Stellaxius A-Team in the World Tour!
As usual, Stellaxius was present in one more Salesforce World Tour: London World Tour 2019! To this event, a team of ten Stellaxians landed safe and sound, excited as ever to learn it all about Salesforce latest trends! Ready to know what they brought from this event (besides great memories and lousy souvenirs)? Our A-Team of Salesforce experts invites you to start reading this cool article!
From all the sessions with insights on new features and success stories of customers sharing how they get the most out of Salesforce, until the Expo area with all the partners and experts helping everyone and advising on how specialized solutions can help customers with specific problems, we had a lot to choose from! So much that the day felt short!
A celebration of Trailblazers!
As expected, the World Tour was full of Trailblazers! And, is there a better way to get it started than by celebrating the victories and achievements of all Trailblazers out there? That was exactly what Salesforce did, acknowledging the value of all Trailblazers who train to master the art of Salesforce. Examples of people who did not own any experience on Salesforce nor on IT, but were able to create and develop a business on these fields from scratch were applauded in the event. Afterall, managing Salesforce is not a super power, it just requires training and persistence. And where else to practice but on Trailhead?
The 4th Industrial Revolution:
One of this Salesforce World Tour hottest topic was the 4th Industrial Revolution. Today’s paradigm is changing and it is no longer enough to be a customer-focused company. These days, you have to master digital transformation, while placing the customer on the top of your priorities, connecting with it in each and every possible way. Thus, powering this new way of doing business, the CRM market and Salesforce are also changing.
Yet, a point that was reinforced in the event was that despite the rapid technology development we are facing, there is still a large number of companies that continue underestimating the critical success factors for a powerful digital transformation process and speed-up. Consequently, many if not the majority of digital transformation processes end up failing. So, in order to be successful in a digital transformation project, Salesforce World Tour reminded us that it’s fundamental to hold a strong culture, putting people first, and processes and technology second. It is mandatory for people to be engaged and to clearly understand the way the company aims to go. Once again, Salesforce leads by example by explaining the way it uses Ohana to implement a strong culture.
Only after empowering your employees, can you serve well your customers. And in what concerns the way your company serves customers, Salesforce really took the time to cover the topic of Customer 360.
What is Customer 360?
“Since we now live in the era of Connectivity, it is critical to find ways to connect data, channels and departments to get a single view of the customer end-to-end” – highlighted Salesforce at this year’s World Tour in London. The aim of Customer 360 is to serve customers better and quicker. So, Customer 360 is all about connectivity. Mainly about connecting Sales, Service, Marketing, and Commerce altogether, using Einstein to power the customers’ journey, and leveraging data in such a way that customers feel they couldn’t have had a better experience. Ultimately, it’s all about providing customers the best possible experience across all digital and non-digital channels and touchpoints. The numbers presented at London World Tour were impressive:
- 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.
- 57% have stopped buying from a company because the competitor provided a better experience.
- And, 67% of customers are willing to pay a premium for a better experience.
Good news for context marketers!
Nowadays, context is everything! The top marketing priority pointed by marketers at the World Tour was “Being able to engage with customers in real time”. It’s inevitable to make this a priority, as customer expectations reached an all time high. Salesforce claims being prepared to help marketers deliver real-time interactions in context powered by Interaction Studio and the recent integration of Datorama and Datorama Marketplace.
Interaction Studio acts as the intelligent layer connecting all touch points between Marketing, Service, Commerce, Sales and aggregating all customer information collected across digital and non-digital channels. With this solution, you are able to make decisions based on real time customer interactions, personalize the information your customer sees in real time, and act faster based on the latest interactions the user had with your brand.
The capacity to get insights across all customer interactions and act on it in real time is the idea behind Customer 360, and it becomes crucial at a time in which the most important KPIs a marketer should be measuring are engagement and customer satisfaction. However, to provide the best customer experience and drive engagement, you need customer insights to guide your actions and to respond in real time with the right value proposition.
The most recent addition to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Datorama, is the solution to power AI and business intelligence at the service of marketers. With Datorama you have new possibilities to unify marketing data and visualize AI insights to optimize channel and campaign performance in real-time.
Now the real interesting news! Salesforce is introducing Datorama Marketplace in the Salesforce Marketing sphere! The marketplace will become generally available in June and it will feature easy-to-use apps that marketers can use to power Datorama’s marketing intelligence capabilities, such as social intelligence apps, Google apps and Salesforce apps. It now relies on 14 apps accessible to beta customers, but it will soon count on much more, as both partners and customers can build their own apps and share them in the marketplace using the Datorama developer portal.
The best of Lightning!
This Salesforce World Tour highlighted how Lightning Web Components can take us to the next level in customizing and personalizing relevant and reusable components to thrive adoption and user experience. Todd Halfpenny, Chief Mobile Architect at Mobile Caddy, reinforced how easy Lightning Web Components are to build and how simply they can work alongside Aura Components or be used in the development of LWC, ultimately increasing the speed with which we make relevant information available to users.
Similarly, the theme of Lightning Flows was also covered. This recent Salesforce functionality can make all the difference in the user journey, suggesting next actions and information to capture based on defined business rules or repetitive behaviors observed. That way, we save the time of end users, increase their satisfaction levels on the tool and therefore increase adoption. Also, end users can then spend more time working on the deals with their customers.
Einstein AI + Analytics for every business process!
At London World Tour, Salesforce reinforced the idea coupling Einstein AI (artificial intelligence) with BI (business intelligence) can be super powerful. On that field, Einstein even provides a functionality on reports, “Data Insights”, which analyses and identifies patterns, taking intelligent conclusions you may get by simply clicking a button. Also, another interesting point highlighted was that Einstein provides a series of templates by industry, with the most important KPIs for each of them, so that these insights get aligned with the specific requirements of different industries.
Go mobile or go home!
It has been known for a while that mobile is the way to go, and Salesforce couldn’t help but to insist on this topic. In fact, mobile is a very powerful and innovative tool for Salesforce. It is said to be the future of the platform, and every year more users are relaying on it. On a session fully dedicated to this theme, Salesforce introduced us to accelerators. These tools make page navigation quicker and more efficient. A practical example of the power of these tools was provided: loading an HD picture with an accelerator is significantly faster than with out it.
Fuel your Design Thinking:
Design Thinking was an interesting session not so much related with Salesforce technology itself, but more about us as users, admins and consultants. When facing a problem, how do we build the solution right? Well, that’s not the right question to ask. The question we should start by asking is: How do we build the right solution? To answer it, this World Tour taught us that we need to start by focusing on the solution, not the problem. This goes against typical approaches that suggest we should start by looking at a need, come up with a solution and deliver it to end users. The downside of this design is that often users end up not profiting from the solution, because they don’t see the value or the benefit and they don’t like it.
Salesforce World Tour ’19 taught us that solutions need to be viable (business), feasible (technology), and desirable (people). The latter is often where we fail to address it. People don’t always desire the propose solution. So, Design Thinking approach proposes a different way of addressing the problem to come up with a solution that users will connect to and love.
Final Considerations…
Many were the topics under analysis on this year’s Salesforce London World Tour. The 4th Revolution, Customer 360, and Lightning were undoubtedly the biggest hypes of the event! Yet, the future of areas such as Marketing and Sales was discussed, tips to improve reports and dashboards were provided, updates on alternative options to Data.com were explored, and so many other themes were put at the table. So, if you wish to know more about the topics discussed at this event, don’t hesitate – just drop us a comment! We hope this article has been interesting to you and made you feel part of the event, even if you missed it! 🙂
