Category: Data Management

Welcome back to another dive into the Salesforce Clouds! If you’re new to our Head in the Clouds series, you can take a look at the full list of Clouds we’ve covered.

This time, we’re looking at Salesforce Government Cloud so stick around to learn more!

What is Salesforce Government Cloud?

Salesforce Government Cloud is a bespoke, securely partitioned instance of the Salesforce 360 platform which offers an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) platform. It’s aimed at:

• US federal government
• Local government customers
• US government contractors
• Public sector
• Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs)

Why does Salesforce Government Cloud exist? 

Salesforce explains the challenges facing government authorities and public offices in a Trailhead module:

“In the modern digital landscape of online applications, customer self-service, and automated workflows, government authorities and public offices must rethink and reinvent their task flows. The ultimate goal for any public sector authority is to increase constituent engagement and streamline internal workflows. Public Sector Solutions from Salesforce do just that.”

Government Cloud’s main objective is to provide government entities with an industry-leading, security-compliant platform on which to scale and secure resources in order to complete their mission effectively. We’ll dive into the specifics of how it does this later.

Quick glossary

Let’s take a minute to dive into some helpful terms and definitions:

Government Cloud: a bespoke-for-government and public sector suite of tools built on the Salesforce CRM platform. Government Cloud is designed for agencies around the world including central government, local government, police and healthcare. Salesforce Government Cloud maintains a FedRAMP Agency Authority to Operate (ATO) at the Moderate Security Impact Level.

Government Cloud Plus: runs on AWS GovCloud (US), a dedicated instance of Salesforce’s Government Cloud designed to support the security needs of U.S. government agencies and contractors. It has achieved a FedRAMP Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) at the High Security Impact Level.

Check out this comparison chart of the differences between Government Cloud and Government Cloud Plus.

FedRAMP at High / Moderate Security Impact Level: a differentiator between Government Cloud and Government Cloud Plus. Government Cloud Plus is compliant to the highest level whereas Government Cloud is compliant to the Moderate level. This means FedRAMP has evaluated these cloud services via a significant, thorough security and compliance review that is annually reassessed. In short, having authority to operate at this highest security level allows Salesforce Government Cloud Plus customers to use Salesforce for the most sensitive, unclassified data.

What can you do with Salesforce Government Cloud?

Since Government Cloud is already built on Salesforce and its 360 CRM, it casts a wide net in what it can provide for the public and government sector. Salesforce offers out-of-the-box security-compliant applications designed for government service.

Here are some of the applications and functionality available with Government Cloud:

• Emergency response management
• License and permit approvals processes
• Inspections management applications
• Grants management applications
• Contact Centre functionality
• Scalable call, web, chat and text response systems
• Centralised communication with stakeholders across email, SMS and social platforms
• The power to give public servants a 360-degree view of citizens, stakeholders and partners in a single source of truth – Salesforce CRM!

💡 Did you know: The UK Government has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Salesforce to enable the UK public sector to benefit from access to Salesforce products and citizens.

Why should you use Salesforce Government Cloud?

Overall, there’s clearly a lot that you can do with Salesforce Government Cloud and Government Cloud Plus. Since governments are vast, multifaceted, and public-facing institutions, Salesforce provides a single source of truth digitally with Government Cloud to empower governmental and public sector employees to accelerate their mission impact. There are other benefits too:

• Low code / no code Saas platform that integrates with legacy systems
• Gain access to a broad range of solutions from contact centres to case management to citizen engagement and many more
• Security-first infrastructure compliant with the demands of government
• See time to value in days not years

Learn more from these Salesforce demo videos.

Salesforce Government Cloud and ProvenWorks in action

ProvenWorks is a Salesforce Partner offering a number of solutions that enhance out-of-the-box Salesforce functionality. We have customers around the world who are government entities with interesting use cases around importing.

Empower external stakeholders, business entities and programmes to import data to your Salesforce org quickly and securely.

Whether you are reporting on local outreach programmes, analysing state-wide employment data or outsourcing contracts for efficiency, you need to collect all that data into your single source of truth – Salesforce CRM.

Our spreadsheet data importing solution, SimpleImport, empowers government entities who want to streamline data input by removing manual workload and empowering users to import themselves. Unlike security-compromising solutions access via third-party website or inefficient admin-only tools, use SimpleImport directly from your Salesforce org or a digital experience.

Contact us today to learn more about how we can support your mission impact!

Reach out to the ProvenWorks team and find out more about our solutions and how we can help meet your Salesforce needs.

So what’s next? The choice is yours.

You can either go back to the first blog in our Head in the Clouds series: What is Experience Cloud and what can you do with it? Or… you can access all the blogs in the Head in the Clouds series.

This is the second part of our deep dive into ZIP+4 Codes for Salesforce. If you’re not sure what ZIP+4 Codes are and why you should care, here’s where you can read the first blog post.

A recap in 3 sentences

Want to get up to speed quicker than that? Here’s the 3-sentence version.

ZIP+4 Codes were created by the USPS to provide even more precise address matching to a more granular level, since they represent only a handful of houses or even a single building.

So, ZIP+4 Codes are incredibly useful because they help the USPS more effectively sort and distribute mail.

For you and your business, this means faster deliveries, reduced misdeliveries, granularity even down to a specific PO box, and all of this translates to saving money and time!

Salesforce CRM and ZIP+4 Codes

Salesforce as an organisation is quick to highlight the importance of ZIP Code data: 

“Without geographic data to structure and enhance existing CRM data, and no market data to track against current market share, it’s impossible to effectively manage sales territories for growth.”

What does bad geographical data look like in practice?

• Allocating sales resource to geographic areas with little potential
• Spending time marketing to places where ROI is unlikely
• Struggling to report on market share across regions, leaving your organisation without a clear forward-looking strategy

All of this boils down to an alarming amount of time and money wasted.

You’re probably thinking that we’ve spent enough time preaching about the perils of inaccurate or missing ZIP Code data for your organisation. So, let’s take it one step further; let’s look at why you need Zip+4 Codes for your Salesforce CRM. 

We’re going to use Salesforce CRM as our case study here, but you can easily swap out Salesforce for your CRM of choice. The information remains completely relevant.

Why you need ZIP+4 Codes for your Salesforce CRM

1. Give yourself the competitive advantage

“Poor quality data costs businesses around $700 billion a year, or 30 percent of the average company’s revenue” according to Salesforce.

If you’re working in a competitive industry (and aren’t we all these days?), have you considered how cleaner, more precise datapoints like ZIP+4 can give you an advantage over your competitors?

As we work through the points below, we’ll see how more granular data sets you up for a better understanding of your market, clearer reporting and business analysis, and greater opportunity to succeed in your niche.

💡 Bear in mind that here we’re discussing the ‘big picture’ wins. We’re not even going to cover how a cleaner, more accurate CRM database empowers your users to to do their daily tasks more efficiently, increases CRM adoption and allows for faster, simple business processes – all things that can give your business the advantage over your competitors.

2. Many integrations require a ZIP+4 Code

It’s worth considering that, along with the list of benefits we’ll be investigating, for many integrations and delivery services that you use alongside Salesforce CRM, ZIP+4 Codes are not just recommended but required. So why not make your integrations smoother by retrieving ZIP+4 Codes within your CRM?

3. Combine ZIP+4 Codes with market data

We’re completely aware that a ZIP+4 Code alone is not going to provide you with useful market insight. However, when you think about that ZIP+4 Code as the data backbone of your market analysis and white space strategy, you begin to see its potential. Let’s imagine the power of having every CRM record associated with a specific ZIP+4 Code.

Taking a B2B example, imagine displaying the number of companies within a region by NAICS industry code*, connecting this data with a ZIP+4 Code directly on a record in your CRM. As a B2C example, imagine combining a dataset related to age, income and spending habits with the granularity of a ZIP+4 Code to have the most accurate consumer targeting available.

Hopefully you can see that by combining a ZIP+4 Code with market data, you’re creating micro-markets that are giving you the best available information about your white space for growth. A more exact idea of the number of businesses in a ZIP+4 area, a truer picture of the demographic breakdown of an even smaller region… Sales territories, targeted marketing and allocation of resource just got more intentional.

*We’ve got a Salesforce-native tool for looking up industry codes! Check out IndustryComplete.

4. Dig deeper into your analytics

We’ve seen how ZIP+4 Codes can underpin other market datapoints for detailed planning and allocation of resource in your market. Now let’s look at how ZIP+4 Codes can improve your analytics and reporting.

With a ZIP+4 Code associated with each Salesforce record, whether it’s an account, lead, opportunity or something else, you can track sales performance and identify with even more geo-specificity your areas of success. With that information, you know more definitively where to focus your time, resource and efforts to maximise your success.

💡 Once you take into account the possibility that two cities may share the same five-digit ZIP Code, you can see how ZIP+4 Codes empower you to drill down more than your competitors to identify your high yield regions.

5. Succeed in your industry niche

It’s always helpful when talking about niches to avoid generalisations. So, let’s dive straight into a case study for this one.

We have a client who supplies parts in the aerospace industry. They need to ship parts to aircraft hangars that are often situated in the middle of nowhere. Providing a ZIP+4 Code for these airport hangars is the best possible way they can ensure their parts will reach their destinations quickly and efficiently.

Whether you work in a niche aerospace sector or something completely different, getting ZIP+4 data into your Salesforce CRM means you’re setting yourself up with the best possible data for success in your (extremely specific!) business processes.

6. Avoid paying excess tax

No one likes talking about taxes, thinking about taxes or doing taxes. Yet it’s what Benjamin Franklin famously called one of the two certainties of life. It’s worth considering that ZIP+4 Codes can take some of the sting out of your tax process.

Did you know that if your address isn’t accurate enough, you could end up paying more due to local boundary lines? Having a ZIP+4, from which you can establish an exact County, is a sure-fire way to ensure you provide the most accurate address data possible.

How to get ZIP+4 Codes for Salesforce

Now that you can see why ZIP+4 Codes are incredibly powerful in Salesforce CRM, it’s time to start using them!

You can easily retrieve ZIP+4 Codes for your addresses in Salesforce using AddressTools, our award-winning package for address validation, standardisation and verification.

Book a free demo

In case you can’t tell(!), we love talking about all things related to address data in Salesforce. Why not schedule a call with one of our team to chat about your ZIP+4 and wider address data requirements for your Salesforce org.

Here at ProvenWorks you’re going to find some of the biggest advocates for buying a solution off the shelf, or what we call a ‘managed package’. We’re fully aware that when it comes to the Build versus Buy debate, we’re pretty biased. We’re a Salesforce ISV (Independent Software Vendor) so we make a living off creating managed packages that businesses using Salesforce CRM can find on the AppExchange.

This is why we look to get other people into the debate too. We’ve done a number of sessions working with developers to raise awareness over the debate around Build Versus Buy – just watch this session we ran with Bitwise Industries at CenCal Dreamin’ 2022.

You will find an endless amount of content from Salesforce ISVs advocating the choice to buy a managed package. You will also find the same number of developers in favour of developing a custom solution. 

What takes us by surprise is when developers speak out in favour of managed packages. And this happened to us recently. 

helpfulbits, a German Salesforce consultancy who implements custom software and delivers training, recently wrote an in-depth review of our data import solution SimpleImport. 

As a system integrator that writes custom software, but also offers a prebuilt standard solution, helpfulbits are the perfect case study for understanding better the choice between build versus buy.

An interview with a developer on managed packages

As software developers (who typically fall into the “build” side of the build versus buy argument), what’s your 1-minute elevator pitch for choosing custom development?

Well, if your business has very complex processes that are unique to your segment or industry, it can be difficult to find a software that fits your company off the shelf. The larger your company is, the more likely this will be. Moreover, the larger your userbase is, the higher the return of investment of custom software. For example, it does make a lot of sense to develop a custom software for support agents if you can shave off 1 minute of processing time for hundreds or even thousands of agents – that’s a huge ROI.

Using data imports as an example, we typically choose custom development when there is business logic or any kind of data transformation involved. For example, a customer might have an excel layout that does not directly translate to records in Salesforce. Other clients might need to join data from multiple sheets into single records.

That said, a lot of the time, service providers and their clients internally simply shy away from the process and the bureaucracy involved in procurement, even if there is a good standard solution, because the developers have already been hired.

On the flip side of that, can you share the story of what led you to develop your own out-of-the-box solution, helpful sync?

I’ll gladly do that! Basically, my buddy and me were having a beer and thinking hard about a product that would solve a real-world problem. We figured that we’d need an easy way to push complex data around Salesforce Orgs and Sandboxes, to debug errors in production for example. The situation escalated quickly and we built a sandbox seeder and anonymizer that we and our clients like to use. Back when we started, we didn’t even know such tools already existed and that there was competition. Had we known, we probably wouldn’t have done it. However, we tried some of the existing software and most solutions were not to our liking, as they were either too complicated and cumbersome or too narrow in their scope.

In your review of our solution SimpleImport, you mention that “custom code is not always economical”. What do you mean by that? When do you find that custom development is not the right decision?

Custom software basically has two price tags. One for the solution itself and the other one for maintenance. Custom development is expensive. For the price of a custom solution, you can probably pay the license fees of something like SimpleImport for a few years. Moreover, it is likely that the custom solution will have to be modified and maintained every now and then, for example, when a new Salesforce release is published. Those costs can be comparable to license fees.

Personally I think custom development can only be justified when your business logic is really special and complex and, in the case of importing, the data has to be transformed before it is imported into Salesforce. The latter can often simply be done with an additional excel sheet, though.

Is there anything you think customers don’t give enough consideration to during the build versus buy argument?

I think most customers are already working with their development teams and rely on their opinions and counsel. However, developers in general often don’t like to look for existing solutions. There’s even a name for it, the so called “Not invented here” syndrome. I am guilty of that myself! Most of the time, when it comes to standard tasks, there are off-the-shelf solutions that simply are better and less expensive.

Looking towards ISVs like ProvenWorks, what do you want managed package providers to know? What do you want to tell them?

Pitch your products more to consultants and developers! They are the ones who implement the solution for the customer and who will receive the user story requesting the “Excel Import” for implementation. If they know about your product and like it, they will recommend it during backlog refinements and the like.

About helpfulbits

About SimpleImport

Nonprofits are by no means left out of the Salesforce ecosystem. As the title of this article says, we’ll be looking into Salesforce’s very own Nonprofit Cloud, a cloud designed and dedicated to optimising nonprofits’ internal and external operations.  

Stick around as we delve into the facts and functions of Nonprofit Cloud – you may just discover a new cloud to use or recommend!

What is Nonprofit Cloud? 

Nonprofit Cloud is one of Salesforce’s constituent management solutions, tailored for charity and nonprofit organisations. Nonprofit Cloud enables users to connect every function of their nonprofit organisation (including but not limited to fundraising, marketing, operations, grants and donations), and holds all this information in one central place – Salesforce!  

Within Nonprofit Cloud is the Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). This is a set of managed packages that sits on top of your Salesforce org and is preconfigured for the types of use cases that nonprofits organisations need. NPSP provides users with custom objects like ‘Donations, Households, Organization‘*, etc, everything specifically designed for nonprofits! 

How does Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud fit into the wider Salesforce ecosystem?

Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud was built with nonprofits in mind. However, this isn’t to suggest that nonprofits are in any way sidelined or prevented from scaling up with the full power of Salesforce. Since it’s built on the same world-leading platform, Nonprofit Cloud can work together with other clouds. For example, Marketing Cloud and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) can be added to Nonprofit Cloud to enhance its overall performance for effective donor engagement. 

So Nonprofit Cloud integrates with other Salesforce Clouds and provides access to other powerful resources too. Here are some of our favourite Cloud combos, functionality and resources that work well with Nonprofit Cloud: 

• Salesforce.org – The social impact centre of Salesforce.com, focused on “partnering with the global community of nonprofits and schools to tackle the world’s biggest problems.”
• Sales and Marketing Cloud– Nonprofit-compatible Salesforce Clouds that work to provide personalised marketing content and help you manage sales data.
• The Power of Us Hub – the portal for Salesforce.org product documentation, how-to videos, webinars, and community groups of all kinds… and the place to get 10 free nonprofit licenses! 
• Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot)– is a marketing software as a service (SaaS) marketing automation platform for Salesforce to empower marketing teams.  
• Digital Experiences– an external, interactive platform that sits on top of your Salesforce CRM to enhance external user experience. Check out our blog on Experience Cloud for more information!

💡 Top tip: Using Nonprofit Cloud can increase Total Online Giving by 130% through its donor centricity!  

Why should you use Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud?

With Nonprofit Cloud, nonprofit organisations get a centralised constituent management hub for all their internal and external communication, interaction and monitoring. Onboarding and administration can also be centralised so donors receive a more personalised experience, plus, users can get a better overview of personnel management, such as volunteer data. Nonprofit Cloud is scalable, which means that you can grow your Salesforce implementation as your nonprofit organisation grows.  

For clarity, here are the main benefits of using Nonprofits Cloud: 

• Scalable, customisable and centralised;  
• Sustainable and secure;  
• Global access for users; 
• Easily adoptable and user friendly; 
• Free licence opportunities from Salesforce; 
• The Power of Us Hub, a support hub that is Nonprofit Cloud specific with communities and how-to videos.

Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud and ProvenWorks in action

How can ProvenWorks, a Salesforce ISV, work with Nonprofit Cloud? First off, we’d like to highlight that nonprofit organisations get a discounted price for any of our paid solutions that take their fancy! Secondly, we love (we really mean it!) working with nonprofits. We won the Salesforce Partner Innovation Award 2021 in the Nonprofit category for our work with Malala Fund. 

Our solutions work seamlessly with Nonprofit Cloud and empower you to: 

• Import donor and recurring donations data easily; 
• Verify address data from the point of entry;  
• Ensure compliance for marketing calls to UK donors and partners.  

Manage and organise donor data with SimpleImport 

SimpleImport does what it says: it makes importing into Salesforce simple. Do you have volumes of donor data or recurring donations from external platforms that need centralising in Salesforce? SimpleImport and its intuitive Lightning component, ManagedImport, empowers you and your team to import this data quickly with a simple drag & drop. It’s quick to adopt and fast to use, so no vital time is lost from your nonprofit goals.  

Verify and authenticate address data at the point of entry with AddressTools   

AddressTools verifies your constituent address data to ensure only clean data lives in your org. Need a postal address format for donors, volunteers and partners? We’ve got you covered! Working with the UK Gift Aid process? AddressTools helps keep any manual updates within this process to an absolute minimum (<0.05%*) enabling efficient and timely processing of Gift Aid claims. 

Ensure compliance for marketing calls to UK donors with PhoneTools 

Cold calling donors or potential donors for your nonprofit? The UK has strict data privacy laws against cold calling, allowing UK residents to register to the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) and UK businesses to the Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS). PhoneTools is a native Salesforce solution that screens your donor numbers against the TPS and CTPS lists to tell you directly if you can call that phone number. 

So what’s next? The choice is yours.

You can either go back to the first blog in our Head in the Clouds series: What is Experience Cloud and what can you do with it? Or… you can access all the blogs in the Head in the Clouds series.

The world is your oyster!

Education Cloud is a platform built on Salesforce CRM aimed at the education sector, including schools through to higher education institutions like universities and colleges. This cloud is aimed at keeping students, alumni and staff connected.

Our blog will take you through the key aspects of Education Cloud to provide you with more knowledge on what you can do with this Salesforce Cloud, and more importantly, to decide whether this is the right cloud for you. Let’s get started!

What is Education Cloud? 

According to Salesforce, Education Cloud is intended to ‘deliver the personalised engagements, proactive advice, and connected experiences students expect’. Education Cloud has a few extra benefits such as the Power of Us hub, K-12 focus, K-20 focus and Education Data Architecture. All of these features enable Education Cloud to better connect students, staff, schools, districts and universities, as well as give schools and universities a 360-degree holistic view of the education journey.   

Quick glossary:

We’ve mentioned a few key terms for this cloud already so welcome to the glossary! Here we’ll define some of the terms we mentioned above. 

Power of Us hub: A community support hub that helps Education Cloud users access 10 free subscriptions and find discounts on other subscriptions, products and services from Salesforce. 

K-12: Refers to the term given to the school years for children from Kindergarten to 12th grade in high school. However, in this respect it shows the type of institution this CRM platform is aimed at, with the ability to scale as the school grows. It also acts as a ‘single source of truth’ for each student and their family with all their data held in one place, making it easier to personalize interactions between school, student and the student’s family. 

K-20: Refers to the term given to the school years for children from Kindergarten right through to degree. This means that both K-12 and Higher Ed institutions can use Salesforce’s Education Data Architecture to create a connected holistic view of their students. For Higher Ed, this means giving universities a flexible way to ‘track dual enrolment, universal learner profiles and more’ with a focus on lifelong learning.  

Education Data Architecture: This is Salesforce’s flexible architecture that provides the foundation of Education Cloud. It’s designed for higher education institutions to get started with Salesforce faster by providing objects, logic and automation tailored towards student data, program enrolment, alumni, engagement and more. This trail on Trailhead is a great place to learn more!

What can you build with Salesforce Education Cloud?

Salesforce Education Cloud is a set of functionality built on the powerful Salesforce CRM platform. This means that when you’re using Education Cloud to manage your data, support your students and create an online community,  the world is your oyster! 

Here are some real-life examples of things you can do with Education Cloud to enhance your student and staff experience: 

• Streamline student services on one platform to deliver unified experiences
• Manage the entire admissions process
• Provide external users with an interactive and beautiful looking interface for all your community interactions – think student registration portals! Check out our blog on Experience Cloud to learn more
• Engage with prospective students, students and alumni with personalised marketing material to build lifelong relationships
• Create beautiful reports and dashboards on recruitment and admissions data

💡 Top tip: Using Education Cloud can increase enrollment by 10%

Why should you use Salesforce Education Cloud?

With students and families now expecting a unified online journey, having a system in place that facilitates more time on education and personalising the student experience and less time on non-academic needs is vital.  

Since Education Cloud is student, teacher and family centric, it provides one single platform on which to manage and support the full learning experience, from admissions to alumni.  

Put simply, Education Cloud:  

• Enables you to give students and their families, prospective students and staff applicants a personalised and centralised journey for an optimum experience;  
• Gives you access to Power of Us hub – a support community network; 
• Secures an internal and external communications hub; 
• Enables you to access 10 free licenses and discounted services from Salesforce; 
• Is scalable, customisable and compatible with other Salesforce Clouds, integrations and third-party vendors to help you deliver an exceptional education experience for students; 
• Is built specifically for schools and universities. 

Salesforce Education Cloud and ProvenWorks in action

Education Cloud empowers the education industry with a world-leading single platform that adds great value to your institution. It creates endless new and improved opportunities for interactions between your students, alumni and staff.  

ProvenWorks offers solutions that work seamlessly with Education Cloud to:  

• Open up import jobs to external users simply and securely 
• Empower internal and external users to in put verified addresses at point of entry 

Open up importing jobs to your internal and external users safely

Regularly importing volumes of student-related data is time consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. SimpleImport empowers users and admins to quickly import files –  XLS, XLSX, ODS & CSV – into your Salesforce CRM. No more wasting time on manual administrative tasks.  

Empower users to provide verified address data from the point of entry 

Ensuring your mailed communication gets to the right individual is crucial. Incomplete address data contributes to a poor admissions or student experience and increases failed delivery costs! AddressTools empowers users to enter verified addresses at the point of entry, even on student registration portals. Our solution solves your address data concerns, so you remain focused on giving students and their families the best education journey possible.   

We’ve got more to come!

The next Salesforce Cloud we’re going to delve into is Nonprofit Cloud. Check it out now!

Salesforce recognises how vast and vital the healthcare sector is to everyone, and has established a cloud focused on this sector to improve patient and internal user experiences. 

In this blog we’ll look into what Health Cloud does and what you can gain from using it.

What is Health Cloud? 

Health Cloud is built on Service Cloud, one of Salesforce’s most popular offerings. Health Cloud is a set of functionality that allows patient liaisons and healthcare professionals to monitor, segment and prioritise patient data. This cloud partnership provides the healthcare sector with improved and personalised customer service, as well as, internally, showing healthcare professionals a 360-degree holistic view of their patients. These advantages are possible through features such as smart case management functionality, EHR-to-Salesforce API connections and secure record management. 

Now that we’ve covered an overview of Health Cloud, let’s define some of the key terminology!

Quick glossary:

Service Cloud: The key Salesforce Cloud that Health Cloud is built on. It enables users to create a tailored and personal customer experience, to ‘increase satisfaction, retention, and lifetime value’. Want to learn more about Service Cloud, check out Trailhead’s Service Cloud Basics module!

Smart case management: According to Salesforce: “A case management system lets a company collect and organize customer service interactions that occur on any channel.” What makes it smart? “Modern case management platforms pull customer requests into a database, where customer service agents can view and respond to them…” 

EHR-to-Salesforce API connections:  An add-on API Salesforce extension specifically for Health Cloud. These connections enable your Salesforce CRM to receive and translate EHR, and other sources of medical data, for patient records. 

What can you build with Salesforce Health Cloud?

Salesforce Health Cloud is a set of functionality built on the Salesforce CRM platform. This means that when you’re using Health Cloud to communicate patient needs, collaborate with other healthcare professionals and track and monitor patient progress, everything is in one place!

Popular examples of things you can do with Health Cloud:

• Care plan tracking
• Patient marketing campaigns 
• Patient acquisition and monitoring
• Medical professional recruitment 
• Patient outreach and engagement management

💡 Top tip: Trailhead has some handy modules for you to learn more about Health Cloud so you can Deliver Great Patient Care with Health Cloud.

Why should you use Salesforce Health Cloud?

With Health Cloud, you can access the right health information about patients from a range of sources, including EHR systems and wearables. Healthcare professionals can prioritise tasks and segment patient lists, provide real-time and collaborative messaging for providers, patients, family members, and care teams. All this enables patients to receive the best and most personalised care possible.

Health Cloud is native to Salesforce, so there is no requirement to switch between solutions which can lose you time or worse, cause confusion in interpreting and working with siloed data.

Put simply, Health Cloud allows you to: 

• Remain on Salesforce – everything you need is in one place!
• Personalise patient services
• Receive and manage all medical data records and contacts in one, central and secure system
• Engage with health liaison officers, patients and more using community hubs
• Tailor, configure and scale your cloud as you grow 

Salesforce Health Cloud and ProvenWorks in action

As a set of functionality, Health Cloud adds tremendous value to your healthcare practice by creating endless new and improved opportunities for you to interact with your patients and partner healthcare providers. 

ProvenWorks offers solutions that work seamlessly in Health Cloud to:

• Empower internal and external users to provide verified addresses at the point of entry
• Open up import jobs to partners simply and securely

Import data into Health Cloud efficiently

Is data importing a pain point impacting your and your patients’ experience? SimpleImport enables simple and secure importing into Salesforce without losing precious time for patients or healthcare professionals. 

Empower internal and external users to provide verified addresses

Managing patient information and keeping records clean with up-to-date data is essential for the healthcare industry. AddressTools ensures all address data is verified from the point of entry. AddressTools solves your address data concerns, while you focus on treating your patients.

So what’s next? We’ve got more Clouds for you.

The next Salesforce Cloud we’re going to explore is Education Cloud. Check it out now!

You might hear people talk about “Community Cloud”…
You might be wondering how a Digital Experience is different to Salesforce Experience Cloud…
Or you might be asking yourself where a partner portal fits into all of this…

Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered in this article!

What is Salesforce Experience Cloud?

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a set of functionality built on the Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform. Experience Cloud enables you to build beautifully-branded “digital experiences” that are connected to your CRM with a key focus on engaging customers and empowering partners. You can use Experience Cloud to create multiple sites and experiences within your Salesforce org to address different purposes.

We’ve already thrown in a few tricky words so why don’t we take a quick pause to define some key terms.

Quick glossary:

Salesforce CRM platform: More than a database, this powerful software is your single source of truth for managing your customer relationships. It’s for you and your business.

Salesforce Experience Cloud:  Formerly known as “Community Cloud”, it’s a set of functionality to deliver external-facing digital experiences (see below) that sit on top of your CRM. It’s for you, your business and your external stakeholders.

Salesforce Community Cloud: The old name for Salesforce Experience Cloud.

Digital Experience: The external-facing ‘site’ you can build with Salesforce Experience Cloud.

Site: Another name for a Digital Experience instance.

Partner portal: One example of a Digital Experience.

Help forum: Another example of a Digital Experience.

DXP: You might see Experience Cloud referred to by this acronym; it is Salesforce’s digital experience platform (DXP).

With those definitions in mind, Salesforce’s online learning platform, Trailhead describes digital experiences and Experience Cloud:

“A digital experience built using Experience Cloud provides a window into your Salesforce world.”

 From Get Started with Experience Cloud

So hopefully we’ve cleared up some terms and their definitions. Now let’s investigate what this means in reality!

What can you build using Experience Cloud?

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a set of functionality built on the powerful Salesforce CRM platform. This means that when you’re using Experience Cloud to build a digital experience, the world is your oyster!

You can create a digital experience for any situation where you want to present a beautiful external-facing interaction with your Salesforce CRM.

Popular examples include:

• Partner portal
• Account portal
• Storefronts
• Microsites
• Industry solutions
• Customer service hub
• Help centres
• Support site
• Mobile app

💡 Top tip: Salesforce has created Lightning Bolts. These are pre-built industry-specific Digital Experience templates (amongst other things!) created to help you go to market quicker.

Why should you use Experience Cloud?

With Experience Cloud, you’re giving stakeholders what they need. Not only this, but you’re doing this completely integrated with your CRM. This means you’re maintaining and cultivating a single source of truth with an even bigger picture of your business, your customers and your partners.

We keep repeating that it’s built on the Salesforce platform… but that’s because it’s important! By building on the Salesforce platform, you’re building your partner portal or support forum on world-leading software that is scalable, secure, customizable and centralized.

A few more perks to consider at a glance:

• Go to market fast with industry-specific customizable themes
• Create multiple experiences for specific needs
• Design for every device since all digital experiences are 100% mobile optimized and fully responsive

Partner users cannot import data to Salesforce in a digital experience

Standard Salesforce does not allow users to import data in a digital experience.

We’ve seen that Salesforce themselves describe Digital Experiences as a “window” into your Salesforce world.

However, many businesses and organisations need more than a window; they need a door.

Salesforce Digital Experiences (Communities) built on Experience Cloud have been growing in popularity. It’s easy to see why they’re so popular, since digital experiences can be used in so many contexts: partner portals, e-commerce sites, help centres and even franchisee hubs.

With so many different digital experience audiences come lots of reasons why users need to import data.

It’s worth bearing in mind that standard Salesforce does not allow digital experience users to import data.

Experience Cloud and ProvenWorks in action

In case you can’t tell, we love Salesforce Experience Cloud. As a set of functionality, it adds tremendous value to your business by creating endless new opportunities for you to interact with your stakeholders.

However we’re not just fans of Experience Cloud; as a team of Salesforce experts who create data management solutions to save you time, we see the powerful potential of Digital Experiences.

We’ve created solutions that work seamlessly on Digital Experiences to:

• Open up import jobs to partners and business users simply and securely
• Empower external users to provide verified addresses at the point of entry

Empower external users to import safely and simply via a digital experience

Think partner deal registrations or subsidiary sales information. Safely empower users to import data into your Salesforce through preconfigured mappings using our two-step drag and drop wizard – introducing the ManagedImport component.

So what’s next? We’ve only just begun!

The next Salesforce Cloud on our adventure will be Health Cloud. Stick around and learn something new!