Improve Competitive Advantage with LMS Integration in Salesforce

The free flow of information has put customers in charge of commerce. The speed of innovation, advances in customer service, and evolving technology have created a storm of rising expectations. Product advantages are short-lived, and in many business sectors, customer service is already the only long-term competitive advantage. By 2017, 89% of marketers expect customer experience to be their primary differentiator.^[1]

Because information and resources are available to anyone with an internet connection, consumers and business customers are willing and able to leave companies if they believe they are not treated well. According to an Opinion Research survey, 44% of consumers switch brands because of poor customer service at a cost to business of $41 billion per year.^[2]

Customer relationship management software has become a business necessity. CRM both drives and satisfies the need for excellence in customer service.

Salesforce has led the market in customer relationship management and continues to dominate by a wide margin. Although the way companies report their revenues makes comparisons difficult, by any comparison Salesforce has a market share at least double than of its nearest competitor.^[3]

One of the reasons Salesforce continues to lead is its commitment to easy integration with other enterprise systems. A robust LMS, capable of multi-channel delivery and robust analytics, is a force multiplier when coupled with CRM.

The resulting capabilities give you the power to manage learning from inside the CRM application. The LMS integration with CRM gives you the ability to:

• Deliver enterprise learning at the point of need, exactly where and when people need it. You can maximize sales performance as agents have product and service information available to them instantly inside Salesforce. Providing sales support on demand helps you capitalize on every opportunity.
• Integrate course catalogs, training recommendations, and learning achievement data into Salesforce.  Bringing learning information into Salesforce enables easy comparison of performance and learning, creating a complete picture of the impact of learning on sales performance.
• Support your extended enterprise from within Salesforce, extending learning to both customers & partners. By providing the right product & support information, you can reduce reliance on support calls.
• Manage LMS e-commerce activities from Salesforce and turn learning customers into sales leads.
• Use social tools for collaborative and social learning, and improve communication even more by integrating with Salesforce Chatter.

We expect even more as Salesforce continues to refine the capabilities to integrate learning and collaboration into CRM.

There are decisions to make along the way. Here are some things to consider in the integration:

• Single sign on. SSO eliminates barriers to adoption by making the integration seamless for the end user.
• When you update learning information in Salesforce, consider whether will use batch processing to update all learning records or push events from the LMS as they occur. Consider processing time, performance, and whether instant updates are necessary.
• Build analytics into implementation. Web analytics platforms provide plug-in scripts that are easy to implement in your web pages, so take advantage of the opportunity to measure your learning and sales performance.

References:

1. Sorofman, Jake. “Customer Experience Primer for 2016.” Gartner. January 25, 2016.

2. “A nation of serial switchers.” NewVoiceMedia. Accessed June 16, 2016.

3. Schaeffer, Chuck. “CRM Market Share Report.” CRMSearch. 2016. Retrieved June 16, 2016.

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