Salesforce optimization strategies for financial institutions in 2024

Five key considerations for Salesforce FSC optimization in 2024

1. Measure, manage and optimize existing FSC org health and performance.

A critical first step in defining optimization efforts is an audit and analysis of an organization’s current state of the platform and Financial Services Cloud. With org intelligence, we can ask and answer questions like:

• What is the state of automation within the org and is it slowing it down?
• Is technical debt hindering users from being effective in their role?
• Is a Salesforce org at risk of not meeting security and compliance requirements?
• Is the org set up to scale with future use cases and demands?
• Is the org being used to follow an intended process (ie. field utilization)?
• Are the integrations with your Salesforce FSC performing correctly?

Analyzing the current performance and usage of a Salesforce org immediately highlights the reasons why an organization might be “stuck”. With the right technology, this can be delivered quickly so that we can begin prioritizing remediation efforts that drive increased adoption and platform usage.

(Zennify partners with Hubbl Diagnostics, a Salesforce org intelligence solution, to deliver on health and performance audits faster and with a more tangible strategy for remediation.

2. Determine key business outcomes and KPIs to define platform success.

If our customer has not defined clear success metrics or KPIs for future growth on the Salesforce platform, any future development or optimization efforts will go unrecognized. The business and IT need to partner on defining key success metrics, both short and long-term that illustrate what good looks like for both groups. This means aligning platform optimization and development initiatives to key business outcomes in three categories: People, Process & Technology. Recommendations include:

• Baselining current state measures and setting realistic goals based on quick-win and long-term milestones.
• Begin quantitatively tracking consumption, adoption and usage of key systems and technology investments.
• Benchmark performance and quantify the value and impact of every release.

3. Implement foundational data strategies for today and tomorrow.

While every financial institution is feeling the pressure to adopt AI, most organizations aren’t sure of where to start or how to become AI-ready. This is largely because many institutions do not have an underlying enterprise data strategy, which is required to be truly data-driven and capitalize on new data technologies.

When helping customers prepare for AI, we always begin with defining the underlying data strategy and foundations on which to build. This means addressing common data governance and architecture challenges such as:

• Is there a need to aggregate structured and unstructured data across the organization for smart decision-making?
• How are data assets being governed? Are they accessible only to the right people and reproducible to meet regulatory requirements?
• What are the highly complex workflows, disparate technologies, and existing processes that are making collaboration difficult?
• What legacy systems and data architectures are being used and can they scale for real-time and AI?

4. Application and process consolidation and modernization.

Traditionally, process modernization has required significant manual work to compare the intended process with the actual process adopted by users. If a system is not configured with a user-centric approach, institutions can find large gaps between how they think users are engaging with technology, versus how they actually are.

Process optimization and subsequent application modernization are foundational to getting more out of your Salesforce investment. As teams grow and customer motions change, so does usage. The business and IT must come together to ensure what is built is optimized for user effectiveness. As a part of modernization, we must consider legacy systems and processes, integration and configuration. Specifically:

• Do we require process mining to understand the true business process?
• Rationalizing & consolidating applications with a platform mindset.
• Consider technology connectivity through an API planning and integration strategy.
• Integration, consolidation, separation and more; strategies for managing multiple Salesforce instances and M&A.

5. Team empowerment: owning performance and driving adoption.

The reason to optimize org performance is to deliver greater value to your users and ultimately an improved experience for your customers. But before end customers can realize value, your internal Salesforce teams and end users (sales, service, execs, and more) must be bought in. Change management and adoption planning always seem to be an afterthought, but without them, most technology investments will fail. To get unstuck, institutions must:

• Prioritize and champion adoption with company-wide change initiatives that explain the “why”.
• Use a governance body to align strategic capability-driven thinking over tactical solutions.
• Ensure UX/UI considerations are made, including accessibility, layouts, and more.
• Deliver value to users in every release.
• Publish agreed upon team KPIs that define success for adoption and performance.
• Provide ongoing training & education to maximize the benefits of their platform

An effective strategy for future growth on the Salesforce platform must include continuous optimization and refinement of existing systems, their performance and related processes. The pace of innovation is increasing and the divide between financial institutions that recognize the need to optimize and those that ignore the need to get “unstuck”, is growing fast.