How GoCardless uses Salesforce today, and the work ahead

At GoCardless, 450 employees use Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud. A further 450 partners feed Salesforce with data for GoCardless (but these partners don’t have direct access to the data). The company primarily uses Sales Cloud and CPQ for acquiring new and supporting active customers, as well as generating orders and forms to send to customers. 

The company also uses Salesforce for rich communication services (RCS) and customer service management (CSM) to offboard customers: “Sadly, that happens from time to time,” Graham says. But Salesforce also provides GoCardless with a full 360º view of the customer base.

Of his role, Graham explains, “I'm responsible for the current Salesforce instance.” He’s been charged with building out the new Salesforce instance for GoCardless—especially critical given that the company has worked with Salesforce for over a decade.

“It's slowly evolved over time as consultants or internal developers come in and make changes,” he says. The resulting system, however, is slapdash. “You would never start out by saying here's what we're going to build, because what we've kind of ended up with is an absolute mess—which is why we need a backup solution,” he highlights. 

Graham’s task is no easy feat: He must build out a new Salesforce instance—that incorporates Sales Cloud, CPQ, Service Cloud, and Revenue Cloud—its accompanying workflows, and integrated applications to all fully match business needs for the next 10 years.

“Our existing instance really needs work,” he says. “That’s why we're going through this transformation.” This sits in stark contrast to the experience Graham had at his previous workplace—where “everything just kind of worked.” But in most companies, Salesforce is iterative.

Why protecting data is critical to GoCardless

“We manage and service customers, providing excellence,” Graham says. “If we lose their data, the opportunity to do that decreases.” 

With transition and integration comes risk. With transformation comes even more. “We've got approximately 80 Salesforce-integrated systems and tools,” Graham says. “Each of those has the capacity to modify data, update accounts, and potentially delete absolutely anything.”

Growing cloud usage across an organization—not to mention a host of new use cases—only increases the risk. “Data migration [requiring that we] build feeds between two Salesforce instances to maintain data increases the potential for corruption tenfold,” Graham emphasizes. 

Own offers an additional layer of protection during the Salesforce integration between the two systems that GoCardless is currently undergoing. “The possibility of corruption during that phase during that project is going to be substantially higher,” Graham says. “Knowing where and how things get changed will be extremely important.”

The challenge… at the previous company

The main challenge that compelled GoCardless to look for a backup and recovery solution didn’t  directly involve the payment processing company.

Instead, it was at Graham’s  previous employer, where he witnessed the deletion of 4,000 files. Thankfully, the company had a backup solution in place. “If we hadn't,” Graham says, “there'd be literally no way of getting that data back.” 

GoCardless couldn’t be left in a similar situation “and it was absolutely essential that they had” a backup and recovery solution in place to avoid major business fallout from catastrophic data loss. “At that moment in time when we do need it, we really, super need it,” Graham says. 

How GoCardless uses and finds value in Own 

Graham logs into Own often—generally to see history tracking. “We don't have very good controls or processes to govern some data elements within GoCardless,” he says. As data changes, users and data managers need to understand who has changed the data and how the data has changed. While not a common use case for GoCardless, Graham still uses Own a few times during a single month.

GoCardless also uses the find and compare tool, which Graham says is particularly helpful for small data sets. “It’s quick and easy to use,” he says. “You come back half an hour [after scheduling a job] to do the comparison.”

Currently, there’s a pressing need to use it as a backup solution against a shaky, unreliable system. The company uses Own primarily as a repository for recovery. “During these times, it’s really good,” Graham highlights. Despite a lack of events warranting using Own, having it provides GoCardless with security and peace of mind. 

Ultimately, “[Own] will just sit there in the background, keeping us safe and giving us comfort that we can recover if we need to,” Graham says. “I can sleep at night knowing there's never any question about the safety of our data.”

Own as the revenue protector

Before Own , how would GoCardless have known if they’d been hit with data loss or corruption? If an end user asked the company about missing or changed data that should be there—such as accounts, contacts, or opportunities—it simply wouldn’t have been able to answer.

“It would be hoping that the full copy sandbox had been refreshed recently, and then doing a comparison of that sandbox at the end of production,” Graham says. Prior to a sandbox creation, GoCardless simply wouldn’t have been able to see or track changes—and totally reliant on luck to solve users’ problems.

But that doesn’t scratch the surface of the most detrimental data loss. “Salesforce is our CRM, so if we lose access to our accounts and contacts—our whole prospecting database—we lose access to all sales. So sales stop. Revenue loss would be enormous,” Graham says.

The ultimate insurance policy against data loss

GoCardless takes data safety and compliance seriously. For small teams that need to take on more with less, Own helps lighten the load. “Own frees up resources for when there is a major event: there’s a lot less time spent on recovering than if we had not had a backup” solution in place, Graham says.

To companies without a backup solution in place, Graham says “Get one: because it is one of those things that, when you need, you really, really need.” He cites a very low cost of a backup solution compared to the cost of recovery without it. “It’s about just being able to sleep easily at night, knowing it’s there and that if we do screw anything up there’s a fallback,” he says.

“No business of any size should exist without a backup solution,” he continues. “Because your CRM is your business, in essence.” Suddenly losing access to all data within a CRM—without a means of recovery—and having to rebuild it all from the ground up is what breaks businesses. 

Own is, at the end of it all, a strong insurance policy against data corruption and loss. And you can’t put a price on the peace of mind that comes with that.

‍