After having a half dozen customers ask me in the past few weeks if I thought Salesforce Premiere Success was something that they should consider, and saying the same thing a half dozen times, I thought – Hey, I should write a blog on the topic.
First and foremost, let me declare my conflicts of interest. Red Argyle is a professional services company. Therefore, it could be construed that it’s in my best interest to sell as much service as possible vs. advocating for Salesforce support. It could also be said that due to our partner status with Salesforce, it’s in our best interest to push Salesforce products and services for our benefit.
Yes, Red Argyle can make more money selling services such as support and administration (and does). However, as Salesforce has continually beefed up their offerings around premiere success, it gives me some room for pause. I always advocate for our customers and want them to spend their money wisely. I also want Red Argyle to cater to a company’s HIGHEST ORDER problems. Figuring out strategy? – YES! Doing business analysis on a complex business process and architecting and delivering a solution – YES! Resetting your users’ passwords, diagnosing security hiccups, writing basic report – I’LL PASS! What I’m trying to say, is that many commodity offerings that we have can just as well be handled by Salesforce, leaving Red Argyle to function as your trusted advisor and partner for key strategic projects.
As for what benefit Red Argyle gets from pushing Premiere Support vs. our own services, first and foremost, we receive NO FINANCIAL COMPENSATION from Salesforce for this. If and when we recommend Premiere Success to our customers, it is truly that we believe a customers’ spend is effective spent there, because our desire to tackle the super hard, special problems that your company has and let the lower cost and more available resources at Salesforce handle the day-to-day needs that you may have.
Now, if you’re on the fence as it’s a big decision and commitment, I’ll share a few key reasons why it’s worthy of consideration:
1 – Response time is phenomenal. 2 hour response time is excellent! I could have a customer next door and still not be able to respond to an issue that quickly. I love it when one of our customers has Premiere support, as if we have any special challenges during a project, we can use the support to resolve things quickly.
2 – It includes training. GOOD TRAINING. Training good enough that your staff can get certified. If you’re in the process of minting your own Admin, giving them access to Premiere Success gives them top notch training, and support as they learn the new role. It’s great to have backup, Premiere Success gives that to your team.
3 – They can actually build things for you(not just fix broken things). Reports, basic data imports, update security settings. Formula fields, page layouts, it goes on and on. It’s fantastic.
4 – DEVELOPER SUPPORT. If you have customizations in your instance that are business critical, development or a lot of installed packages, the developer support is a safety net that can get you out of a jam if you get an inexplicable error. (If you didn’t know, Salesforce now requires Premiere Success to provide developer level support)
5 – Accelerators. Want to launch Service Cloud? Use the Accelerator package to get things up and running with a serviceable out of box configuration set vs. a rather detailed project with us to get it going.
So, if you’re on the fence, talk to your team. One thing I would recommend is that Premiere Success is like a Gym membership. Great if you use it, waste of money if you don’t. If you’re buying this to help your admin – give them metrics to uphold relating to how many cases they should run through Premiere or trainings/services that they use. Have them justify the use quarterly so you get the value out of the investment.
To close – Premiere Success is a conversation worth having with your account executive. Red Argyle is happy with the heavy lifting and special projects. If you decide to run with Premiere – get familiar with the offering, and use it!
