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- Published on Tuesday, 08 April 2014 19:53
Who on earth would give their sale team access to the billing system?
What if they wanted it the web-based CRM software SalesForce?
The billing system is probably the only place where all your solutions/platforms/services including future agreements, congregate to provide a true and detailed picture of your contractual and variable relationship with your customers. This total clarity not only provides detailed financial forecasting but also has the potential to provide great opportunities for your different departments, identifying possible upgrade and cross-selling opportunities as well as insuring that no renewals get missed.
Encode It’s Recurring Billing and Payments software module has always enabled access to this valuable information by way of a login user-profile that gives read-only access, export routines that provides selected key information for use with third party software or read-only ODBC connection direct to the data, again, for any application that can use this open data-sharing standard.
Well, we were recently asked, by one of clients, to provide this information for their sales teams but they used the web based SalesForce solution.
This request clearly posed various questions including those of security. Will our client wish to open up their system to enable a remote MS Sequel connection, should we provide an IIS web services solution, as we have for remote users of other software modules, or would batch updating be the better method?
Getting to the right solution was assisted by the decision that the data could be up to 24 hours old, it didn’t need to be real-time and that the size of the data required to be held in the SalesForce cloud had no significant financial effect.
Now to the last question; to configure SalesForce to come in and collect the data or to push it up? Both solutions are fully supported by SalesForce and our client chose the latter and most secure option.
So with everything agreed, in a matter of days, working together with them and their SalesForce consultants, we have delivered a totally automated solution that provides their sales team with a much clearer picture of every client.
Clearly we await analysis as to the goal of providing even better market-leading client service, based on building true partnering relationships and assisted by the total clarity of the contractual relationship.
So to the opening question; “Who on earth would give their sale team access to the billing system?, clearly anyone using our Billing and Payments module can and now anyone who also has SalesForce can (with a little help) choose to too.
