Best practices of Salesforce Financial Services Cloud implementation

Introduction

The financial services sector is undergoing rapid digital transformation, and at the forefront of this evolution is Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (SFSC).

This solution offers financial institutions a comprehensive suite to enhance client relationships

1) What is Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (SFSC)

Built on the world’s #1 CRM platform, Financial Services Cloud is a cloud software that enables companies working in financial services to automate their core processes and build trust by unifying the customer experience across channels, geographies, and lines of business—both commercial and consumer.

Purpose-built industry functionality and the capabilities of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud enable financial services firms to increase employee productivity, accelerate time to value, and deepen customer trust with every interaction.

2) Key functionality of SFSC

Salesforce Financial Services Cloud has out-of-the-box functionality for wealth management,  retail banking, commercial banking, mortgage, insurance companies to get 360-degree view of their customers, manage clients’ financial data, provide personalized service, automate customer’s onboarding and use the advantages of advanced analytics.

Key features:

Data model for Financial Service Cloud enhances Salesforce CRM data model to meet requirements of the financial sector. It includes new custom fields on Account and Contact objects as well as new custom objects to manage relationships, households, identification documents, employment, education, financial information, financial transactions, etc.

Actionable Relationship Center (ARC)  helps to visualize relationships between accounts and contacts in the form of a graph and manage records directly from relationship graphs.

Know your Customer (NYC) Data model to support customers engagement and risk management.

Manage customer financial information: financial accounts, assets and liabilities, clients’ financial goals, financial transactions, billing statements and etc

Create Action plans based on company templates and best practices to automate repetitive tasks for specific business operations. 

Timelines for chronological view of customer interactions

Branch Management to configure branch units hierarchy and track branch performance and productivity.

Manage prospects and deals using Salesforce CRM Leads and Opportunities.

Manage customer interactions using Salesforce Cases and Service Cloud features.

Advanced analytics based on Salesforce CRM Analytics for Wealth management, insurance, retail banking with insights about customer’s financial data and high-potential clients

3) Preparation to the implementation

Preparation is a key to success. When a decision of Salesforce Financial Service Cloud implementation is made before start any salesforce implementation activities don’t forget to go through the following steps:

• Identify key stakeholders and define project goals, KPI, budget with them 
• Define the project timeline and roadmap  
• Specify what Salesorce platform and Salesforce Financial Services Cloud features you are going to adopt whiting the project 
• Determine what Salesforce licenses will be required for these features usage
• Define project Team

4) Planning

Based on your project goals, plan a number of discovery sessions with stakeholders and (or) business process/product owners to gather business requirements and prepare Solution design. More deep view on project requirements may have an impact on project timeline, roadmap, project plan, resource plan and budget. 

Working on project milestones it’s highly recommended to plan production launch with some MVP as soon as possible and with regular releases after. This will help you to start getting return on investment already on the early stage of the project, receiving feedback from business users and mitigate risks not to receive project goals.

At this stage you also will need to define how you are going to run the project: project management methodology, tools to manage project tasks (issue trackers, messengers, etc), project management processes, project reporting, etc.

And it’s time to contact your Salesforce Account executive regarding license purchasing in order to be ready with the Salesforce environment at the beginning of the configuration stage.

5) Configuration

Now you are ready to continue with implementation according to gathered requirements and solution design:

• Create development and testing environment (sandboxed form you production instance) to organize smooth and continuous development process
• Highly recommended to implement CI/CD process to automate development process. At least be sure that you back up metadata from you production, test and development environment to some code repository
• Configure business processes according to solution design. Implement required custom development and integrations.
• Configure user profiles and permissions
• Perform QA of implemented  business processes under end user profiles
• Create required project documentation
• Run user training/onboarding or prepare user documentation

It’s very important during configuration and QA to think from the perspective of  business processes: business processes steps, responsible for steps execution and how these steps are executed across IT systems including Salesforce Financial Service Cloud. This approach helps you to avoid gaps in implementation. 

6) Data-migration

Data-migration is extremely important for the success of the project. On one hand you will be sure that all your customers and deal information is not lost and reports will be available from the day 1 of go-live.

On the other hand, Salesforce Financial Cloud implementations usually involve integrations with banks and other 3rd party systems to get required financial data so master data sync and transnational data migration are must have in this case.For a successful data migration, you should consider using a data migration tool to navigate the process efficiently.

Fos successful data migration you should go through the following steps:

• Define Data Sources from which you need to migrate data to Salesforce (IT systems, files, etc)
• Prepare Object and field mapping 
• Prepare a sequence of data migration
• Analyze the number of records for migration, this can have influence on go-live activities and timeline if there is a significant number of objects and records
• Take care about records deduplication
• Automate data migration activities using custom scripts, middleware tools if data migration scope is rather big and mapping rules are not straightforward. In this case the usage of Salesforce native tools like Data Loader, Data import wizard can be not efficient.
• Define environment for test data migration, be sure that you will be provided with access to source IT systems or at least data for test migration from source IT systems
• Plan at least 2 iteration of test data migration and document results of test data migration as after 1st iteration of data migration you may need to do corrections and repeat test migration
• Receive approval of test data migration results from stakeholders/key business users to avoid issues after production migration

7) UAT

Your MVP is configured, test data migration is done, initial user onboarding/training is done now so at this point you'll be able to evaluate readiness of the solution and your team to work with the CRM.

For successful User acceptance testing:

• Define UAT scenario and confirm them with the Team
• Run user training/onboarding before UAT session so Team will be already familiar with application and UAT goes smoother
• Schedule UAT sessions
• Create UAT protocols to confirm passed scenarios and report found issues and new requirements
• Reserve in your project plan time and efforts for fixing of critical issues identified during UAT 
• Receive confirmation from participants that UAT passed and we are ready for production launch.
• As Salesforce Financial Service Cloud implementation is about clients personal and finance data pay attention to fields level and record access during UAT

8) Go-live

And now it’s time to launch with all the nice Salesforce Financial Cloud  features that you implemented last week. It’s and exiting process but it will run smoothly if you take care about the following items:

• Define the date/time for production launch, find the optimal ‘window’ based on you business calendar.
• Notify Team about launch details, provide with all required user documentation, release notes, etc
• Prepare for legacy system(s) freeze
• Prepare a plan for data migration. Don’t forget to create reports about production data migration
• Prepare Salesforce Financial Service Cloud environment (set up production instance, deploy release  metadata from test environment)
• Create users in Salesforce Financial Service Cloud, be sure that users logged in
• Organize extra support for the first days/weeks after launch 
• Monitor Salesforce Financial Service Cloud usage by users, communicate with user what do not use application actively to identify possible issues

Summary

This is how you pass through all Salesforce Financial Service Cloud implementation stages with the first project milestone and scope.

And now you are ready to through these steps again and adopt more great Financial Service Cloud and Salesforce Platform features for your business.