Salesforce brings its Field Service solution forward by a notch or two
The News On September 1, 2020 Salesforce announced its next round of updates to its Field Service Management solution. Eric Jacobson, Salesforce VP Product Management, Field Service and Gary Brandeleer, Senior Director Product Management, Field Service gave me an interesting briefing and demo beforehand. The new releases are all about efficient processing of the engagement throughout the whole process. In detail they are about Dynamic job scheduling Using Einstein Recommendation Builder to ensure that service technicians have the right spare parts available Asset management capabilities that allow companies a detailed view into the installed base at their customers. This is developed in cooperation with ServiceMax Improvements to the appointment assistant to provide as accurate as possible information to the customer about the arrival time of the service technician. The various features shall be made generally available through the next 6 months; as this is a forward looking statement, this may be subject to change. For your convenience, find the complete announcement below. Introducing the Next Generation of Field Service at Salesforce: AI-Powered Tools for Trusted, Mission-Critical Field Service By Mark Cattini, SVP of Field Service Management Today we are announcing the next generation of Salesforce Field Service, equipping teams across industries with AI-powered tools to deliver trusted, mission-critical field service. Built on the world’s #1 CRM, Salesforce Field Service includes new appointment scheduling and optimization capabilities, AI-driven guidance for dispatchers, asset performance insights and automated customer communications, all of which help ensure jobs are completed the first time, on time, every time. When the pandemic first hit, many industries that send employees out to complete jobs in the field...
SugarCRM supercharges its AI by acquiring Node.io
The News On Monday, August 24th, 2020 SugarCRM announced the acquisition of node.io. I had the pleasure to get pre-briefed by Craig Charlton, CEO SugarCRM and Rich Green, Chief Product Officer and CTO SugarCRM about this topic. Node was founded in 2014 with significant expertise, including ex-Google personnel and he creator of the Alta-Vista search engine. According to Crunchbase, the company has acquired $43.5M US to innovate around AI as a service. The company applies deep learning to help organizations make better predictions and decisions that impact their bottom line and focuses on delivering accurate predictions even with minimum CRM data. It does this by taking advantage of large data sets that it acquired or has free access to, including company and available business related personal information. That way, it is possible to hand over only a limited amount of SugarCRM data to Node in order to achieve accurate predictions. Instead, the prediction engine runs almost exclusively on Node data. According to Charlton and Green, SugarCRM itself also does not see any personally identifiable data (PII) but only meta data out of the Node system. One core idea behind the acquisition is that superior business outcomes need a combination of internal and external data. As Paul Greenberg gets quoted in the press release “now more than ever it is critical to leverage all available data and signals to work towards better outcomes for both customers and the business alike”. SugarCRM compares the result of combining CRM data with the data and intelligence provided by Node to the switch from a low fidelity to a high definition view on the...
Salesforce News on different Topics – But Hey, are they really different?
The News In the past month, Salesforce made announcements around some interesting topics. First, beginning of October, the company introduced Einstein’s Guide to AI Use Cases, a web tool that is targeted at helping businesses identify viable use cases and provide some information about what it takes to support it. It starts with information and videos that explain AI, terms around AI and give some examples how AI can help improve different aspects of a business. According to Sarin Devraj, Associate Product Marketing Manager Salesforce Einstein, for time being the site covers some fifty use cases but will be updated regularly to increase the coverage of relevant and interesting use cases. The website is intended to be top-of-funnel. The second and more recent announcement was about introducing Lightning Order Management, which shall enable brands to deliver end-to-end commerce experiences from shopping to shipping. Lightning Order Management is currently in beta and will be made available later this year. Right now it focuses on B2C processes. Based upon Lightning and enabled by Salesforce’s vast partner network, Lightning Order Management offers a low code platform that helps companies to easily create order management flows, including some partner applications. Salesforce expects the number of partner applications to increase steadily. Lastly, in the beginning of November, Salesforce announced its own Salesforce CMS, a hybrid content management system designed to help easily create and deliver content across channels. Salesforce CMS is designed to be simple, fast yet flexible, and closely connected to the Salesforce infrastructure. For time being Salesforce CMS is geared towards the Salesforce B2C e-commerce solution, but shall be extended to support...