David Smith, Head of Revenue Operations at Tribal Group, has worked with Salesforce for nine years. At Tribal Group, they initially rolled the use of Salesforce out to a select group of Sales teams before opening it up to the wider business.
Tribal Group serves the needs of Universities, Colleges, and Private Training Providers around the globe, with numerous products integrated into these establishments. And they are currently using the Salesforce platform to track all of their internal engagements with their customers.
To do this, Tribal primarily uses Salesforce’s Sales Cloud to manage and report on opportunities along with Remedyforce for support tickets, both for internal and external use, and Kantata for a PSA solution.
With their ever-growing use of Salesforce through acquisitions, the expanded use of support ticket functionality, and data being pulled in and out of various systems, it was imperative that David found and implemented a more robust backup solution.
Challenges
Over the years, Tribal Group has acquired several other organizations. One main requirement within the team is to onboard those acquired companies into the existing internal systems, including Salesforce. Adding new users, new workflows, and integrating data from other orgs increases the data within Salesforce exponentially, but also introduces additional risk into the system.
About three years ago, David was using the native Salesforce solution to backup their Tribal Group data. According to David, this method was very cumbersome and required manual checks and interventions to ensure everything had been backed up correctly. When Salesforce announced that they were sunsetting their backup functionality, David took this as a sign to find a better backup solution for their needs.
“We had been loosely browsing the Marketplace, prior to Salesforce's announcement. That was primarily because Salesforce’s backup solution was a bit more manual than I’d like. It would be great to free up time for the team to actually do development work and improve the user experience for the end users rather than crunching backups.”
David first looked at the AppExchange to see what solutions were on the market. He saw from previous engagements with customers that Own ranked at the top. He knew he’d need to compare a few different solutions, but he could tell pretty quickly from the positive comments and experience others were having with Own that that was the right fit for them.
Solutions
Own stood out as the vendor of choice for David for several reasons.
David was immediately drawn to the breadth of services available. Own goes beyond just the backup functionality– David can backup, restore, and seed actual data into his test environments, which saves him and his team hours of work a week.
Additional benefits of Own include:
David has a number of key projects he’s working on, which will call upon access to data. It’s vital to the success of the projects that he and his team members have the latest information all backed up. With Own, David can confidently transition through these periods of change management.
Challenges
David and his team used to spend countless hours inputting the data required to complete projects in test sandboxes. If they used too little data, it wouldn’t be a meaningful exercise so they spent additional time inputting data they may not need, in case there were relationships among fields they may have missed.
Once a project was completed and the changes pushed live, the sandbox would be reset for the next project. To reuse the sandbox, they would, again, go through the manual process of having to input relevant test data. Even with a data loader tool, it took hours of developer’s time getting the connections just right.
“We found ourselves recycling existing sandboxes and rebuilding data requirements which was taking so much time before we could make a meaningful start on a project.”
These processes sometimes caused delays depending on requirements, which could be problematic for David. Having something in place to help rebuild the data was a must to improve the efficiency of the team.
Solutions
With Own Accelerate, it was much easier for the team to spin up a dev site, press a button, and drop information straight into a sandbox, saving the team hours of time and giving them the opportunity to personalize that sample data needed for the project.
“We were able to set the limits and the levels at the right amount of information we needed for that project, and that was just perfect for us.”
One example David shares on how they’re using Accelerate is to train new users.
They seed data into their test environments to help new teammates get onboarded quickly. They can also test out new scenarios without fear of causing irreversible damage or breaking anything in production.
Being able to configure a sandbox that is purely for training purposes (and that’s not going to be corrupted by any other activity) keeps things simple for David and his Business Application Team. As a result, David’s team is open to exploration and welcomes the opportunity to develop something new.
“Having Own allows my team to push their own personal development, giving them the confidence and the reassurance to learn something new.”
While it was Own’s breadth of services, functionality, and trusted AppExchange reviews that drove David’s decision to go with Own, it’s the Customer Success team’s support that keeps him confident in his choice.
Through this engagement with the Customer Success team, David learns more about how Own can help him proactively solve problems.
Tribal Group plc is a pioneering world leader in education software and services. Its portfolio includes Student Information Systems; a broad range of education services covering quality assurance, peer review, benchmarking and improvement; and student surveys. Working with Higher Education, Further and Tertiary Education, schools, Government and State bodies, training providers and employers in over 55 countries, Tribal Group’s mission is to empower the world of education with products and services that underpin student success.
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