CRM success is heavily dependent on the accuracy and comprehensiveness of data within the CRM system. Incomplete or inaccurately collected data can significantly impact CRM ROI if account reps have to spend a lot of their time tracking down correct information about a prospect or chasing down prospects who are difficult to find or no longer employed by the organization being pursued.
StrikeIron has several applications available on the AppExchange that are natively integrated to Salesforce.com using the Force.com Cloud platform. These solutions can go a long way in helping an organization greatly improve the quality and completeness of the contact data that exists within their Salesforce.com data, making it easy an natural part of the data collection process.
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You can find out more about these solutions here: http://crm.strikeiron.com/Home/Live-Data-for-Salesforce-CRM.aspx
In addition to the ability to validate and correct mailing addresses both in the US and Canada as well as 200 other countries, verify email addresses, and check phone numbers for Do Not Call list compliance, our solutions provide custom mapping capabilities to ensure that the data returned from each verification call ends up in the correct field within your customized Salesforce.com application. The application simply hits our data center with contact record data, validates it, and then brings back any additional enhanced data about that contact that goes straight into the account or contact record. This integration, including the custom field mapping, is a big selling point of the solution.
Here are a couple basic screen shots showing how to utilize the mapping capabilities:
(Mapping data from Salesforce.com that will always be validated by StrikeIron)
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(Mapping data from StrikeIron back to fields, including custom fields within Salesforce.com)
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Also, if you want to see these solutions in action and how they provide for a solid foundation of clean, accurate, and complete data within Salesforce.com, visit us at our booth at DreamForce next week at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
CRM systems are only as good as the data within them. That's especially true with Salesforce.com and their CRM solution products, including their premier sales force automation product Sales Cloud 2 and their call center solution Service Cloud 2.
For example, imagine how much more effective a salesteam member can be if he or she has complete, accurate, and up-to-date information on contacts they are about to reach out to. Optimizing the time and effort of the sales team can provide significant dividends to the bottom line.
Also, there is nothing more frustrating for example than typing a well-though-out email only to have it returned as undeliverable fifteen minutes later. Bad addresses and bad phone numbers can be just as agonizing.
When marketing to the gold mine of contacts that exist in your CRM system, the quality of data can be the difference in a successful campaign or a failed one. No matter how good the message or offer is, if it's not reaching the targets, it's not going to do well.
Because of this, a couple of years ago we integrated several of our data-as-a-service Web APIs into Salesforce.com, optimizing our capabilities within Salesforce.com. We are gradually improving them over time as customers put them to use in a broad range of industries.
The four services that are currently integrated, customized for the Force.com platform, and available on the Salesforce.com AppExchange include:
US Address Verification - ensuring accurate, validated addresses within your Salesforce system (including adding additional data like county and latitude and longitude)
Global Address Verification - includes address verification for hundreds of countries around the world
Email Address Verification - ensuring email addresses within Salesforce are valid and deliverable (without having to send an actual email)
Do Not Call List Compliance - checks phone numbers against the federal Do Not List to ensure compliance and avoid FTC fines
One of the many Web service APIs StrikeIron provides "out in the Cloud" is the ability to check if a telephone number is on the Federal "Do Not Call" list or one of the many similar state lists. This helps an organization that makes outbound telephone calls stay in compliance with Federal Trade Commission and state laws much more easily and cost-effectively. StrikeIron provides this service as an easy-to-integrate API. We also have done a slick integration into Salesforce.com, making compliance within Salesforce very easy as well.
If you are not familiar with the Do Not Call (DNC) list, you can simply register your telephone number to this national list, and by law, telemarketers may not call you pitching their various products and offers. There are exceptions of course (such as if you owe money to an organization), but in general companies face large fines if they do not adhere to this list with their outbound efforts. The largest fine levied so far has been in excess of $5 million dollars, and over sixty organizations have faced legal action for violating the list since its inception.
When the StrikeIron service is invoked (either a SOAP or REST call from an application) to check a given number, typically from a call center application or a business process of some kind, it checks other lists as well such as the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) list. It returns whether or not the provided number can be called, and if not, the reason it can not be called.
One of the possible reasons that we indicate a number can not be called is that the number is a cell phone. Federal regulations already prohibit most telemarketing targeted to cell phones.
We invariably get asked whether or not cell phones need to be separately registered with the DNC list. We also often get asked if the viral emails that are traveling the world indicating that cell phone numbers are going to be released to telemarketers very soon are true. The answer to both questions is no. There is no impending deluge of telemarketing about to occur to mobile devices. There is no separate cell phone registry either.
While you can register a cell phone number to the Federal DNC list without harm, there are already laws in place to prohibit telemarketers from using auto-dialers to dial cell phones and calling cell phone numbers without the consent of a consumer. So there is no need for cell phones to be registered to the list.
And if you are using a service such as StrikeIron's subscription-based DNC Call List Verification to check numbers against the DNC list, you can rest assured that cell phone numbers that are checked will come back with the appropriate response.
