Imagine, you have chosen to go for an (renewed) implementation of Salesforce Service Cloud because you want to further digitalize and optimize different service processes. A matter of implementing and activating and you’re up to speed, you thought…
According to your implementation partner, you were able to get specific needs solved through customized development of certain unique solutions. Sounded good, but so far you’re still waiting after many months until they’re done. Meanwhile, all the additional requests you have seem to be a huge challenge and the costs exceed all forecasts. This delay wasn’t foreseen and the board of your organization is starting to pressure you. Would a more simplified, standard out-of-the-box implementation have been more wise? It is the continuous battle between configuration and customization: how do you decide what the best choice for you?
“For customization of solutions, new code needs to be written to make software function in a way that isn’t included within the standard solution.”
Round 1: the advantages of customization
With customization, specific solutions are created within the Salesforce platform. Customization may be required because certain functionalities, integrations or applications are missing initially, but are required to complete your ecosystem with all touchpoints to interact with your customers. For this to work, fundamental adjustments must be made to the platform, which means that new code must be written to make the software in question do something that it cannot yet perform. These are often more robust and longer projects, since coding is a time-consuming business.
The advantages:
- The implemented solution is specifically designed to fit your company and thus offers a customized user experience.
- No concessions are made, as it is developed exactly as you request and therefore meets all your wishes.
- It gives you the feeling of being ‘unique’. After all, a standard solution did not suffice in your eyes.
“A configuration process takes less time, because you make use of existing functionalities and previous developments.”
Round 2: the advantages of configuration
Contrary to providing customization, one can also mainly concentrate on the configuration of the chosen platform. When configuring, you will look at how you can optimize the use of existing, so-called ‘Standard Out-of-the-Box’ (SOOTB) solutions within the Salesforce platform to arrive at the perfect solution. Another approach is to use external solutions, such as product add-ons or external objects. These are additional solutions to the existing infrastructure, that are already pre-developed. They are usually developed by Salesforce partners who have dealt with the challenge in question before, and created a standardized solution for it. By configuring these additional solutions, you enrich the platform and adapt it in such a way that it perfectly matches the wishes of the customer.
The advantages:
And the winner is… Configuration.
- The process is shorter because you simply use existing possibilities and previous solutions to the problem, instead of coming up with something completely new.
- At the same time, this also results in lower costs, more flexibility and better scalability.
- It is easier to run a project together with your internal organization, in which your own specialized Salesforce employees develop. As a result, they immediately go through a training process. This ensures a better and more effective adoption.
“A configuration process takes less time, because you use existing functionalities and previous solutions to the problem.”
In our eyes, we consciously choose to use existing solutions as much as possible in implementation processes. We only code if there really is no other way. Why? Because delivering custom work mainly costs extra hours and exceeds budgets. This is of course interesting for the supplier, but is it also in the best interest for you? The term customization suggests that it makes the solution more scalable and flexible. However, often the opposite is true. The more you adjust in the basic system, for example a Salesforce platform, the greater the risk of complications with, among other things, upgrades and integrations.
Don’t make it unnecessarily complicated
Of course, you have to look at the possibilities (and impossibilities) for each unique situation. However, in most cases, it is completely unnecessary to reinvent the wheel over and over again. We are simply not as unique as we like to think, and many companies struggle with similar issues. The reality is that 70% of data modeling challenges and 35% of innovation requests are equivalent. As are 60% of the components or functionalities in a typical implementation. We think it is a shame to leave this valueable stock of already thought-out solutions and technologies unused. Instead, we use them to develop new features and tools that are complementary to the Salesforce platform (product add-ons). It allows you to secretly realize a bit of customization using standard products and it saves you a lot of hassle and time.
Our motto reads ‘simplifying technology’ for a reason. So as far as we’re concerned: don’t make it unnecessarily complicated!
More info?
We are happy to have a chat with you to discover what the best solutions is for you and your organization. Send us message or directly plan a meeting via this link.