Strategic Edge Given to Businesses to Achieve Client Success

Named the most widely used professional services automation (PSA) application by Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), FinancialForce delivers first project collaboration platform built for services professionals on Salesforce Platform

FinancialForce, the leading cloud ERP provider on the Salesforce Platform, today announced FinancialForce Professional Services Communities, a social project management platform for professional services organizations (PSOs), their customers and partners. Built on the Salesforce Community Cloud, Professional Services Communities enables organizations to break down communication barriers between customers, partners and subcontractors, and gain deeper, real-time visibility into projects for a more unified service experience. This allows services professionals to more effectively collaborate with all project stakeholders and focus on more impactful work, as opposed to back-and-forth emails on status updates, budgeting and other time-consuming, administrative tasks that don’t tie directly back to project success.

FinancialForce Professional Service Communities empowers PSOs to create a personalized channel of communication for each customer while providing real-time project information at their fingertips. The new offering also enables consultants, partners and subcontractors to stay aligned on goals, resources, timelines and strategies, creating more successful client experiences and higher satisfaction.

Capabilities of FinancialForce Professional Service Communities include:

• Document sharing – The filing component allows for sharing, storage, and management of project related files. Versioning functionalities help everyone keep on track of changes and updates to documents as a project progresses.

• Partner visibility – FinancialForce Professional Services Communities serves as a central hub for all interactions – and associated data – with partners and subcontractors. It allows project leaders to quickly determine who’s available, and when, and enables partners and subcontractors to enter time and expenses straight into the system.

• Access rights – Project teams can set access rights based on roles so that a given party can access only the information they need.

• Community branding – PSOs can customize FinancialForce Professional Services Communities with their own brand elements to deliver a consistent brand experience for their clients.

• Social collaboration – FinancialForce Professional Services Communities has also built in Chatter, the popular enterprise social network to enable real-time communication with other employees, customers and partners within the same app.

• Mobile access – FinancialForce Professional Services Communities are built for an increasingly mobile workforce so users can access and update project data from anywhere via the Salesforce1 mobile application.

“We see Professional Services Communities as an important part of our customer engagement initiative.  It helps us create a more personalized, transparent and collaborative experience with our clients and allows us to better manage and communicate with partners,” said Jim Murray, chief technology officer at USDM. “Communities bring together disparate pockets of data and insight to help us better serve our customers, provide real-time updates to projects, exceed their expectations, to build a stronger, long term relationship. What’s more, it opens up a new marketing channel on which we can share information about new services to customers. This new platform will be integral to helping us grow our business.”

“Businesses across the board are adopting more customer-centric approaches,” said Lori Ellsworth, general manager of professional services automation at FinancialForce. “We built FinancialForce Professional Services Communities to help our customers differentiate on client engagement and tighter partner collaboration which translates into higher project success rates and customer satisfaction. While reception from our existing PSA customers has been extremely positive, I think the potential impact of Communities is limitless and we will continue to see innovative ways PSOs will leverage Professional Services Communities to transform customer experience.”

FinancialForce Professional Services Communities extends on the benefits of FinancialForce PSA, recently recognized by the Technology Service Industry Association (TSIA) as the world’s most widely used PSA tool, which connects sales and services organizations on the same platform to eliminate data disconnect and drive revenue growth. FinancialForce PSA was also recently named by G2Crowd as the application delivering the ‘highest overall satisfaction’ in the PSA category.

“It’s no coincidence that FinancialForce has built up the world’s largest community of PSA users,” said John Ragsdale, vice president for technology research at TSIA. “The company continues to innovate, offering improved, transparent collaboration around projects that will allow professional services organizations to differentiate themselves from industry peers based on the tools they use. It promises to be especially useful for the ever-growing number of freelance workers within the professional services world.”