Challenge
Like many companies in the financial services industry, this hedge fund had developed a proprietary customer relationship management (CRM) system to meet its original requirements.
Over time, as technology evolved, user expectations increased, and the firm needed to move faster, it determined it had outgrown its custom CRM’s ability to meet its needs. The company chose Salesforce as its core CRM platform to accelerate its digital transformation strategy.
After the project began, the investment firm determined that Salesforce’s built-in email tracking and calendar syncing capabilities for Office 365 did not offer many key integration features that its previous CRM provided.
“When we determined our data integration and harmonization needs went beyond the Outlook and sync options available with Salesforce, our Salesforce representative and implementation partner both recommended we work with the Riva team,” explains the firm’s CRM administrator.
Flexibility, granular control, precise data handling, and controlled data integration were required. Data needed to be integrated and securely displayed between Salesforce and Office 365 based on specific data sharing and privacy requirements across multiple roles and relationships to support secure collaboration.
Solution
In addition to the built-in Salesforce options not fully meeting the firm’s data integration and harmonization requirements, its information security team had concerns about opening its firewall so Salesforce could access the firm’s email system in a way that did not meet enterprise data security requirements.
The team reviewed Riva’s advanced data controls and integration capabilities and determined that Riva’s ability to sync its data went far beyond the functionality of its previous proprietary system. The Riva implementation received the go-ahead after the firm’s information security team confirmed that Riva met the company’s scalability, security, reliability, data privacy, and compliance requirements.
The company’s investment teams deal with high-value real estate and private equity investments. They needed to ensure internal and external communications could be managed using different policies and integrated into Salesforce to support frequent, secure collaboration on portfolio work. Cross-team collaboration and properly tracking full email conversations, relationship interactions, and meeting activities were especially important.
Because the firm works with highly sensitive and time-sensitive information, it needed to ensure Riva could meet and exceed its data sharing, security, and data privacy requirements in real time.
A key component in Riva’s success was meeting the company’s requirement for full support for delegate tracking. The firm needed to allow administrative assistants to continue to be full contributors to the collaboration process and update the investment team members’ calendars so those calendars always contained the latest information.
The most important success criterion for Riva to meet was clear: The team needed to benefit from the improvements and advantages of its migration to Salesforce without losing the integration features and flexibility users had enjoyed with the previous CRM.
Results
By implementing Riva as part of its Salesforce rollout, this investment firm now has a more reliable collaboration platform that meets user and management expectations without requiring duplicate data entry or significant changes to business processes. Users can continue working in familiar systems while benefiting from stronger collaboration.
The firm added the Insight Side Panel to surface relevant and controlled Salesforce data in users’ Outlook clients. This means users and managers get access to the right data, at the right time, on the right device, without having to change the way they work. Riva supports the workflows end users expect while giving management the structure needed for collaboration, metrics, reporting, and related initiatives.
“Successful Salesforce CRM would be impossible without Riva. Our users want to live and work primarily in Outlook. They want Outlook to work transparently with Salesforce for email tracking, meeting classification, and contact integration – without having to switch back and forth between the two systems,” notes the CRM administrator.
This firm’s users and customers now benefit from a higher standard of customer care and improved collaboration because Riva was configured to support:
- Seamless, automated integration and harmonization of contacts, meetings, and tasks.
- Contact synchronization and harmonization based on roles and multiple owners.
- Conversation capture to track full email conversations in Salesforce from Outlook.
- Administrative assistants managing communications and calendars for multiple users.
- Attachment syncing based on specific criteria.
- Different tracking and meeting classification requirements for private meetings and shared appointments.
“Riva has enabled our sales organization to be more efficient, allowing them to work in just one system versus two when it comes to calendaring. In a world where even one more click matters, this has definitely saved us time and helped with the change management of our sales team making it easier to get them into Salesforce to do their jobs,” explains the Operations Director.
