Jul 5, 2020
Salesforce Project on Acme Homes- Part 1
Salesforce is my passion , I love to solve problem applying my salesforce skills. Then an idea popped “why shouldn’t I publish an article working on a project??”.This is my very first article and I have tried my best to present my ideas.
Journey on Building a use-case
When a project idea bloomed I searched a lot for business cases to work on. We have several projects on trailhead but I wanted to work on a project which is not mentioned anywhere. So it's a new project that I can work on :) !!!!! I listed out different features of Salesforce what admin can carry out and try to build use case for every feature. Later I identified all the business cases to build a real estate project.
Project use-case
Acme Homes is one of the leading builders in Australia with decades of experience in building a budget friendly homes to designer luxurious homes covering entire Australia. The sales were really going good, as we all aware that covid-19 has impacted each and every business in this world. Now Acme Homes want to expand their business with digital transformation and go digital on customer service.
Currently Acme Homes have a public website running successfully but they don’t have a proper system to support and segregate the prospects or exciting customer. Our Sales team is wasting their time in searching for every information of a customer which is already in the system on creating quotes and its hard to know which quotes are denied or accepted in whole lot of quote list. We want to reduce the time consumed by our sales team.
We want to treat our customer with easy access to their Acme Homes information where they can communicate with our sales and service team from anywhere in the world supporting mobile apps too.The customer should be able to chat with our sales team or service team on enquires or to raise issues regarding to their purchased product. They should be able to track on their raised issues instantly.
Our service team members are attending cases which is not their expertise very often which is resulting us in poor customer service and we are losing our customers too.Our revenue is reducing exponentially.
Salesforce Solution
On knowing the challenges I have designed the below solution for Acme Homes.
Acme Homes App
I have build an app exclusively for Acme Homes which supports mobile as we know. A sales and service team members can work with this app which includes required standard object and custom objects.
For the requirement I have created two custom objects “Projects” and “Packages”. The standard objects used for Acme Homes are Leads, Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities, Quotes, Products, Price Books, Contracts, Cases, Reports and Dashboards.
Web-to-lead Form
I have created a Web-to-lead form with First name, Last name, Email, Mobile, Street, City, State/Province and Country fields from leads. Let Acme Homes use this form in their public website to capture more leads from who pop into website for enquiry.Hence this increases the number of leads.
Below is how web-to-lead form looks for Acme Homes.
Lead Captured from website is created in Salesforce
Lead Conversion
The lead created on SF is converted after sales team have qualified the lead.To track the customers Account type, I have built a process on lead to set Account Type to prospect once lead is converted.
Lead is converted- Accounts, Contacts and Opportunities are created
Process Builder on Lead to auto-set Account type to prospect when lead is converted.
Create Quote easily
Sales agent contact the prospects to discuss on creating opportunity regarding their interests.Once the opportunity is successfully created, sales agent generate multiple quotes offering customers different price choice.Just for the requirement I have created a new checkbox field called “Final” on Quote object.
Criteria 1
I have created a Quote process to auto-populate Contact, Project and Package selected which saves sales agent’s time.
Best part is that the sales agent don’t need to struggle to share the quote choices with the customers. Salesforce helps to generate quote pdf to email quotes to customer.
Criteria 2
Once the Quote is accepted by the customer, I have added an addition criteria for quote process on accepted quote. If the quote is accepted, on conditions that quote status field is changed to accepted and check for the quote checkbox field “Final” is false. This creates four immediate actions:
First: Updating accepted quotes description field to “Final Quote” and Quote name to “Quote Opportunity name+Quote number+Finalised”.
Second: Updating denied quote description field to empty, final checkbox field to false, quote name to quote number- Denied and status to denied.
Third:Once the quote is finalised, it auto creates new contract which auto populate account, address, contact, contract name as “contract for- quote number”, package and project.
Fourth:Update opportunity stage to closed won
Criteria 3
What happens if the customer changes his mind upon finalising the quote??? I have designed solution by adding one more criteria on quote for opportunity. If finalised quote is again changed to any other status, then the opportunity stage move back to need analysis stage.
Second immediate action to update the quote Final boolean field to false.
Once the contract is activated, I have built a contract process to update account type to “Complete Customer” so Acme Homes can have track on customers who have activated contracts
Customer Community Portal
On activating the contract, user record is creating with the login access for customer community for customer. This helps Acme homes to provide personalised user portal access for their respective information and also customer can be in contact with Acme Homes sales and service team for tracking their contracts or to get back if any concerns arise.
The user can view all their contracts information in detail.
The user can create new case within the contract detail page if required.
Successful Case Handling
For an effective and successful case handling, we have to channel the cases to right person with appropriate expertise. So I have created two different record types “Technical Issue” and “General Issue” assigning it two different queues by building case assignment rule.
A case process, the customer will be get an email notification on creating the case successfully. So that the customer will have a track.
Let’s see, how it really works. When a customer tried to create a case, he has to select the issue type either general or technical so that the case will reach right person for better service.
The case raised in the community is successfully created. In the below image we can observe the email notification received by the customer as soon as he/she create the case.
The case raised in community is successfully created in salesforce.
Once the case is created, according case assignment rule, an appropriate service agent will handle the case for successful resolution. The agents and customer can exchange their chats through case comments as shown below.
It’s very important for the customer to track the case status. To make it easy for the customer, I have implemented case comment process for notification in community.
In the below image, the service agent comment for the raised case is notified on the community for better tracking of the case for customers
Upon on resolving the raised case by service agent, the case will be successfully closed. It’s very important to notify the customer upon closing the case successfully. For this purpose, another criteria is added for email notification when case is closed.
I’m still working on the enhancements hence this is phase 1 of my project. Looking forward to bringup maximum enhancements what an admin can do to the best in the phase 2 of my project.
PS: I’m happy to welcome any suggestion or advice 😊
