Improve Employee Engagement with Experience Cloud and Pardot

Ever feel like emails go to an abyss? A black hole of “too busy to reply,” “that email probably isn’t super important,” and “I’ll get to this later.” Emails keep piling up because work is always busy and later never comes. While we all could use less cluttered inboxes, many emails require action. A company culture of too many unanswered emails is a problem. It creates more work, hurts employee engagement, and ultimately can impact the bottom line. Luckily, Salesforce has a solution for making high-priority employee emails actionable rather than bound for the abyss using Experience Cloud (formerly known as Community Cloud) and Pardot. 

“Engineering” Employee Engagement: A Case Study

A 400-person engineering firm used employee profiles when bidding projects and forming teams. The profiles were like resumes including each engineer’s work history and unique skill sets. The practice gave the firm a leg up because it quickly showed they had the right people ready for the job. 

But there was a big problem. Staff were not updating their profiles. 

Outdated information meant overlooking an ideal engineer for a project, missing a proposal deadline while chasing down details, or including inaccurate skillsets—all of which created a possibility for losing the bid. Managers constantly asked staff for updates with no good way of tracking who followed through. Even worse, telling which profiles needed an update was difficult and time consuming. 

The firm wanted four things: 

• A database of employees and their experiences 
• Profiles updated by engineers directly rather than managers
• Standard profile requirements to improve quality and completeness 
• Automated reminders prompting employees to take action

Experience Cloud offered the most cost-effective option for creating a self-service profile portal. The firm then leveraged Pardot for creating bi-annual campaigns prompting engineers to update their information including a clever way of checking the content against requirements. 

The result? A 52% increase in up-to-date employee profiles! With the help of Galvin Technologies, here’s how they did it. 

Building the Solution

Step 1: Set Up the Employee Portal

Salesforce Experience Cloud provides organizations with branded spaces for users to connect, collaborate, and work. Employee communities act as internal websites for staff to share files, manage projects, and access company information. 

The team built a standard record with all profile fields inside Salesforce. Every employee had access to update their profile through the portal. This created a cost-conscious way of limiting Salesforce licenses to managers while giving profile access to employees using a less expensive Salesforce license. 

Step 2: Build Profile Logic

After defining standard profile requirements, the team built system logic that checked profiles against those parameters. Did the introduction include at least 10 words? Is the credentials section complete? Is the last experience more than a year old? Based on the answers, the system generated profile action items for employees. 

Step 3: Create a Tracking Dashboard

Managers still held ultimate responsibility for ensuring their team’s profiles were current. Developers created a Salesforce dashboard showing managers which teammates required an update and how compliant each profile was against the requirements. Now managers knew exactly which profiles required attention and why. 

Step 4: Launch the Email Campaign

The company set a goal of updating all staff profiles every six months. A Pardot email campaign went out to employees bi-annually notifying staff it was time for updates. Once built, the automated campaign required no ongoing management from the marketing team and sent based on dates set in the system. 

Beyond just issuing the update reminder, the emails provided tips for a good profile and called out what sections needed attention. This required the use of dynamic content so each email was specific to the recipient. 

However, dynamic content is not standard in Pardot’s basic Growth license used by the engineering firm. Upgrading the license across multiple users was a costly option. Rather than increasing this recurring annual cost, Galvin’s developers worked around the limitation. They leveraged merge fields to gather the content and apply the information against the profile requirements logic. When the system found a non-compliant profile field, it created an action item and added it to the reminder email. Now the engineers knew it was time to update their profile, which sections needed new content, and when the update was due. 

Each employee received a total of four reminder emails, but the email campaign stopped once the profile was updated. If the emails went without action, the manager identified the issue through the Salesforce dashboard and intervened. 

The Bigger Picture

Think about the power of bringing employees together online when remote work is more popular than ever. Ray Dalio, famed hedge fund manager and founder of Bridgewater Associates, talks about the importance of building project teams using an employee’s “baseball card” with their key stats, qualities, and contributions. Imagine the impact of tapping into talent this way. Experience Cloud makes this and much more possible.  

Combined with the power of Pardot, staff stay connected and more engaged. The tools ensure employees receive, read, and take action on important communications. New COVID protocols, project deadlines, employee onboarding materials, benefits open enrollment—communities and Pardot make it easy.

Why does a high-engagement culture matter? According to Gallup, companies with higher employee engagement perform better. Their earnings-per-share growth is four times higher than competitors. These companies benefit from more customer engagement, higher productivity, and better retention. 

The outlined project took three weeks from idea to implementation. What could a few weeks of work in Salesforce transform for your company? Let’s get together and find out. 

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