Tech-integrated personalized solutions have become the norm across businesses and help them to stay ahead of the competitive curve in the industry. Salesforce is one such platform with exceptional capabilities to blaze trails in a company’s marketing, sales, and customer service departments. By shortening work cycles and simplifying business practices, it has made itself an absolute necessity for organizations.
Nonetheless, extracting the full potential of a constantly evolving platform like Salesforce is not an easy task. Implementation is just as important as maintenance when it comes to Salesforce, or it could result in backlogs. So, to keep up with changing business needs, data architecture, system innovations, and workflows, companies need experienced Salesforce admins and architects.
Hiring or retaining Salesforce professionals involves a tiring process and requires huge amounts of monetary investment, which may or may not be feasible for all businesses. Hence, Salesforce managed services are the way forward for companies facing issues like limited resource requirements and constrained budgets. Under managed service, companies outsource Salesforce administration tasks to a remote partner who constantly monitors and regularly maintains the system to ensure minimum downtime.
In fact, business reliance on managed services has gradually increased over the years, which is quite evident from the latest Statista reports dated June 21, 2022. Though the global managed services market was valued at 161.37 billion U.S. dollars in 2021, it is further expected to exceed 300 billion U.S. dollars by 2027.
Managed Services Salesforce Offerings for Businesses
1. Implementation – Salesforce managed service providers help firms deploy the customer relationship management (CRM) platform and specific Salesforce Clouds according to their preferences and needs.
2. Consulting – Under the salesforce consulting services, the vendors provide comprehensive assistance to Salesforce users and help them build a powerful implementation/operational strategy.
3. Customizations – By availing of the managed salesforce services, businesses can opt for customization of Salesforce tools such as dashboards, campaigns, reports, etc.
4. Integrations – To leverage the overall usage of the Salesforce CRM platform, the managed services allow firms to combine their data and functionality with a third-party platform or service.
5. Data Management – With the help of powerful ETL tools, these services take care of the import, management, and export of valuable data aggregated by Salesforce users.
6. Salesforce Training – These services aim to provide managerial and technical training to Salesforce users, as well as help them to use the CRM platform better.
7. Salesforce Support – The Salesforce support services provide personalized support to the users including regular system checks, fixing bugs, auditing, and many more.
Benefits of Managed Salesforce Services
There are plenty of reasons why businesses opt for these managed services. Some of these are listed below:
1. Optimized OpEx
Contracts are structured in a way that you can maximize your investments in managed services. Rather than hiring full-time experts, businesses can get professionals on a fixed hourly basis and pay only for the actual work hours, thereby eliminating any delays or downtime. It is this flexibility in the agreement that makes it a go-to model for a majority of businesses and certainly helps in optimizing operational costs substantially.
2. No Ramp-Up Time
Getting an in-house set-up needs a good amount of time to get on board and get going. On the other hand, off-shore professionals do not require any significant ramp-up time and start work as soon as they join, which also boosts the morale of the entire team. Thus, opting for managed services is the key if your business wants swift on-demand support along with early value realization.
3. Skilled and Competent Professionals
Investing in a managed service model enables the firms to easily access diversely skilled and competent experts who are continuously trained and tested to gain a better knowledge of the platform. As listed here, the Salesforce team includes a pool of experts, which can be hired according to your unique project requirement.
1. Salesforce Developer
Developers create and edit workflows, triggers, third-party apps, Visualforce pages, and lightning components in Salesforce solutions. These developers can be hired on an hourly basis, eliminating the higher costs of maintaining full-time experts.
2. System Administrator
Just like an in-house administrator works, a system administrator in managed services also works similarly as well as performs various day-to-day and periodic tasks including data validation, report generation, account management, dashboard customization, data management, etc. This also ensures that the system remains updated and error-free.
3. Project Manager
To ensure that the firm achieves the most out of managed service arrangement, a remote project manager works collaboratively with team members and ascertains that the tasks are executed efficiently.
Apart from these, businesses can also hire specialized resources such as consultants, architects, and cloud-specific experts via managed services.
4. Minimized Risks of Critical Failure
A majority of companies usually have limited amounts of resources to optimize and manage the entire Salesforce ecosystem. Professionals often get preoccupied with day-to-day activities, given the huge work responsibilities. This, as a result, makes the complete system prone to single-point failures such as server crashes, disk crashes, network failures, etc. But with managed services, companies can easily access multiple experts at the cost of one; thus, minimizing the chances of single-point failure.
5. Reduced Hiring Challenges
Hiring in-house professionals is not only a costly affair but also a difficult task especially when there are strict time constraints. It often takes months to recruit a candidate and then help them understand your unique objectives. They will take some getting accustomed to the system even if you find an appropriate candidate well in time. Instead, managed services for Salesforce allow organizations to hire experts literally from any part of the world under flexible contracts—AppExchange can help you find prospective companies in your specific region.
Winding Up
Engaging in Salesforce managed services is the best to go forward, irrespective of whether the business is B2B or B2C, big or small, old or new. Organizations can cut down their operational costs significantly while aligning more specialized experts for implementation, administration, training, and support.
Apart from this, there are certain data security and communication challenges. To better utilize the Salesforce platform and overcome the hurdles, you must look for remote Salesforce partners that specialize in accommodating businesses in your industry, ensuring strict data compliance, and providing uninterrupted service for your Salesforce ecosystem. So, now is the time to make the next move!
