Background
For this top-five USA-based bank, Salesforce CRM has earned its place enterprise-wide as an integral, even indispensable tool for advisors and sales teams to leverage customer history data, improve customer engagements, and grow customer lifetime value. Like many of its peers, this financial powerhouse started its data integration journey using Salesforce’s native Lightning Sync tool to channel calendar, task, and contact data from communication platforms like Outlook.
Faced with the impending retirement of Lightning Sync — and the limitations of other Salesforce-native alternatives — the bank recognized the need to source alternatives. They also recognized this represented an opportunity to seek something better than the base sync technology they were replacing.
Challenge
Based on this bank’s experience, Lightning Sync was far from perfect. When surveyed by the team responsible for identifying a new solution, advisors, sales team members, and managers cited a range of recurring frustrations, including:
- Time-consuming manual double-data entry and re-entry practices necessary to transfer customer data captured in Outlook to Salesforce
- Frequent struggles with erroneous, omitted, and duplicate email, calendar, and contact data that compromised the quality of customer engagements — and reduced customer and end-user confidence in the bank’s data
- Reluctance to adopt Salesforce as a single source of truth due to unreliable data quality
With that in mind, the bank identified a group of nearly 1,600 customer-facing Salesforce users and tasked a small team to research alternatives capable of not only meeting Lightning’s capabilities — but exceeding them.
While data quality was a critical consideration of the solution evaluation team, security and compliance concerns were every bit as important. Like all financial services enterprises, this bank was subject to a range of regulatory requirements and strict data security protocols. Failure to satisfy these concerns would threaten not only a regulatory breach but the loss of customer confidence in the bank’s ability to protect sensitive customer data. As a result, only solutions capable of consistently ensuring data security and compliance would make the cut.
Solution
Working with clear objectives to replace Lightning Sync with a technology capable of not only unifying calendar, contact, and task sync in Salesforce — but of improving the overall quality of Salesforce data — the bank’s team went to work. Over the course of several months, they evaluated different alternatives. Their search was comprehensive, including both Salesforce-native and third-party revenue operations data integration solutions.
Given the strict requirements of the team’s search, the field narrowed quickly. In the end, only Riva met all of their requirements. Unlike the alternatives reviewed, Riva was the only solution that employed pass-through technology that transferred data from Outlook to Salesforce without retaining that data during the process. This seemingly simple distinction meant that customer data was not exposed to additional risk of data breaches — thus ensuring the security of material non-public information (MNPI) from compromise.
Once selected, the Riva and bank teams went to work. Following a careful review of the bank’s systems and requirements, Riva’s data integration solution was implemented for use by 1,600 customer-facing bank employees. The end-user team engaged in comprehensive training, made simple by Riva’s integrated interface. While much of Riva’s Activity Capture work to unify, govern, and distribute data takes place behind the scenes, the team quickly recognized the positive impacts of Riva Insight to provide improved user access to unified, current, complete, trustworthy customer data.
Results
Given its automated, AI-enhanced design, Riva also offered the enormous advantage of single-point data capture — eliminating the need for the bank’s sales teams to manually transcribe data captured in calendar, contact, and sync platforms to Salesforce. By capturing this data, eliminating errors, omissions, and duplications, and automatically transferring the curated and improved data to Salesforce, Riva also helped the bank to reclaim hours, even days of advisor time formerly consumed by manual data entry. This process transparently improved data quality, bolstered data trust and returned hours of time every week to each end-user — giving them the opportunity to reallocate that time to customer engagement, relationship building, problem-solving, and sales.
Shortly after Riva’s implementation, the bank began to recognize and benefit from a range of benefits, including improved CRM adoption by advisors and sales team members and time savings of 45 seconds for each customer data creation and/or update. During the rollout period, the group of nearly 1,600 advisors and sales team members saw:
- More than 5 million events created and/or updated
- More than 470,000 contacts created
- Time savings of more than 3,000 hours per week
- Total time savings of more than 60,000 hours
- Improved data quality — and data trust
- Steady growth of CRM adoption by advisors and sales team members
Since the trial period, those results have continued to hold true. Plans are now in the works to consider Riva’s Sales Engagement options and expand Riva to other business units.
