As we provide Salesforce services to our clients across various industries, we have realized that Salesforce Front-end Integration with other business applications, for instance, Salesforce Commerce Cloud Integration with Facebook, Salesforce integration with Google Drive among the others help in providing a unified view of the entire process and improves efficiency and productivity overall. Our clients’ successes have validated this view for us.
One of our recent clients is in the business of providing marketing services to their customers. They create templates and designs for their customers and this includes logos that fit their brand & market needs. These templates and designs are saved in Google Drive and sent as URLs to their customers. The customers then select their favorite design/template and send it back to our client.
Our client wanted to track their customer’s interests and their pattern of selection so that they can suggest the best design and template for them. Our client was using Salesforce through which they communicate with their clients. They wanted the entire design selection process from Google Drive to happen within SFDC org as this would help them analyze their client’s choices and intent.
In the midst of competitive vendors on the market, the client approached us as they totally fell in love with our unique On Demand Services engagement model that provided scalability and agility. DemandBlue Salesforce Advisory team immediately took stock of their process and suggested Salesforce Integration with Google Drive.
The DemandBlue Solution:
As part of the brainstorming sessions and considering the benefits of Visualforce, we first thought of creating a Visualforce page with an iframe, which dynamically loads the URL of Google Drive onto it. The downside of this solution was that the folders that were not relevant would also be displayed to the customer.
Another solution was to send the Google Drive link along with the selected image. The drawback with this solution was the inability to track their customer’s interest.
Finally, we decided to use the API within the Salesforce VF page to fetch the images that are present in Google Drive which will improve the Salesforce Visualforce performance. The customers can directly access and view the images from the URL and select the image directly with a click of a button, which the client can access directly.
The process is to invoke RestAPI provided by Google Drive from Salesforce, which will send Folder ID and API key as request parameters. The HTTP request will be sent from Salesforce to Google API, which accepts the Folder ID and API key. The JSON fetched from Google API will be parsed and the URL of image will be displayed in the IMG tag in page block table in a Salesforce VF Page. The customers can directly select the image or template they wish to choose from the URL. The selected image will be saved in the database and that will be used for their further reference.
The Salesforce Integration with Google Drive accomplished the following for our client-
- Provided insight into the customer’s intent and interest
- Switched on the analytics for better suggestions
- Automation pushed the entire process into overdrive
- Increased customer satisfaction and faster processing time
The Salesforce Integration with Google Drive has notched up one more integration in our bag. Looking back at all our Salesforce integrations and the kind of positive impact these had on our customer’s organizations and ROI, integrating all the your apps with Salesforce is the smartest thing anyone can do. So, what are you waiting for?
Also, read our blog on 7 Integrations to sync your CRM with all phases of the Customer Lifecycle
Authors: Indhu Ravi with Salesforce Dev Team
