Solidify Your Digital Capabilities With Salesforce CoE
The changing consumer market and market volatility are often the discussion points for CEOs and other C-Suite executives.
Apropos of the current market conditions, it is pertinent to ask: How would the executives respond to these challenges? Through digital transformation, business model innovations and more significantly, through proactive human capital management!
Talking of human capital management, innovation in managing the human talent can help organizations improve overall operations, which can be especially important during economic downturns when resources may be limited.
Moreover, talent management and skill set resourcing are more important than ever for industry leaders to remain agile and responsive to changing market conditions.
Perhaps you’re wondering how?
Well, you might have top-of-the-line tools at your disposal to embrace digital transformation and automate business processes. However, without the right set of experts, you can’t get them to work to their full potential.
Establishing a center of excellence (CoE) is a great way to create a team of experts who are pros with such tools and technologies.
Best part?
Most vendors, like Salesforce, often offer you flexibility and infrastructure for establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE).
In this article, you’ll get to know about CoE and how Salesforce CoE can be your winning wager.
Let’s get started, shall we?
What is a Center of Excellence (CoE)?
There is much more history behind the concept of a center of excellence than you might imagine. For quite some time, academies and medical institutions have been adopting this idea to improve their internal processes.
A center of excellence in a business context is a team of individuals in the organization with extensive expertise in business process management, customer relationship management, and who are also adept at using a wide variety of tools and best practices.
When Should You Consider Establishing a CoE?
The following are a few examples of when an organization might consider implementing a Center of Excellence.
Setting Up a Cloud Infrastructure
In the modern business environment, enterprises are using multiple cloud service providers. This often results in the infrastructure team being hindered and unable to manage the project effectively. In most cases, the process ends up being highly complex for the IT team due to the differences between the various cloud service providers.
Establishing a CoE can provide your organization with the functional team, governance, consulting, and implementation expertise to overcome these challenges.
Adopting New Technology
Even the most agile and flexible organizations face challenges when it comes to product adoption, but it’s also necessary to calculate the ROI of any new technology investment. The new technology may disrupt the way teams work, even if it improves those ways of working. During implementation, a CoE acts as an agent of change and ensures that all viewpoints and processes are considered.
Now that you have understood the importance of a CoE, let’s understand how Salesforce CoE helps businesses.
What is a Salesforce Center of Excellence?
Salesforce’s center of excellence (CoE) fills skill gaps and brings stakeholders – implementation partners, success management teams, external consultation partners, and more together to create a single, well-defined group that is responsible for making decisions when it comes to Salesforce.
A Salesforce CoE helps a business set the standard for Salesforce architecture, updates, and enhancements.
In doing so, the CoE should ensure a consistent user experience and minimize administrative overlap.
Why Do You Need a Salesforce Center of Excellence?
CoE is a vital component of Salesforce governance strategy as they enable the organization to have a centralized governing body.
Here’s How it Adds Value to Your Organization:
- Providing a clear place for feedback from the user community.
- Eliminating unnecessary duplication by standardizing processes across the organization.
- Making sure changes are implemented in an organized manner and that top priorities are addressed first.
- Enhancing system usage and adoption.
- Ensuring that appropriate people are involved in making decisions.
The role of a CoE isn’t simply to get an organization from point A to point B and then move on. CoEs provide a centralized location for planning and managing change. With a CoE, you can scale your Salesforce operations and accelerate time-to-value through consistency, collaboration, and effective communication. Besides this, a Salesforce CoE does so much more! It helps businesses drive positive ROI.
A 2020 Dreamforce webinar, which surveyed 300+ Salesforce program owners from North America and Europe found that 91% of those reporting the highest levels of Salesforce ROI have a CoE.
Those numbers indicate a strong correlation between ROI and CoE.
According to the same survey, 82% of the companies that gave their Salesforce implementations an “A” grade had a CoE.[i]
Image Source: [ii]
Doesn’t this look like the figures you intend to achieve for your company?
If yes, then the key lies in establishing and optimizing CoEs.
What Can You Do to Maximize the Impact of Your Salesforce CoE?
- Decide what your needs are and how you expect a particular technological solution to impact your business.
- Decide what value the CoE should deliver, such as implementing a solution by a certain date or sticking to a budget.
- Establish the roles and skill sets required for each of these roles.
- Decide which roles you will provide within the CoE, which roles they will outsource, and how each will be funded.
- Establish future goals and timelines based on current levels of technological maturity.
Now that you know the current state of CoE, let’s gaze through the crystal ball to see what’s in store for CoE in the future.
What Does the Future Hold for Salesforce CoE?
The Salesforce CoE will likely continue to play a critical role in helping organizations optimize their investment in Salesforce. Here are few predictions based on the current trends:
- AI and Automation Integration: The integration of artificial intelligence and automation technologies into the Salesforce platform is likely to become an important focus for the future Salesforce CoE.
- Customer Experience: Salesforce CoE is likely to focus on enhancing the customer experience by leveraging the platform to provide personalized omnichannel experiences to customers.
- Data Management and Governance: Salesforce CoE will also likely play a critical role in ensuring data quality and accuracy by establishing data management and governance practices.
- Analytics and Insights: Salesforce CoE is likely to focus on leveraging the platform’s analytics and insights capabilities to drive better business outcomes.
- Industry-specific Solutions: In the future, Salesforce CoE may also focus on delivering industry-specific solutions that meet the unique needs of different industries, such as healthcare, finance, and retail.
The Bottom Line
Considering the future trends and role CoE will play in helping organizations create efficient Salesforce operations, Salesforce CoE will likely continue to play a critical role in helping organizations maximize their investment in Salesforce, improve digital capabilities, and drive better business outcomes.
Ready to Get Started with a Salesforce Center of Excellence? Just drop us a line at [email protected] and we’ll take it from there.
Statistics References:
[i] Dreamforce Release
[ii] Why COE should be CEO of Salesforce Program