CRM FYI

It’s kind of scary, but I think he really did. I was just drafting an email to my favorite User Experience team at Salesforce. I wanted  to discuss any future ideas they had on revamping the interface to allow “gradual data entry” and not just overwhelm people with a huge page layout with temporally superfluous fields on it.

When I heard that Salesforce had released a new feature set called Visual Process Manager (VPM), I first thought it was a rehash of the previously released visual approval process designer. While a good product, it wasn’t the most exciting thing around. (No offense to those who wrote it. Showing the process visually is WAAAY better than just looking at a series of steps.)

As it turns out though, Visual Process Manager was actually the first step in Salesforce breaking open the piggy bank to acquire some new companies to compliment their current functionality and expand way beyond what many of us are even dreaming about.

Salesforce acquired Informavores, a six year old company in the UK who specializes in simplifying process management. Co-founded by Steve Wood and Robert Suttie, they’ve been AppExchange partners with Salesforce since 2009.

The core of VPM is (the formerly known product) Firefly; a sophisticated yet simple to use, drag and drop interface that you can design process flows in minutes, not days. Test them out, on the fly. Then after they’ve been in place for awhile, measure which paths are taken most often; which ones are never used at all. Learn how you can tweak the process to make it smoother for everyone.

Fortunately, some of Informavore’s customers like British Telecom (BT) are already on Salesforce.com for CRM. While Firefly was originally designed to work with nearly any CRM solution, I’m willing to bet in the very near future, they’re moving to just one; Salesforce.

What gets me most excited about VPM is the idea that some data is gathered in sequence and the user doesn’t need to see 80 fields on a page, just to fill out the 20 which turn out to be relevant to their particular issue or inquiry. That’s where VPM’s call scripting comes in.

Using VPM to design a call script allows you to gather relevant data when you need it and help guide sales and support people down the right avenue to not only ensure better data quality, but gather the right data every time and ensure that mandatory paths were taken and so on.

I’ve already got in mind a project that I want to start building on VPM tomorrow. I have a team of sales people who sell Medicare insurance to the public. There are strict regulations around the exact scripts which much be read to members when they’re enrolling in Medicare. VPM will allow me to design all those paths (98 pages on paper) and ensure we not only gather exactly the data necessary to enroll those members, but will ensure that we read them each part of that script and record their response to the whole enrollment process. in “the old” Salesforce, I couldn’t do anything that complex without a customized solution like using Flex Builder for Force.com. Now rather than needing developers, business users can design and deploy complex business processes on their own and adjust as quickly as their business changes.

Do you have business processes which require this kind of scripting? Maybe it isn’t 98 pages like my Medicare model above, but maybe you need to gather relevant data step by step and the “old way” in Salesforce just hasn’t given you the results you need from a data quality or employee guidance standpoint. You should check out VPM.

I’m sure we’ll see a lot more about this in the coming months, but for now, Marc read my mind and has spent his first however many millions of dollars from the piggy bank wisely on acquiring Informavores.  This is a great step forward and I’ll let you know how it goes building my first scripts.

See an overview of Visual Process Manager

salesforce.com: Visual Process Manager Demo

Posted to The Salesforce Channel by CRMFYI on February 02, 2010

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See what Firefly for Salesforce can do (Informavores demo)

See an overview of Firefly for Salesforce and Force.com (Informavores demo)