5 Things We Learnt at Salesforce World Tour Sydney 2017
We recently attended Salesforce’s World Tour at the International Convention Centre in Sydney. As more of our clients jump onto the Salesforce Platforms from Marketing Cloud through to Einstein powered CRMs, it was a great opportunity for us to find out more about the new ideas and developments that Salesforce and their partners have been working on over the last few years.
Here are our key takeouts from Salesforce World Tour:
1. Salesforce is focussed on equality which makes good business sense
Salesforce has a concept called Ohana – the Hawaiian word for family – that is working towards building a path forward to equality for all. Their key areas of focus are equal pay, equal opportunity, equal advancement and equal rights. It’s a pretty big call for a company as large as they are to ensure that they treat everyone equally and fairly. But why wouldn’t you when statistics clearly show that businesses with higher levels of gender and ethnic diversity experience higher levels of financial performance? It’s a no-brainer.
2. You can only be as agile as your platform will let you
We all want to be more agile, to do more things in smaller increments. But how do you take your small build and scale it to something that 1000 or 100,000 or even 1,000,000 users can gain value from? The answer is the platform you choose to build on top of. Salesforce isn’t your only option in this space, but key is ensuring that you strategically choose a platform that allows you to iterate all the way to your desired end scale.
3. Knowing your customer is just the first step, next is using that knowledge to make decisions.
Businesses with CRMs have data about their customers coming out of their ears, but not many know what to do with it. How do you use your knowledge to decide what product to show a customer next, when to move them to a different communications stream or how to offer them a better experience when they get stuck with your service? Predictive analytics and artificial intelligence are the next frontiers of enterprise CRMs that will help you understand your customers better so you can anticipate their needs and recommend them as to the best course of action.
4. The future of service is connected
For a while there it was all about the multi-channel strategy, be in all places at once and hope for the best. But in the digital age, we need to take a different lens. An omni-channel service is one where your channels are the ones that they actually want to engage with you in and all of those channels are connected, helping you create a wholistic view. As Tony Braxton-Smith of TfNSW says: “Customers don’t judge us on their last transport experience, they judge us on their last digital experience”. Only with a connected view are you going to have a true understanding of your customers and how they experience your product or service.
5. No matter what you call it, you have to design for your customer not yourself
Design thinking, Human Centered Design, Salesforce WorkDifferently. However it is dressed up, large companies are all embracing a new approach to defining problems and designing solutions that are developed using empathy, insight and understanding from real world customers. While it can seem a daunting task to go out and find your customers and ask them what their problems are with your service or product, the value that is gained from even a few conversations is invaluable.
One final thought: If you think that your business is in a more traditional sector and that none of your competition are focussed on digital transformation yet, you’re already behind. Can you really afford to let your competition be up to 30% more profitable than you?
