August 5, 2024
In today’s competitive landscape, enhancing customer experience (CX) is crucial for brands to achieve superior growth and loyalty. This blog is the first in a series that will highlight tech providers and how integrated tech solutions can empower enterprises to meet CX challenges and seamlessly connect various tools for improved productivity and data flow. Reach out to us to discuss further or for questions.
Enterprises love talking about customer experience, or CX, and for good reason. Brands that prioritize CX (think Apple, Amazon, Disney, or JP Morgan) consistently outperform their peers in terms of topline growth and customer loyalty.
However, to get to this place of superior CX, enterprises need to invest in a strong backbone of integrated tech solutions that can meet the challenges of an increasingly interconnected operational environment that transcends channels and places. With generative AI-led innovation, digital CX solutions are becoming more sophisticated and impactful.
Enterprises require multiple technologies within the CX tech ecosystem, such as data platforms, including customer relationship management (CRM) and Customer Data Platforms (CDP), contact center solutions, including cloud, AI bots, and agent support, as well as analytics tools for customer and sales insights. Additionally, marketing solutions like content management systems and social media tools are crucial.
The whole ecosystem has had time to become mature and rich with multiple compelling offerings in the market. However, enterprises seeking to simplify their transformation journeys and reduce the burden on IT and procurement are increasingly looking at ecosystems or platforms that can act as a one-stop shop for their technology needs. This approach also helps create a CX ecosystem where different tools can seamlessly integrate and connect with each other for better efficiencies and information flow.
Sensing this opportunity, numerous tech providers are working to address this emerging need in the market. Players such as NICE, Sprinklr, Salesforce, and even tech giants such as Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are moving in this direction. We plan to cover some of them in our series of blogs, starting with Salesforce, which is in the spotlight today.
Salesforce offers a range of CX solutions to enterprises for their customer experience initiatives. The company has developed a suite of CX solutions designed to support enterprises in their customer experience initiatives. Let’s have a look at some of these integrated tech solutions and what they’re capable of across the processes they cater to below.
Salesforce Einstein 1 Platform: The Salesforce platform’s AI capabilities bolster sales, marketing, and support strategies by unifying organizational data. The Einstein 1 platform enables enterprises to offer connected customer experiences, develop targeted strategies, and track their effectiveness. It also includes Einstein Copilot, a customizable AI assistant.
Einstein 1 is a modular platform that can be tweaked as per the enterprise needs and comes with core solutions for sales, marketing, service, commerce, and data that are natively integrated into the platform, along with other solutions that can significantly enhance these capabilities, such as analytics and AI. Let’s look at the core offerings under the Einstein banner in detail below:
(Image source: Salesforce)
Service Cloud: Service Cloud integrates customer service and field service needs onto the Einstein 1 Platform, connecting business data and apps to provide a complete view of every customer. Service Cloud helps businesses across industries deliver service from first contact to final delivery on multiple channels.
It offers features such as omni-channel routing, case management, analytics and dashboard, telephony integration, knowledge management, AI integration, service console for agents, community collaboration, social media integration, and field service among others.
Sales Cloud: Sales Cloud is a comprehensive platform designed to support sales organizations of all sizes, industries, and regions. It offers a wide range of tools and capabilities tailored for different roles within a sales team, including sales leaders, representatives, and operations. These tools cover various aspects of the sales process, such as prospecting, engagement, team collaboration, analytics, sales programs, performance management, partner management, CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote), and billing. Built on the Einstein 1 platform, Sales Cloud integrates harmonized data and connects to the broader Customer 360 ecosystem through Data Cloud, utilizing reliable AI to enhance its functionality.
Marketing Cloud: As the name suggests, Marketing Cloud is a digital marketing platform aimed at helping organizations manage customer journeys. Marketing Cloud comprises five main core capabilities, each focusing on specific aspects of digital marketing. The key products within Marketing Cloud are Data Cloud for Marketing (customer data platform), Personalization (real-time next best actions), Engagement (email, mobile, advertising, journeys, and loyalty management), Account Engagement (marketing and sales alignment, lead generation, and ABM), and Intelligence (performance insights, analytics, and reporting). The platform is aimed at B2C customers. The product architecture sits on its own platform apart from the core Salesforce infrastructure, using connectors for integration.
Formerly called Pardot, the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is aimed at B2B customers. It can automate and streamline marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns across channels. It includes functionalities to manage and nurture leads, run targeted campaigns, align with sales to close deals, and track the effectiveness of marketing efforts.
Commerce Cloud: Designed for brands to create and manage online stores and scale personalized ecommerce experiences from acquisition to conversion to loyalty, Commerce Cloud offers digital storefronts for business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) customers, along with full-scale order management and payments solutions that can be connected to the rest of the business. Commerce Cloud converts insights into actions, driving revenue and loyalty throughout the entire customer journey by leveraging unified data and trusted AI on the leading AI CRM.
Besides these, Einstein 1 also features other solutions inside and outside the core platform. These include solutions such as:
- Data Cloud that captures customer data in real time from different sources (internal to Salesforce and external, and both structured and unstructured data)
- Analytics (including Tableau) for analytics and BI
- Mulesoft, which connects software as a service (SaaS), on-premises software, legacy systems, and other platforms to Salesforce
- Slack for internal and external messaging, collaboration, and automation of work processes
- AppExchange, a marketplace to add pre-built apps and capabilities to Salesforce solutions
- Net Zero Cloud, a sustainability management platform to track and analyze your carbon emissions and environmental footprint in a single location
Salesforce Einstein’s integrated and holistic operations support enterprises in designing their customer experience. Features such as low-code development, integrated AI, and unified data management along with a platform-based approach to CX transformation are some of its key features. With recent investments, especially in AI-focused organizations, Salesforce has shown an intent to focus on upcoming AI solutions and add those to its core offerings.
Of course, it is one of the several compelling options out there. Stay tuned to this space as we explore other integrated tech solutions that can help you on your CX transformation journey. For questions or to discuss this topic further, reach out to Sharang Sharma at [email protected].
Watch the webinar, Elevating CX: Trends and Insights for a Unified CX Tech Strategy, to learn how integrating service, sales, and marketing capabilities through a platform approach can streamline operations, centralize customer data for better insights, improve collaboration across departments, and enhance the overall customer experience.
