Salesforce
The system of record, and the experience in front of it.
Salesforce holds the record — constituents, applications, cases, pipeline. We build the surfaces that write to it and read from it, so the experience and the system agree.
In production for One Percent for America, Earthwatch and Precision Digital — the record and the experience in front of it, kept in agreement.
Salesforce is the system of record: constituents, applications, cases and pipeline on an extensible object model, with reporting across the whole lifecycle. The record and the experience in front of it are usually procured separately, by different people, at different times, and the seam between them is where the two stop agreeing. A constituent fills in a form that does not match the object model. Staff work a case in one system and answer questions about it in another. The record says one thing and the website says another, and the audience believes the website. The stakes are rising with AI — Agentforce answers from the record, and Salesforce has signed to acquire Contentful as the context layer agents reason from — so the work is making the surfaces around the record honest to what it holds.
Our Work with Salesforce
Earning Trust Before Asking for an Application: A Fintech Lending Platform for One Percent for America
Publishing Straight From the System of Record: A Product Website for Precision Digital
How the Work Splits
CRM and case management as the system of record, an extensible object model, identity and access controls, reporting across the constituent lifecycle.
The experience layer in front of it, integration engineering that keeps the record and the interface in agreement, content architecture that survives the object model changing, and the judgment about which parts of a journey belong in the CRM and which do not.
Platforms where an application or an account is a real record with consequences attached, and where the person on the other side has to be able to trust what they are told about it. Lending and eligibility flows are the clearest case: the applicant’s experience and the institution’s record have to be the same story.
The work in practice
Salesforce shows up in engagements where the record has consequences for the person it describes. A loan application, an eligibility determination, a case that a caseworker and a constituent are both looking at from different sides.
Our work sits on the surfaces around it. The experience an applicant moves through, the content that explains what is happening to them, and the integration that keeps the two in agreement with what the CRM actually holds. When those drift apart the institution loses the argument, because the audience believes what the interface tells them over what the record says.
Practice leadership
Doug Sisko
Doug Sisko works on customer acquisition and the digital barriers in front of it. He has led work for companies whose customer data already lives in a CRM and whose growth depends on using it.