Is your current CRM unable to enhance collaboration between your sales and service teams, boost your business productivity, and streamline all your operations? Then, Certinia (FinancialForce) PSA is your answer! With customers becoming accustomed to lightning-fast speed services, you will be left behind if you don’t boost your CRM’s capabilities.
In this blog, we’ll talk about how integrating Certinia PSA with CRM can benefit your business multifacetedly and give you a step-by-step process to integrate the same. But before that, let’s look at what exactly Certinia PSA is about.
What is Certinia PSA?
Certinia Professional Services Automation (PSA) is a powerhouse built on Salesforce that will help you optimize, manage, and automate all your business processes surrounding your service delivery from end-to-end; so that you can improve your customer experience and boost your overall profitability.
How Can Certinia PSA Benefit Your Business?
- Exceptional Reporting
The real-time, in-built dashboards and reporting system in Certinia PSA will present you with crucial information like assignments, backlogs, expenses, actuals, resource requests, and milestones so you can stay ahead of the curve and empower your business with data-driven choices, ensuring a competitive edge. With insights into such details, you can get complete visibility into all the data that you need and deliver your projects right on time within the stipulated budgets, thereby running a predictable business.
- Mastering Customer Records
As Certinia is built exclusively on Salesforce, this PSA solution will enable both your service and sales teams to communicate around every customer record, allowing anyone to answer your customer’s query at any time and learn where the billing and project status stands at any given time; thus, helping you enhance your overall customer experience.
- Accurate Forecasting
Enhance your project’s profitability and resource planning using Certinia PSA’s remarkably precise forecasting and advanced analytics capabilities. Right from the starting point of your pipeline to delivery, get unparalleled insights into how every dollar is spent with Certinia PSA. Also, you can build staffing models that will help you generate higher profits, expedite your delivery, and boost customer satisfaction.
- Alignment with Sales and Services
Resource management is critical to the success of any project, and not doing it right paints a picture that you’re not meeting your KPIs. To alleviate this pain, Certinia PSA helps sales teams get insights into the project status and resource availability in real time, empowering them to discover possible opportunities and make the right sell. It also helps resource managers gain the visibility they need during transactions by identifying the demand. Therefore, businesses can allocate the right resources at the right time for the right projects to ease any potential staffing issues that may arise.
Step-by-Step Guide to Integrate Certinia PSA Successfully into Your CRM:
Pre-Integration
1. Recognize Your Integration Goals
2. Assess System Compatibility
During Integration
3. Map Data Fields
4. Configure Integration Settings
5. Schedule Data Synchronization
6. Assess & Validate Integration
Post Integration
7. Equip Your Team
8. Track and Optimize
Step 1: Recognize Your Integration Goals
Defining your integration objectives and the outcomes that you’re expecting is your first step to a successful Certinia PSA Integration into your CRM. Be it improving project management, enhancing your customer interactions, or centralizing data, jot down the challenges you’re facing in your existing workflows and how Certinia PSA integration can help you get rid of those issues. By doing so, you can lay the sure foundation for your Certinia PSA integration strategy.
Step 2: Assess System Compatibility
The next step in your strategy is to make sure that the CRM and Certinia PSA versions you’re using are compatible with integration. Therefore, you need to review the documentation provided by both vendors to identify any limitations or requirements you may need. Also, to ensure smooth compatibility between your CRM and Certinia PSA, check for any necessary upgrades or updates you may require.
Step 3: Map Data Fields
Data mapping is an indispensable part of your Certinia PSA integration process. This is why you need to identify the data fields in your Certinia PSA and CRM to harmonize and merge. To avoid discrepancies and redundancy during this process, you can create an extensive list of all the fields you want to synchronize, like project details, customer information, financial data, etc. By doing so, you ensure the right data transfer is done between both systems.
Step 4: Configure Integration Settings
Configuring your integration settings within Certinia PSA and your CRM is the next thing you should focus on. While most integration tools offer user-friendly interfaces that let you choose particular fields and data mapping rules, we strongly recommend that you simulate the integration settings in a sandbox before deploying them in a live environment.
Step 5: Schedule Your Data Synchronization
Data synchronization is essential to ensure your data is up-to-date and in sync with your CRM and Certinia PSA. Take it one step further by determining the frequency of data sync-up you need between these systems. In other words, you need to decide whether or not you want your data to sync up daily, weekly, monthly, hourly, or even in real-time. Remember that regularly synchronizing your data will allow your team to have accurate and the most recent information about your customers, thus, helping your business to reduce errors and make informed decisions.
Step 6: Assess and Validate Integration
Prior to integrating your CRM and Certinia PSA, you need to keep in mind to test and validate the complete integration setup. During this process, verify whether your data is seamlessly transitioning between these two systems and if they’re aligned right as per your data mapping rules. Test all the user scenarios carefully to make sure that all your workflows and functionalities are working as per your expectations.
Step 7: Equip Your Team
Integrating Certinia PSA with your CRM introduces your team to a new world of processes and workflows. This is why you need to train them, so they can familiarize themselves with how the new system works and how it can improve their productivity daily. You can train your team by conducting training sessions or providing resources covering the latest information, including reporting, collaboration, and data entry.
Step 8: Track and Optimize
Post integration, you need to monitor your data flows thoroughly and keep a check on user feedback to identify any discrepancies or potential areas of improvement. By checking your system performance, user satisfaction, and data accuracy repeatedly, you can optimize your integration and ensure that they align with your business needs as it evolves.
Conclusion
Though integrating Certinia PSA into your CRM sounds easy, it is challenging to do it all yourself. So, whether you are looking for enterprise-level scalability, 360-degree visibility into your projects and resources, power up the relationship between your service and sales teams, or more, you need the right partner for integrating Certinia PSA into your business.
Our team of certified experts at Solunus will dive deep into your business challenges and create a robust Certinia PSA integration strategy to help you reach your goals faster and more effectively. Talk to our team today to learn how we can help you!
About Solunus
Solunus is a leading Salesforce consulting company, based in Dallas, TX, USA. Our proven ‘needs-first’ approach coupled with our unrivaled expertise of the Salesforce platform enables us to provide the perfect solution to help you deliver delightful services to customers and achieve rapid growth.
