Content Management Strategies with Salesforce.com leveraging Box and mxHero
Companies continue to expand towards best-in-class CRM Platform Salesforce.com. Aligning Salesforce with a Cloud Content Management (CCM) Strategy along with mxHero fuels global Sales, Service and Marketing Team collaboration
Background
There is no denying the market presence of Salesforce. With an incredible platform strategy aligned to a robust Application Exchange, Salesforce customers benefit tremendously as they aim to innovate on top of the world’s leading sales, marketing and service collaboration platform. By linking up Salesforce with best in class cloud content management (CCM) platforms like Redwood City’s Box.com, organizations have the ability to significantly empower their operations.
Box and Salesforce
By leveraging Box for Salesforce from the AppExchange, enterprises have the ability to link both platforms in such a way as to drive improved collaboration around relevant sales, marketing and service-related content. Through a Box with Salesforce API integration, organizations can accelerate sales cycles by removing email bottlenecks, streamline sales, marketing and service processes by exposing mission critical content and drive towards compelling customer conversations around the most important content-based assets in the enterprise.
There are a number of feature-based reasons why a deployment of Box with Salesforce makes sense beyond those mentioned. Some of the outstanding features of linking Salesforce with Box’s CCM platform include:
- Linking Box content with specific Salesforce records including custom objects
- Viewing files stored in Box directly within the Salesforce U/I
- View, Edit, Comment and collaborate around key artifacts and assign tasks to team members
- Real-time monitoring of customer activity including content downloads
- Expand the app eco-system by leveraging DocuSign, Chatter and other solutions directly from within the Box widget
- Customize the integration between Salesforce and Box to support workflow automation, AI-ML solutions via the Box for Salesforce Developer Toolkit
Now What About Those Emails?
While the linkage between a CCM strategy (e.g. Box) and Salesforce makes sense for the enterprise, especially given the prospective costs of saving content within Salesforce, there are challenges. First, not all users within the enterprise are Salesforce users. Service teams may leverage the Salesforce Service Cloud capabilities and sales leaders may use the CRM components of the Sales Cloud from Salesforce to fuel their organizations. However, internal business units within the enterprise may not be leveraging Salesforce for their day-to-day workflow functions. Secondly, there are essentially three scenarios here as it relates to enterprise content strategies in this paradigm:
- Some content is relevant to the users who leverage Salesforce;
- Some content is relevant and ubiquitous in nature in that all business units could and should benefit from an organization-wide enterprise cloud content management framework; and
- Email — it is ubiquitous, all users have it and some studies show that as much as 40%-50% of an enterprise’s relevant content is actually in process within email which presents a whole set of new challenges for CIOs who aim to benefit from the cloud while at the same time being concerned about security, governance and workflow enablement.
Art of the Possible
As cloud-based enterprise architecture begins to move towards highly collaborative enterprise-ready platforms, a trifecta solution exists in the market to solve some of these challenges. What if an organization were to be able to harness the power of the Salesforce.com platform, align it via integration with the world’s leading CCM platform (e.g. Box) and also address the unfortunate paradigm and issues related to email-based content? This solution exists today!
mxHero — New Intelligent Content Routing for Box and Salesforce
Leveraging San Francisco start-up mxHero’s Mail2Cloud platform, the organizations of tomorrow will be able to achieve solutions around their enterprise content that five years ago were not achievable. If all enterprise employees use email and if the strategy is to drive security, collaboration and content management strategies around content toward the very platforms where that content is most relevant, we need to get the attachments and meta-data out of email and into the targeted platforms. Through mxHero’s Mail2Cloud platform, organizations are now able to intelligently capture inbound or outbound messages and attachments and intelligently route them to the Box Cloud Content Management (CCM) platform. With mxHero, users use email the same way they to today. However, mxHero automatically captures the inflight message body, email attachment(s) and meta data and automatically and intelligently routes the content into its intended Box folder structure complete with metadata, security overlays and access control definition. By then exposing that very same content that now resides within Box into Salesforce via the Box for Salesforce integration, organizations can leverage all content from within the Salesforce and Box platform user experience. Figure 1 below depicts an example workflow for the email-based content.
What does this mean for an organization?
Through mxHero’s new intelligent routing capabilities, sales reps will no longer have to take an inbound email from a client with an RFP and save it to Box to drive team-based collaboration. That RFP will be automatically routed to the appropriate Box folder complete with team sharing rules and exposed within the Salesforce U/I via the Box for Salesforce integration.
If a service agent is working on a ticket, the outbound ticket status would be automatically captured by mxHero, stored within Box and exposed automatically within the Salesforce Service cloud leveraging the Box for Salesforce integration. While there are many other bi-directional examples we could share pertaining to the benefits of getting relevant enterprise content out of email and into these platforms, the real key here is that this innovation requires no user adoption, no training, it works with all major email solutions and as Box’s 2016 Elite Partner of the Year, mxHero has been deployed to some 500,000+ users across some 3,500 customer domains. While the technology is proven, expanding the use-case for content management to include the trifecta platform strategy of email content, with Box’s CCM platform and that of Salesforce, customers are the real winners. There are other tactical advantages for such an architecture including the fact that file size impediments are removed (e.g. links are shared via email vs. attachments), software is no longer needed to view key artifacts (e.g. an Adobe Illustrator file can be viewed via mobile or desktop from the Box U/I), and storage cost offsets from using a CCM platform such as Box vs. storing content in email archives or within Salesforce are significant for the enterprise.
We often discuss the art of the possible; today we have new solutions that will truly change the enterprises of tomorrow as they aim to leverage both unstructured and structured data and content to drive broader collaboration, improved security and towards novel solutions leveraging Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and data intelligence. Box and Salesforce are powerful platforms. By combining them with an intelligent solution around email-based content, they become even more powerful for the enterprises who seek out the Art of the Possible!