Have your company jumped on the high-speed train to implement Service Cloud throughout all your call centers? Yes! Awesome move! But… are you struggling to figure out how to start? Here’s some considerations to help kickstart your thought process before starting implementation 😉
Biggest market / Smallest market
By the biggest market, I mean which is the region that generates the highest volume of cases. Assuming the number of agents is going to be the largest in this region as well, we would usually see the greatest number of trainers available in their key markets, thereby going live first with their top market might makes sense. This allows the agents to be trained up fastest, allows your company to weed out the teething issues of user adoption faster. Your implementation partner and Salesforce combined would also have all hands on deck on your first go live, the highest chances of hitting any limitations that come with high case volume can be resolved quickly and lessen the chances of it coming up again as you continue the roll out into smaller markets.
On the flip side, there are also benefits to going live with your smallest market. Any service cloud issue that passed UAT but remains a problem is allowed time to be resolved without the stress of large volume of cases that continues to stream in.
Related Projects/Backend System
Say company ABC is in the midst of consolidating their individual ERP systems into one centralized ERP, the roll out dates of other systems should be taken into consideration when rolling out Salesforce. It will reduce the amount of training agents need to undergo and ensure resources have the capacity for the new systems roll out.
Another consideration might be an existing system with a clear contractual expiry date. With this in mind, we would be working backwards based on the timeline towards full cutover.
Languages
Language play might come up as a consideration to the roll out. If implementation is to be done with one primary language in the first phase, it would naturally suggest that roll out has to be done on a language basis instead of countries. Take asia for example, the primary language for Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore is English. These countries can go live together instead of separating them up.
Team structure in each region
Escalation processes might differ from one region to another. Many a time, the first phase of implementation caters to the first market that is to go live, before adding localized capabilities for the other regions. One reason company have moved on to Salesforce is for consolidation and centralization. Many companies take the market with the ideal team structure to be in the first phase to go live. This allows them learnings and time for upcoming market to restructure themselves.
Centralized backend team
Not all market has every team in-country. Many companies have Tier 3 escalation or backend operation team available only in their biggest market. Taking Tier 3 escalation as an example, this means that Tier 2 in multiple counties (without Tier 3) usually routes their cases to Tier 3 agents sitting in another market. This impacts the roll out since the market with Tier 3 has to be rolled out first or at the same time to allow the continued escalation of the case.
Differing business processes
Due to many reasons such as legislation in each market, there might be differences in business processes. It will be best to understand the similarities and localization before implementation takes place to allow minimal change requests. Clustering regions that is fundamentally similar has seen smoother transitions.
Channels
If the phasing of the project means capabilities are rolled out channel by channel. We may put the above factors such as market to a lower priority. Roll out might go out to all market at once but by channels. Email and phone might go first in all countries, thereafter the social media team can come in. This may involve some complexities as agents will be toggling two systems in the mean time since typically escalations to Tier 3 is not channel specific. Tier 3 might have to handle cases that gets escalated to them on previous system and new system at the same time. The full omni channel case history might not have been moved over as well. It can be expected that there will be a slight drop in productivity on the impacted teams as they toggle multiple systems.
Highest impact
Cost savings directs what goes into the first phase at times. If the business case sees the highest benefits in moving a team out first, this will allow the management to see the maximum return on investment with the minimum viable product. This might be a key to unlocking more budget to move ahead. We cannot deny this will be the key consideration given limited resources!
These are some of the factors i have seen as important to consider if we are on this exciting journey of deploying Salesforce regionally/globally. Happy to hear your comments and feedback!