“Why should our organization take Salesforce payments?”
We hear this question fairly often from prospective customers – and we love to answer it.
The short answer is: taking payments in Salesforce allows organizations to improve decision-making by centralizing customer data to generate actionable insights, streamline customer payments to provide a better experience, save time and money with increased productivity, while ensuring security and compliance around payment data.
In this five-minute video, learn more about the benefits that Salesforce payment processing can deliver.
Break Down Data Silos with Salesforce Payments
Salesforce customers are often focused on breaking down data silos, with the goal of capturing all of their customer data in a single place so they can make informed decisions quickly, based on a complete, single source of truth. Integrating Salesforce payment data is a key component to establishing a holistic customer view. Organizations that can harness this data effectively will be more agile, as they can better anticipate customer needs, identify emerging trends, and stay ahead of the competition. Additionally, the gap between businesses that fully capitalize on their customer data and those that don’t is growing quickly, as generative AI makes data increasingly central to every customer interaction.
The ultimate goal: to turn data into a strategic asset in order to thrive in a customer-centric, data-driven world.
Process Improvements Lead to Greater Productivity
Salesforce payments integration can be a game-changer for organizations, leading to substantial process improvements and, ultimately, greater productivity. Seamlessly integrating payment processing into Salesforce helps eliminate time-consuming, redundant tasks like manual data entry – reducing the risk of errors and freeing up valuable time and resources that can be redirected toward more strategic work.
Further, the ability to access real-time payment data within Salesforce empowers teams to identify and address payment issues quickly. Increased efficiency not only improves overall payment workflows but contributes to a more streamlined, productive, and customer-focused operation.
Let’s look at a few examples:
Salesforce Payments for Manufacturers
A common scenario in the manufacturing industry is a customer requesting an express return merchandise authorization (RMA), in which a customer pays a fee in exchange for expediting the replacement of a defective part. Swapping out a defective part sounds simple enough, but for many companies relying on legacy systems, this process is full of inefficiencies. Customer data might be managed in one system, while credit card payments are handled in another system, resulting in unnecessary delays. In a customer-centric world accustomed to instant online payments, that just won’t cut it.
Fast forward to an organization that has integrated customer and payment data with Salesforce and Chargent. Their customer service agent can simply click a button and take a credit card number right where they’re already working in Salesforce Service Cloud, or easily send payment request links. These simple and efficient workflows boost productivity for their team, but most importantly, provide a seamless experience for their customer – who doesn’t care how they process payments, but just wants their replacement part so they can get their own operations back up and running.
Salesforce Payments for the Enterprise
In large enterprises, we often see call center agents working in Salesforce to service customers, while the back office works to integrate Salesforce with a legacy billing system.
It does not make sense for call center agents to log in to multiple systems to enter payment details in order to provide the back office information they need. A more efficient approach is for call center agents to capture payments directly in Salesforce, while they’re on the phone with a customer. Payment method data is then tokenized and sent to the billing system, where that system can continue the job of billing customers.
Salesforce Payments for Subscription Businesses
Salesforce payments can also be transformational for subscription businesses, and any organization that needs to capture recurring payments. For example, companies that send a request for an electronic signature on an order form and require immediate payment.
This is applicable to a wide range of subscription-based businesses, such as Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, like our own. Keeping payments inside the Salesforce platform for subscription businesses makes business and process sense.
Payment Processing Solutions to Improve Security and Compliance
Organizations often opt to manage payments inside of Salesforce to keep their payments more secure and PCI compliant. Using Chargent in Salesforce allows you to take advantage of advanced security features to reduce compliance risk.
Reducing the number of systems in use enhances information and data security while enabling precise control over data access. Additionally, this consolidation leads to cost savings by eliminating the need to onboard extra IT operations, compliance, or security personnel to oversee this aspect of the operational infrastructure.
Leveraging the full capabilities of Salesforce payments is an effective strategic way to optimize the return on an organization’s Salesforce investment. These examples from manufacturing, SaaS, and the enterprise illustrate how incorporating payment functionalities into Salesforce can offer a competitive edge to virtually any organization.
If you’re ready to realize these benefits or explore more Salesforce payment options to fit your business, please get in touch – our team is always here to help.
