FinancialForce brings customer, partner collaboration to PSOs
- Summary:
- FinancialForce has extended its professional services automation (PSA) product with a community platform to bring customer and partner collaboration to PSOs
So it should come as no surprise that today FinancialForce is adding a collaboration platform to its professional services automation (PSA) product. Just as the PSA product — along with the rest of the FinancialForce portfolio — is built on the Salesforce platform, the new Professional Services Communities takes advantage of the Salesforce Community Cloud, which was first released two years ago.
Adding a PSA flavor to the vanilla community platform will help professional services organizations play their part in building customer engagement, explains Lori Ellsworth, general manager of professional services automation at FinancialForce.
We're actually bringing it down to the professional services business and helping them up their game in how they work with partners and customers.
Professional services organizations are part of that customer revenue generation, customer retention discipline that [enterprises] are putting in place.
Organizations are thinking at the big picture level, and customer engagement is probably the most important topic. It's being driven at a board level and professional services organizations are thinking about how do they get on board with this.
Access choice
Customers or partners will be able to access the online collaboration functions via either a Web-based or mobile dashboard. From there, organizations can choose to let them drill down into detailed information on specific projects, or provide access to training, documentation, Chatter social media streams and other community activities. It's up to organizations to decide what level of access each individual customer has, as Ellsworth explains.
You decide the level of relationship you have with each customer and what you build can be different for every customer.
The functionality can be implemented just for customers or partners or both at the same time. Bringing partners into the same platform helps ensure everyone is on the same page, says Ellsworth.
This partner community is removing all those extra steps and opportunity for error and directly connecting the partner into the active project.
Transactional collaboration
The focus of this release is on collaboration around adminstrative processes in the professional services automation product — co-ordinating resources, checking timelines, tracking tasks, expenses, invoices and so on. But as well as purely transactional issues to do with the operation of the project, it can also extend to include the collaboration that takes place within each project around subject matter expertise.
The platform's capabilities include:
- Document sharing — A filing component allows for sharing, storage, and management of project related files, with versioning to keep track of changes and updates to documents over time.
- Greater visibility into partner activity — All interactions with partners and subcontractors go through the platform so that project leaders can quickly determine who's available and when. Partners and subcontractors can enter time and expenses straight into the system.
- Access rights — Project teams can set access rights based on roles, restricting each partipant's access to only the information they need.
- Own branding — PSOs can add their own brand elements to deliver the right brand experience to clients.
- Social collaboration — The Chatter enterprise social network is built in, embedding real-time communication with other employees, customers and partners.
- Access anytime, anywhere — Users can access and update project data from anywhere via the Salesforce1 mobile application.
The Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) recently named FinancialForce the world's most widely used PSA application, with around a third of the installed market.
My take
At diginomica, we believe that a concept we call frictionless enterprise is the key to digital transformation — which we define as the use of connected digital technologies to strip out cost, delay and opacity when harnessing resources and delivering outcomes. Digital collaboration is an essential ingredient in erasing barriers to getting things done.
What's interesting about this announcement is that it reminds us that there are multiple layers of collaboration in many enterprise activities — not merely co-ordinating the job in hand but also all of the administration connected with it.
My sense is that this initial announcement from FinancialForce is a little too strongly skewed towards the administration of the project and probably the platform needs more maturity in how it connects into and brings together all the subject matter collaboration going on within a project. The platform will be most valuable if it brings together all project-related collaboration rather than streamlining the administration activities in one environment while the project actually happens somewhere else.
But in conversation with FinancialForce PSA customers attending the company's London user conference yesterday, it's clear that this new product fills an important need to help overcome communication gaps in project management across the extended enterprise of PSOs, their subcontractors, partners and clients.