Arena-FlowEQ CRM Integration (Salesforce, Zendesk, …)
Full transcript below:
Ann McGuire
Hello, everyone. I’m Ann McGuire, director of product marketing here at Arena, and will be the moderator for today’s session. On behalf of Arena, I would like to welcome our customers to our event today with our partner, FlowEQ.
Thank you for joining us. We’re excited to have you with us today. I have just a few items to review before we turn the mic over to Brittani at FlowEQ. This is mostly for the people joining us for the first time. We want to keep the event engaging and interactive and will do so with questions and raffles. Use the Ask a Question feature located on the right side of your screen throughout the presentation. You can also upvote questions that already have been asked. After the presentation, we’ll address as many questions as we can. Note the questions are anonymous, so follow up with your Arena support, your coach, or contact FlowEQ through the link provided in the event. And then for raffles, we are going to raffle off two Yeti cups today. Please note that a recording of this event will be available on the platform, and that finishes up our housekeeping items.
So now, it’s my pleasure to pass the mic to Brittani with FlowEQ, who is going to be presenting along with Mike Moone and Andrew Wilkinson.
Brittani Dunlap
Thanks so much, Ann. We really appreciate the time that you guys are offering us today. My name’s Brittani Dunlap. I am co-founder and CEO of FlowEQ.
Andrew Wilkinson
My name’s Andrew Wilkinson. I’m the Head of Product for FlowEQ. And before I worked at FlowEQ, I was also a customer, so I’ll be able to speak about how FlowEQ is actually used.
Mike Moone
Great. Thanks, Brittani and Andrew, and I’m Mike Moone, CTO, also a co-founder at FlowEQ. And so as CTO, I spend a lot of time working on developing the product and setting up our integrations, and making sure that we are making it as easy to use as possible for our customers. And I wanted to spend a little bit of time discussing why we built FlowEQ, in terms of what problems we saw and gaps between existing solutions.
And so, to set some context for that, I wanted to first frame the problem from a different perspective. Now, as consumers, I think we’ve all seen that things have generally become easier to purchase, easier to contact, easier to get around.
I mean, think about nowadays if you want to watch a movie, you have an instant library of hundreds of thousands of options on demand. If you need to go grocery shopping, well, you drive to the store or you can open an app, press a button, and your groceries will be there in an hour. And so, you can imagine that with all that reinforcing convenience, the expectations that consumers have today are exponentially higher than they’ve ever been. And so, as a company trying to serve those expectations, that can be a pretty high bar to meet. And you have this conflicting challenge on the company side where your data needs to be in very robust systems of record.
Think about all the challenges around there facing data security and privacy and everything that happens in the cybersecurity space. It’s really important that as a company … to have this in a robust way and a documented way and in a secure way, and oftentimes that’s not compatible with just speed and meeting this on-demand expectation. So, companies have to close this gap, and that’s really where we see ourselves coming in. Prior to co-founding FlowEQ, I was at a company called SunPower, and we sold solar systems to consumers.
We were a very fast-growing company. In the early days, we used to have Oracle as our ERP for accounting. But in order to meet the speed of what people were looking for, we couldn’t do everything out of Oracle. And so, what that meant is we’d build a lot of spreadsheets, and a lot of our work that didn’t happen in Oracle would happen in spreadsheets. But as you can imagine, as the company grew that wasn’t robust. We needed to define good systems of record. So for example, Salesforce for handling communication with customers; we used Arena for PLM and for QMS to make sure that we were continuing to incorporate learnings from our products that we put out in the field in terms of being able to make better products and the highest quality solar equipment.
That was great for giving different departments the systems of record that they needed, but one challenge that arose from that is that all these systems didn’t talk to each other. And so, there are a few ways that you can try to address that. So, one of which is you create a lot of internal training material and documentation and instructions on how you would like your team to interact with these various systems.
And that can work, but if you think about it, the number of different tools that you have to train people on today, it’s continuing to grow. There have been studies that show the average number of applications an internal employee needs to interact with is up to eight or nine, or even 10 on average. And so, think about training folks to be efficient across not only one system, but 10 different systems. That tends to break down.
The other side of it is, that you do have the ability to fully automate certain things, right? Play RPA on one portion of the process, or set up trigger-based automations for when all the information comes in perfectly. But in reality, that’s a small subset of the work that actually happens. So, let’s say 10%. The 90%, the majority of the work, it does require people.
The other end of the spectrum is, well, yes, you could ask people to work from a separate, dedicated environment that tries to pull together all these internal systems, but then you’re just creating one more application in the mix, right? You’re going from 10 to 11, and asking employees to remember to log in to just one more thing. That’s contributing to the problem, in our thinking.
So our solution, what it does is it embeds within your existing systems of record. It does not ask you to adopt a new system. It tries to enable and empower companies to use the tools they already have internally, and just use them in a way that communicates more efficiently.
And so, that’s what we’re going to look at today in terms of how we do that between Salesforce and Arena, especially. Because if you look at these two platforms, Salesforce is really a best-in-class customer communication system, right?
It has your contacts from a sales perspective, it has a great case management solution. It’s very good at communicating with your customers and keeping track of all of that information. But on the product side, if you’re manufacturing high-quality products, especially companies in regulated spaces, it’s very important that you have very accurate and auditable and robust logs of that communication, of any complaints that might arise from the products, especially if any of that information needs to get fed back through to the manufacturing process.
So, that Salesforce to Arena connection is an area that we’ve spent a lot of time refining, and we’d love to give you a preview and a bit of an overview of how that works.
So at this point, I’m going to go ahead and pass it over to Andrew for a bit of a demo. And Andrew, take it away.
Andrew Wilkinson (FlowEQ-Arena-Salesforce Integration Demo)
Before I launch into the demo, I want to give you some context on who I am and where I came from. So, before I was Head of Product at FlowEQ, I was a customer of FlowEQ. Specifically, I was the Head of Customer Support at Kinsa, which is a smart thermometer company. Our platform captures data from a thermometer and shows it to a customer in the app and helps them diagnose what they may be dealing with.
And then, as you can imagine, when a fever-causing pandemic hit the whole world, our products became in incredibly high demand, and we had to deal with a surge in business that, frankly, my team wasn’t quite up to at the time, because all of our processes were very manual. We used Arena for our quality management. And so, we had to make sure that all our records were in order because we would get audited by the FDA annually.
We also had to use Shopify for creating orders for customers. We had to use ShipEngine for creating return shipping labels. There are so many different systems at play that it would normally take my team roughly 30 minutes to handle just one RMA, which is, frankly, just not scalable when you’re dealing with so many people coming to you needing your product. And so, what I did, I started to build my whole process on FlowEQ. I’m going to show you what that looks like, and how we were able to get our RMA process down from 30 minutes to about 30 seconds.
So here, I’m going to go into Salesforce. This will look familiar to a lot of you. This will be a support case. Now, it’ll be a bit strange because unlike most support cases, we’re going to have everything we need from the very beginning.
But here we have Walter. He’s very unhappy because he just bought a smart thermometer last week and he can’t use it with his paid subscription because it won’t power on anymore. He’s tried new batteries, it didn’t help, and now he’s asking for a replacement.
So right here natively within Salesforce, we have the FlowEQ app running the right rail. And this app has already read through the contents of this ticket, and has noticed this is probably a thermometer problem, and so it’s recommending the thermometer troubleshooting flow, and that’s what we’re going to go through right now.
So, the very first thing, it’s going to ask me some questions about what’s going on. And here, I’m going to select “It won’t power on.” “Has the customer tried replacing batteries?” In this case, they have, and this helps to qualify whether a particular issue needs to become an Arena complaint, or needs to become a troubleshooting case at all.
You can add as many questions as you like to qualify, but for the purpose of this demo, we’re just keeping it simple, that this thermometer is completely dead and we need to send a replacement. So, because Walter has tried replacing batteries, I’ll click yes, and now we’re going forward to file a quality process in Arena.
So here, it’s already pulled in data from this case and it’s ready for filing. So, it’s pulled the name of the case from the subject line. It’s pulled the serial number from the serial number field here. And I can update these if necessary. So, maybe if the customer didn’t provide a serial number, the agent can still type it in manually. And then it’s also pulled in some other data here. So, “When was the complaint opened?”
“What was the method?” “What’s the RMA number going to be?” And then I can also include attachments. So, Walter was very kind and included a photo of his thermometer, which is also necessary in our case for FDA compliance.
And so, the only thing I need to do is hit “Create quality process,” and now the FlowEQ step type is connecting with Arena and passing that data through, and now it’s created a quality complaint. So, I have this 469 and I’m ready to move on to the next step. So, “Is the thermometer still under warranty?” Well, Walter mentioned that he bought it last week, so it’s definitely within one year warranty, but we can also, if we have the data available, choose the correct option automatically for you.
If we have a purchase date available in a field that we can work with, we can do some math and automatically make that decision for the agents, which can speed things along even faster. But for right now, yep. They’re still under warranty. I’m going to verify Walter’s mail and mailing address, which has also been pulled from the ticket already. Next, we’ll just validate it because obviously, we’ll want to make sure that his replacement gets to where he needs to go.
And then here, I’m just going to order that replacement using that confirmed mailing address. And now I just have to choose which product we need to send to him. In our case, it’s the smart thermometer. How many? And that’s it, that’s the order created and I’m ready to move on to the next step. So, we’ve created the replacement order, but we still need to get the old thermometer back so we can investigate it and continue with that Arena complaint.
So, I’m just going to choose the package option here, get rates, and this will offer me a shipping label to create. Now, obviously this is a demo, so it won’t be a real label, but you get the idea. And once that label’s created, it updates the case automatically. So, now I have the link to the shipping label right here, and the flow has looked at our Recurly integration and has found that Walter has a paid smart health plus subscription, which we want to help reduce this painful process for Walter.
And so, we’re going to offer him, as a way to reduce churn, one free month to his account. And so, I’ll go ahead and hit apply. And now FlowEQ is composing an email to the customer, and it’s pulled in all the details that I’ve worked through this flow.
So, here’s the complaint number, here’s the order number, and here’s that shipping label. And all I have to do is scroll down to the bottom and hit send. And then that goes and writes that into the feed so that email has been sent out immediately, and I’ve also updated the case itself with a history of the decisions that I made to get to this point, and I’ve also closed the case and I’m ready to move on to my next step.
So, that’s how you can use FlowEQ to really whittle down your processes and accelerate them significantly. Now down here, you can see that I took about three minutes and 55 seconds to go through that, and that was with me talking.
As you can see, the median is much shorter. It’s less than two minutes. You can see very clearly in the product how much faster you can go through things when you’re led every step of the way. And so, and if I go back into Arena, I’m going to refresh this page now, and this is the quality process I just created. So, I’m going to go into that and click on details, and you’ll see a lot of the same data that was passed through from Salesforce into Arena.
So, I have the serial number of the item, I have the comments, I have the original complaint, I have the RMA number, the complaint receipt date-all that good stuff. And then down here, I also have that photo that shows me the thermometer itself and then a direct link back to the case.
This part is incredibly important because the FDA auditors were very, very picky about this. They wanted a very clear line of communication straight back from the quality process, right back to the Salesforce case.
And with that link, your auditor has direct access to exactly where they need to get to. So, now that I’ve shown you how a flow is followed, let me go and show you how it’s built. So, this is that exact same flow that I just followed, but this time I’m in flow builder, and this is where the magic happens. So as you can see, it’s in a diagram form on the right-hand side, and on the left, I can choose decisions and work my way down in the left panel as well.
So, this will look very familiar. If I click “Won’t power on,” the next step is, “Has the customer tried replacing batteries?” Yes, and I can go through this as needed. If I need to add an additional step to this flow, all I need to do is use the plus button and use any of our integration steps, we call them step types, to build out this flow even more. As you can see, we have three different Arena step types where we can change them, we can create one, or we can also update a quality process that’s already been made.
So, it’s a very, very powerful tool and very, very simple to use and very intuitive. There’s no coding required here at all. All you have to do is set up your integrations one time with an API key, and then you’re good to use all of your Arena steps.
One thing I definitely want to circle back on is, if I have to go back to the case, up here if I go back to the home, you’ll see at the very top we have a list of integrations that relate back to Walter’s case. So as you saw earlier with Recurly, he has that active subscription, but now there’s a new one for Arena. Now that we know that Walter has created a complaint, we have the information available here as well. And this will automatically update as that quality complaint is investigated. But you can click here and see all that information in Arena without actually having to open Arena.
It’s just available at a quick glance. And so, that’s how you can build flows with FlowEQ, and how you can save time and money by handling all your cases, no matter how complex they are.
Brittani Dunlap
All right, thanks, Andrew. And as Andrew and Mike mentioned, I want to echo everything that they’ve said, but we are here to make work easier and teams more productive. While there are a ton of benefits you can see on the right-hand side, I want to focus on three areas: visibility, consistency, and productivity.
We want to provide easy visibility across departments within your organization, so your support team and your quality team have visibility into the same information. It’s important to streamline the complaint handling process and to ensure it is followed accurately each time.
And lastly, the faster transfer of information with reduced errors results in higher product quality. Overall, this is becoming incredibly cost-saving to our customers, and this is what they’re saying about it. While I’m not a fan of reading from the slide, I am going to take a moment to do this here because what this one customer said was really impactful, both on a product level, but also a company brand level.
On the left-hand side, you’ll see a bolded font where it says, “We were thrilled to find that support from their team was excellent too. Responsive and thorough in both the initial setup, and through the ongoing growth and maintenance.” So, it’s important to us that the product Andrew just demonstrated and showed of course meets all of your standards from a product point of view, but also our team is here to do the same thing. We’re excited to offer this to your company too.
Ann McGuire (Q&A)
Well, thank you, Brittani, Mike, and Andrew. What we’re going to do now is turn on our cameras, and we’ll answer questions that you might have. I will switch over and look at questions. Okay, and it’s not too late to put in your own questions.
I’m going to do this in the order that they were asked. The first is, do you integrate with other CRM systems?
Mike Moone
Yeah. I’ll go ahead and take that one. The answer is yes, we do. Salesforce is obviously a very popular CRM and a popular integration, but we have a very similar integration with Zendesk, with Freshdesk, with Zoho.
For the CRMs where we don’t have a native app, we also actually have a Chrome extension and a Firefox extension that allows you to interact with your workflows from really any web-based application. Again, that’s just kind of trying to fit with the theme of going to where our customers already work and trying to make it easy from within their workspace to interact with the other systems of record used across the company.
Ann McGuire
Great. I think, yeah, I mean, Zendesk is one that we advertise a lot, as well as your integration with Zendesk. I think that’s a popular one. The next question has to do with the demo. Once the quality process investigation has been completed within Arena, is there a way to then automatically update Salesforce with the results of that investigation?
Mike Moone
Yeah, and I’ll take that one, as well. This is a common area where we’ll often expand the integration with customers, because if you think about it, Arena is really great for enabling closed-loop learning through product manufacturing and deployment, and then receiving feedback and making better products.
That manifests in a couple of ways. One is we have a listener that allows you to trigger follow-on updates after that complaint has been resolved. For example, if you want to go back and automatically close the case after the complaint you initiated from the case was completed, you can do that, using our two-way integration. The other component of that is even further downstream. Let’s say that you have opened a quality process. You’ve identified the affected skews or the affected parts that were problematic, and then you’ve initiated a change within Arena, and you now have a new revision on that item.
You can actually take those affected changes and use a trigger there, as well, to go identify which locations you might have those in the field and, for example, automatically open follow-up work orders within Salesforce to go address them.
Again, to us, that’s a big part of closing the loop is where the customer complaint came in. The feedback got to the engineering team, made its way into the manufacturing process, an approved part is now available, and then making sure that that gets reflected and back into the fielded units that are out there.
Ann McGuire
Yeah, that’s great. We like those closed-loop processes.
Let’s see. We have five more questions, and it’s still not too late to ask more. We’re planning to hire new customer support reps. Does this increase our onboarding or training?
Andrew Wilkinson
Yeah, so Mike, I think you might be muted, but I can take that one. Yes, so it definitely helps with onboarding and training. One example would be, with that kind of massive influx in business that I mentioned earlier, we had to bring on more staff and more agents as quickly as possible, but because I’d built out all of our flows using FlowEQ, they were able to run through those flows immediately, even without having terribly much prior product knowledge, so they were handling tickets within their first couple of hours, which was amazing.
Obviously, we made the more advanced flows available to them later on, as they got more familiar with the product, but yeah, they were up and running on their first day, even though we had a very technical, smart, connected product, which had a hardware component, a software component, and a network component.
Ann McGuire
Great. Well, this one got up-voted, so I’m going to put it in here just as a little breather. We are a current customer and/ FlowEQ has been very helpful and responsive in our integration. Someone put that in, and then more people up-voted it, so yay.
Mike Moone
We should add that back to the quote slide.
Brittani Dunlap
Yeah, let me pull that one in there.
Ann McGuire
That’s in real-time.
Brittani Dunlap
I didn’t make it up. I promise.
Ann McGuire
Then, let’s see. The next one is, can you generate multiple complaints from the same case?
Andrew Wilkinson
Yes, you can. In the demo that we’ve just shown, after the Arena complaint was created, there was the Complete Step and the Move onto the Next Step button, but there was also a Create Another button, and so that would allow you to create additional complaints and whatever else you needed to do.
Ann McGuire
Yeah, and I’ll just add to that, as well. Obviously, we want to enable that when it’s the desired approach, but we want to kind of make it not easy to accidentally do that, as well, so there are certain areas where we’ll intentionally require additional confirmation.
If you go to a case where there’s already been a complaint, and you go to create another one, you can, but you’re going to have to bypass and acknowledge that, yes, here’s the first one you’ve already created. Do you really want to create another one? That’s just an example of where, in general, we always want to make sure the correct process is followed, but we also understand that corner cases come up, and there are exceptions.
We want the product to be flexible enough to expand just enough to account for those and not require people to leave that workflow entirely and do it offline, because that’s when we’ve seen, within companies, that the best-intentioned process breaks down if it doesn’t have the ability to handle that one corner case. Then, really, people have to exit it entirely, and you’re back to doing things manually, so that’s just… That’s an example of trying to guide down the happy path but allow for the not-so-happy paths when they arise.
Andrew Wilkinson
Yeah, and speaking about the not-so-happy paths, because the flows are designed to be iterative, so as you deploy them to your team, and you learn, well, this corner case is coming up more often than we thought.
It’s very easy for you to change that flow and add that extra path. When that happens, unlike when you’re training your team, where you have to update documentation and then force your team to read documentation, which everybody hates doing, all you have to do is update that flow, and then your team is automatically following your SOPs right away without any additional training.
It saves a bunch of time and documentation, as well.
Ann McGuire
Great. All right, this is going to test you guys. If you update information in Salesforce, and it says SFDC, can you use the update Arena quality process to update the fields in the Arena complaint, or will this override?
Mike Moone
Yeah, so I can take that one. The short answer is yes. That’s kind of what the update quality process stuff is designed to do, but I’ll caveat that with, typically, you’ll configure that with a subset of the fields that you used to initially create the quality process, because it is important to not override things.
If there’s any field that, or attribute on the quality process, that your engineering team or your quality team is going to be taking control over, you wouldn’t want those to be updatable from Salesforce, right? Because you wouldn’t want them to override an update made on the Arena side, there are certain fields that really are controlled from the Salesforce side, and you would want to reflect additional information.
One example is the description of the initial issue, right? That’s an area where, if you have received subsequent information that was not on the initial case description, you can use that to expand upon the description attribute when you update that within Arena, without overriding anything else. The other example is if there’s an additional attachment. Let’s say that the first complaint was initiated, and there were no pictures, no evidence of the damage, and the engineering team needed that, so the customer responds, and provides that to the case.
You can use the update to add an attachment to the quality process when it wasn’t available originally.
Ann McGuire
Good. Oh, that’s a really good example, too, because like Andrew said, it’s unusual to have all the information there the first time, in the first half of the complaint.
Andrew Wilkinson
Yeah, that never happens.
Ann McGuire
Except in demos.
Let’s see. The next one is, can you build out similar workflows for other Arena worlds, like changes?
Mike Moone
Yeah, so good question. Yeah, there is a change step type where you can actually bypass the quality module and basically initiate a change directly.
That’s an optional way to structure it, depending on if that’s how your business wants to operate. Obviously, a perfectly happy path is it runs through quality. It runs through the complaint process, and then that is used to initiate the change on the Arena side, but for some customers, they want to go directly to that.
There’s the team working in Salesforce is kind of qualified enough to just go straight to initiating the change. That’s where you can use that change step, which allows you to kind of bypass the whole quality module and push that directly. Then you can listen for that change becoming effective like I was mentioning, as part of the two-way integration, and use that to go find and update subsequent Salesforce records.
Really, that’s going to be the decision of the admin who owns this process, and I’ll point out that there is a difference in permissions, in terms of being able to use the workflow inside Salesforce versus being able to edit or decide the structure of the workflow. Typically, there are one or two admins on the FlowEQ side that have the ability to make those edits or decide, can you go straight to a change or do you have to run through quality but, based on what they’ve decided, then they can publish a workflow that’s accessible to the Salesforce users that are going to direct them through the appropriate path.
Ann McGuire
Good. Okay, the next question is, what if you don’t have a CRM application of any type?
Mike Moone
Yeah, that’s a good question. Obviously, there’s a Chrome extension route. That is one option for opening an Arena record really from any web application. As long as it’s web-based, as long as you can load it up in Chrome, you can open a workflow on that record and use a step to open a quality process or a change.
The caveat there is if it’s just a generic kind of webpage, it’s not going to have the ability to automatically pull field values from it, right? Because that’s a benefit of having that initial information in a CRM is you can map that data, so the user doesn’t have to populate or type it in if it already exists within Salesforce or within Zendesk.
We do also have a product that we didn’t demo here, called WorkBoard. What WorkBoard… Think of it as a bit of a spreadsheet replacement, where it allows you to load in records, and you can load them in from a spreadsheet, and then WorkBoard becomes that workspace where you can run flows on those records. We really created WorkBoard for that scenario where customers have a need to use the workflows but didn’t have an existing CRM that housed all that information.
We’ve actually found, in practice, that customers, will actually use both oftentimes, and RMAs are a really good example, because even if you’re using a CRM with cases or tickets, a lot of customers will still have an RMA log that ends up being a spreadsheet or a Google Sheet.
It’s because the RMA lifecycle is different than the ticket lifecycle, right? Ticket, you get the request. You respond to the customer. You close it. But this RMA, you’re waiting for shipping, for logistics.
There’s time. It’s a different lifecycle, so one thing that some of our customers will do is they’ll have the ticket or the case and initiate the Arena record from that, but when they’re doing the return, they’ll also create a corresponding WorkBoard record that lives in parallel, and the shipment status of that return, the order number that came from the system, or if it’s coming back to a warehouse, and the warehouse team has to verify that what the customer returned was the right unit.
They didn’t just put a brick in a box and send it back and expect a replacement. The warehouse team can actually come into WorkBoard to go and verify that return and initiate the follow-up steps. As you can imagine, that takes a bit more configuration than just mapping a Salesforce field to an Arena field, because you’re basically creating your own structure like you would in a spreadsheet. Once it’s set up, it’s quite powerful. Back to the original question, it allows you to utilize those good workflows even if the data does not live inside of a CRM right now.
Ann McGuire
Good. Let’s see. We still have three questions left. One’s about licensing. Do you need a specific license in Arena to view the complaint from Salesforce?
Mike Moone
Yeah, so I’ll take that. It’s a read-only quality license is the… Again, the Arena team is probably going to be the experts on this, but in our experience, if you have a license with read access to the quality module, then that’s what you can utilize for the integration to open and view the quality process records in Salesforce.
Ann McGuire
Okay. Yeah, and then I’ll say, too, all of these questions are anonymous, so if you have a specific question like this, you can contact Arena Support or your account manager or your coach, especially your account manager for this licensing question.
Let’s see. Is FlowEQ 21 CFR Part 11 compliant? If not, do you expect to make it compliant?
Mike Moone
I’ll touch quickly on our certification. We actually just recently received our SOC 2 certification. That was one of the efforts that our team went through. I’ll say, in general, one of our philosophies is that we, ourselves, are not the system of record.
We exist to connect systems of records. What that often means is that, in some scenarios, it doesn’t make sense to pursue the same certifications that Arena might, as the system of record for the products and the complaints, et cetera, because really, once you’ve created that, we’ll attach and identify a reference, but we’re not going to store any of that information about what the customer said, what the investigation was.
We intentionally don’t store that data. We just ensure that it’s transmitted securely. It puts us in a little bit of a different kind of realm of the certifications that are applicable versus somebody that is storing the sensitive data or health data or things like that in their systems on their databases.
Hopefully, that helps. I mean, in general, we’re constantly evaluating what are the applicable certifications that are next for us, and in our view, SOC 2 was the most appropriate, based on how our product was structured and the types of things we store and don’t store. We do have other certifications on our roadmap that we’re planning to go achieve as a follow-up to SOC 2 because that was SOC 2 Type 2.
Brittani Dunlap
I’ll just tack onto that…
I’ll say, on that, if there is something specific that is relevant to our customer base, our future customer base, please jump onto our website and shoot us a note through our support or request a demo, however you want to contact us. Let us know, because like Mike said, we can absolutely alter and adjust the roadmap certifications if this is one that we’re seeing consistently surfaces.
Ann McGuire
Good, great. Let’s see. Would there… Let’s see. Would there be traceability of who is performing complaint investigations or other modifications in an Arena complaint file/ FlowEQ?
Let’s see. I’m not reading that right. Would there be traceability of who is performing the complaint investigation or other modifications like complaint categorizations in the Arena complaint file?
Andrew Wilkinson
That kind of sounds like it might be more of an Arena question, but I can say, and perhaps Mike will have more details, but when you create the complaint from Salesforce or Zendesk, whichever CRM you’re using, the person who followed that flow is logged in that Arena complaint, so you do have that traceability.
Then, also, like I kind of showed in the demo, there is a hyperlink that’s automatically attached to the complaint, which traces right back to the ticket or to the case within the CRM, so you have a kind of flow auditability that way, as well.
I’m not sure if that answers the question but, Mike, did you have anything to add?
Mike Moone
Yeah, I think that was the main thing I was going to point out is, as part of linking the integration, you’re able to identify the Arena user that is attached to that FlowEQ user. What that means is that when you run through the workflow and create the complaint record within Arena, it shows who created that complaint record, so it’ll come in as created by, and then there’ll be an Arena record of a user.
Then, from there, obviously, you have all that traceability within Arena itself, who’s able to progress this from one step to the next step and who modified any of those attribute values. Similarly, just tying back to that update step, if you were to use that update step, let’s say you had one user initiate it, and then somebody sent a photo or somebody sent an additional description and a different Salesforce user ran that update step to update that one specific attribute that was updatable from Salesforce, you would similarly see who did that modification.
That is the benefit of having those users tied together is each time we make an API call on behalf of that user to Arena, Arena logs which users credentials were used to make that API call.
Andrew Wilkinson
Then I just wanted to add one more thing. The part of the Arena integration that automatically adds a link to the CRM ticket, that was by special request because, specifically, for any other people who are on this call, who represent a medical device company, the FDA auditors require that the Arena complaint has a link, a direct link, to the CRM.
Oftentimes there’s a lot of copying and pasting happening, which is less than ideal, because as you get more information, that becomes out of date, so that’s where that direct hyperlink comes from.
Then, also, another requirement of the FDA audit was that three good faith efforts had to be made to contact the customer and get that item returned for investigation.
That is also something that FlowEQ can do. Because we create the shipping label as part of that RMA flow, we can also track the status of it, so we know when it’s just sitting with the customer versus when it’s actually inbound and when it’s delivered. By tracking that status we can then, also, automatically follow up with the customer, so if it hasn’t gone inbound or delivered yet a week after that initial ticket, we can be like, ” Hey, it’s been a week since we gave you your return label.
Can you send it back?” All of that can become automated, rather than this very, very manual process of not only sending those emails but also just checking the status of every return shipping label you have to deal with. There are a lot of features like that, that are designed to improve not only the transparency of the links between the systems but also to make the auditor’s job a lot easier, as well.
Ann McGuire
Great. Thank you both. The last question is a little bit for Arena, too, I think. Can you build complaint reports from Arena or FlowEQ?
I’ll just jump in and say, yes, you can build complaint reports from Arena, and if you want to take it from there.
Mike Moone
Yeah, and I’ll add to that, as well. Obviously, you have the full reporting capabilities of Arena available.
One of the other goals of FlowEQ is to make reporting easier by enforcing that certain field values were populated correctly.
That’s one of those hidden gotchas with any report is if the data coming into it and feeding it was not good or correct, the report isn’t going to be useful. Being able to enforce required attribute updates, and similarly on the Salesforce side, as part of progressing through the workflow, you can enforce that certain field values got updated correctly, and then that makes your Salesforce reports also much more accurate, as well, because you can guarantee that when there was an Arena record opened from a Salesforce case, that the field of Arena quality number in Salesforce is also populated correctly. You can run reports out of either Salesforce or Arena. Then, the last way we try to help with reporting is, like I mentioned, WorkBoard.
WorkBoard, you can obviously use to populate records without a CRM, but you can also use it to house information that is looking across both Salesforce and Arena. WorkBoard, the naming of it is like a dashboard that you can work from. Part of its goal and capability is to just provide that dashboard view of, hey, here’s a view of every case that had a quality process created where the shipping label is not in transit yet, so these are the ones that we need to follow up with the customer, to make sure that they have, they’re actually planning to put that in the mail.
Those are the three avenues we try to help with reporting to make sure data comes and goes in cleanly to Arena, and then Salesforce or Zendesk or whatever the CRM is, and then optionally you could also build reports around the WorkBoard to use, as well.
Andrew Wilkinson
Yeah, and if I could just add onto that, just being the head of a customer support team, my agents not tagging tickets and cases correctly was a giant headache, and I’m sure any other customer support team members on this call have had that same issue, where they think everything’s going great, and then they pull the reports at the end of the month or the quarter, and it turns out their data is just not reliable at all, because agents forgot to check a box or forgot to add a tag.
By giving flows to your team, they’re guaranteed to follow that flow that you’ve built out for them every step of the way, and so you can make particular fields, like Mike was saying, required, so that they physically can’t progress onto the next step or skip the step entirely, because they have to fill out this one entry, this one field, too. Those fields don’t actually have to be visible to the support agent, so perhaps if you really want to make sure that they are following the flows correctly, you make sure that one particular field is required but is not visible in the ticket form.
That way, the only way that your team can actually create an RMA or follow a flow is by following the flow. That has become really handy for just data reliability and integrity.
Ann McGuire
All right. Well, thank you so much. That is it for the questions for today. Again, I’m just going to remind you that the questions do come in anonymously, so if you have questions, you can either contact Arena, Arena Support, or you can contact FlowEQ, and the link for you for that is if you, when you’re in the EventMobi or when you’re in the events platform here, scroll down to the bottom. I had to use the scroll bar to get down to the bottom, and it says, ” External links.” That’s obviously the link to FlowEQ for Arena customers.
Thank you so much. I mean, you guys are just such good partners, because you really know CRM systems and customer support. It’s just such a good partnership because you bring a lot that we don’t have, so thank you.
Brittani Dunlap
Thank you.
Andrew Wilkinson
Yeah, no problem at all. Just one last thing before the raffle. We’ve been accused of being pathologically helpful, which I kind of wear as a badge of honor. I love it. If you were to set up a demo with us, we’d love to hear what are the most difficult processes that are giving you the biggest headaches. Those are the ones that we love to tackle first because if we can knock out your most difficult process, everything else is easier after that. If you’re considering reaching out, we’d love to know the biggest problems that you’re facing.
Thanks, everyone.