5 Easy Use Cases of Process Mining Salesforce in '24

Salesforce is one of the leading CRM software and enterprise cloud systems helping businesses with account management, customer service and marketing. However, Salesforce poses certain challenges to sales and marketing teams, such as user adoption problems or management issues. Also, the software might require further integration to RPA bots or analytics tools to automate the manual activities or to clean and analyze the excessive event logs data.

Process mining can overcome the mentioned challenges and serve as an analytical tool that discovers the data and offers insights on automation opportunities.

In this article, we cover 5 use cases where sales leaders can deploy process mining in Salesforce to improve customer service and increase sales velocity.

1. Leverage Salesforce data

Salesforce captures every customer interaction, starting from an order request until the point where the deal is closed. As Figure 1 shows, CRM systems data contains any process instances coming from Support cases, sales or marketing and activities of employees on emails, calls or any sales related tasks. Therefore, it offers a great data source to understand and improve the customer service. The problem; however, is that the CRM data consists of structured and unstructured data types, which complicates the data cleaning period.

Figure 1: CRM data model

Process mining can be helpful to leverage such data to analyze and visualize real-time sales processes to obtain insights into inefficiencies and the points where the deals are stuck. Specifically, leading process mining vendors employ ML algorithms to automatically gather, transform and discover the data by labeling activities and discovering event classes.

By deploying process mining in Salesforce, sales teams and business analysts can monitor sales processes, set standard or ideal business processes, improve sales performance and conversion rate, and develop and optimize marketing strategies.

Explore more how process mining supports sales and marketing to accelerate.

2. Discover RPA opportunities for Salesforce

Salesforce can include time-consuming manual activities such as exchanging data between Salesforce and third-party platforms such as business ERP systems. By integrating Salesforce with an RPA solution, businesses can automate these manual activities and increase operational efficiency of the platform. However, it is still a challenge to detect which activities could be automated and manage the automation initiative.

Process mining can help IT and sales teams catch the inputs that require an urgent automation implication. Executives can utilize process mining to manage RPA integration process itself and track the changes after having implemented them. Learn more on ways process mining facilitates RPA deployment.

For example, a business that wants to analyze the customer journey for their new product needs to gather the data from business web portal, CRM and ERP systems. The business can benefit from RPA bots to automatically extract relevant process data from these portals.

Some process mining vendors offers digital twin of an organization (DTO), which is a specific application of digital twins that enables process simulation to obtain an accurate view of current automation project.

3. Improve support processes on the cloud

Support processes are the secondary business processes that streamline the operational workflow or case resolution. Salesforce allows sales and marketing executives to generate support process cycles and control the steps users follow during the case resolution.

Process mining can identify such cases where support processes are needed. By implementing process mining in front-and back-office systems in Salesforce, sales executives can evaluate their core sales and revenue metrics, assess performance, detect inefficiencies and the root causes behind these issues. As a result, they can pinpoint where support process cycles can be useful to improve performance.

For example, automatic mails are a common support process practice. Sales teams can analyze compliance or customer-complaints cases, and then create rule-based, auto-responses to these inquiries via Email, Customer Portal or Website. The benefit automatic mails is that it increases customer satisfaction while saving time for employees to execute the primary processes.

4. Manage Salesforce implementation

Salesforce users can over-customize their CRM system, which leads to unused fields, approval-flows, work-flows and unnecessary points. With such counter-productive data, sales and marketing teams lose time and money when they carry an analysis of CRM data for marketing campaigns. Thus, over-customized Salesforce is difficult to integrate with third-party platforms.

Process mining allows users to manage their Salesforce implementation and customization. For example, sales teams can isolate important customers to solely focus on their analysis. This will assist them in discovering unused fields in records, visualizing process flows and detecting inefficient tasks to modify. As a result, users can increase the value they obtained from Salesforce.    

5. Overcome user adoption problems 

Sales teams adopt Salesforce to decrease the number of manual tasks and usage of Excel, which would lead to difficulties and mistakes in customer management processes. However, these teams usually configure mandatory fields, skip steps and continue with Excel to align their Salesforce and actual processes.

Process mining can overcome user adoption issues by allowing users to compare and align their real-life processes on Salesforce. By visualizing their workflows, users can gain full understanding of the actual sales processes, and can run conformance checks between process standards set on Salesforce and the actual operations. They can categorize the issues depending on their monetary repercussions and can start changing these business processes on Salesforce accordingly, thus optimizing user adoption.

Further Reading

Discover other software process mining improves, such as:

• The Ultimate Guide to Process Mining in SAP
• How to Leverage IoT & Process Mining Together?

If you believe your business can benefit from process mining, you can check our data-driven list of process mining software.

Check out our comprehensive and constantly updated process mining case studies list to find out more process mining salesforce real-life examples.

And if you need more help, you can let us find you the right vendor: