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Jared Douglas
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Jared Douglas, Marketing Specialist at Progress DataDirect
Thanks to the combination of Progress DataDirect Cloud and Salesforce Lightning Connect, Intuit can keep its data where it belongs while still enabling its sales and marketing teams to gain quick, on-demand access, creating a unified user experience.
Ever since it first emerged on the scene, the Salesforce1 platform has completely transformed the way we think about customer relationship management (CRM). Its easy-to-use, cloud-based, software-as-a-service (SaaS) model has made it easy to access and act on customer data from anywhere, while effortlessly keeping data up-to-date and synchronized across all instances.
As companies adopt Salesforce, there is a tendency to want to consolidate legacy data on the new platform. However, migration often presents challenges for companies looking to do this. Companies may be concerned with moving sensitive data outside of their secure on-premise servers, or they may not be able to spare the time and resources required to move terabytes of data into Salesforce, especially when much of that data is non-essential for daily tasks.
Intuiting Customer Needs with a Single View
This was exactly the position Intuit found itself in during the lead-up to Dreamforce 2014. At Dreamforce, Director of Engineering for Intuit, Jerry Lekhter, learned about Salesforce’s new Lightning Connect product and the OData service provided by Progress® DataDirect Cloud®. Thanks to these products, Intuit was able to drastically improve its customer service experience by arming its representatives with all the data they need from a single unified view inside Salesforce.
Intuit’s ultimate goal is to delight its customers and improve interactions with them by any possible means. One of the best ways of doing that is to arm agents with data and improve the experience of accessing that data. For the most part, this means giving agents a single view of all their data, wherever it resides. If agents don’t have to juggle a half-dozen applications to find all the data they need, the customer is no longer put on hold forever or tossed between departments when they just try to get a simple question answered.
To achieve this goal, Intuit used a combination of Salesforce Lightning Connect, which allows outside data sources to be accessed directly from Salesforce through the OData protocol, and DataDirect Cloud, which has the ability to expose multiple diverse data sources as an OData endpoint, even when those data sources do not natively support OData. The real beauty of the solution is that most of the technical heavy lifting is handled by Salesforce and DataDirect connectivity, letting Intuit focus on delivering the best experience possible.
Keep the Focus on Business Growth
Right now, Intuit has 11,000 agents reaping the benefits of Lightning Connect and DataDirect Cloud, and that number will only continue to grow. Now, Intuit can keep its data where it belongs while still providing its agents, and therefore its customers, the delightful experience of having answers to all their questions at their fingertips.
Your Turn
If you want to see similar results in your own organization, reach out to us or check out a free trial of DataDirect Cloud.
Author information
Marketing Specialist, Progress DataDirect at Progress DataDirect
Jared Douglas is a marketing specialist at Progress® DataDirect®. Since earning his Bachelor's degree at North Carolina State University, Jared spends most of his time coordinating content for the Data Connections blog and talking about the latest and greatest from the world of data connectivity and integration. In his free time, he enjoys playing games, spending time outdoors and sampling beer from North Carolina’s many craft breweries.
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The post Intuit Delivers a Unified User Experience with DataDirect Cloud appeared first on Progress Newsroom.
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