Challenge
Like many companies in the financial services industry, this hedge fund had developed a proprietary CRM to meet their original CRM requirements.
Over time, with growing and shifting technologies, increased user expectations, and the desire to move forward at a faster pace, they determined they had outgrown their custom CRM’s ability to meet their requirements. The company chose the industry leader, Salesforce, as the CRM core component to accelerate its digital transformation strategy.
After moving forward with the project, the investment firm determined that Salesforce’s out-of-the-box email tracking and calendar sync solutions for Office 365/Exchange did not offer many key integration components their 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, specific data treatment, and controlled data integration were required. Data needed to be integrated and intelligently- and securely – displayed between Salesforce and Office 365/Exchange based on specific data sharing and privacy requirements across multiple roles and relationships to allow for secure collaboration and specific data sharing requirements.
Solution
In addition to the out-of-the-box Salesforce options not fully meeting their data integration and harmonization requirements, their InfoSec team had concerns with opening their firewall for Salesforce to access their email system in a way that didn’t meet their enterprise data security requirements.
Their team reviewed Riva’s advanced data control options and integration functionality and determined that Riva’s ability to sync their data is far beyond their previous proprietary system’s functionality. The Riva implementation received the go-ahead after their InfoSec team determined Riva fully satisfied their 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 collaborate on portfolio work frequently and securely. Having cross-team collaboration and properly tracking full email conversations, relationship interactions, and meeting activities was extremely important. Dealing with highly-sensitive and time-sensitive information meant they needed to ensure Riva could meet and exceed their 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.” They needed to allow admin assistants to continue to be full contributors to the collaboration process and update the investment team members’ calendars. So, they were always up-to-date and contained the latest information.
The most important success criteria for Riva to meet was to allow the team to benefit from the improvements and advantages their migration to Salesforce provided without losing the integration features and flexibility the users had enjoyed with their previous CRM.
Results
By implementing Riva as part of its Salesforce implementation, this investment firm has an improved and more reliable collaboration platform that meets their users’ and management expectations – without anyone having to do double data entry or make significant changes in business processes. Their users get the best of both worlds!
Riva Insight was added to surface and display relevant and controlled Salesforce information 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 works the way end-users expect it to work and how management requires it work to support their 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 based on Riva being configured to have:
- seamless and automated integration and harmonization of contacts, meetings, and tasks;
- contact synchronization and harmonization based on roles and multiple owners;
- the ability to use “Conversation Capture” to track entire email conversations in Salesforce from Outlook;
- administrative assistants managing communications and calendars for multiple users;
- the ability to sync attachments based on specific criteria; and
- support for 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.
