. Specifically, when it comes to CRM (Salesforce CRM), a sound strategy with flexibility can help your organization to utilize and get the most out of your Salesforce investment.
Doing it right, especially with integration, Salesforce CRM is a great tool that helps business put their customers at the forefront of business focus, which as a result will help businesses achieve their desired result.
