thomas.wieberneit@aheadcrm.co.nz
Salesforce News on different Topics – But Hey, are they really different?

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...
Salesforce Einstein Search – The Formula for Customer Success?

Salesforce Einstein Search – The Formula for Customer Success?

The News Last week Salesforce announced Einstein Search, an enhancement of the search mechanisms that are already available in its applications. As usual you can read the announcement online or below. Salesforce wants to release three main issues with Einstein Search:     The diverse interests and objective of users of enterprise search make it hard to be as good as a consumer search as delivered by Google or Bing, or the other consumer search engines, especially if in an ecommerce environment. In an enterprise setting, objectives can vary between closing a deal or solving a case, or creating new campaigns. This creates hidden complexities. There are no safe assumptions. Data is residing in different silos and frequently not linked. Further, there is no one size fits it all as Salesforce as an application normally is customized to suit an individual customer’s needs Third, the data simply does not belong to Salesforce, with the consequence that Salesforce cannot look into the data, even not with the objective of improving search. This makes it impossible to use traditional machine learning approaches. As per now Einstein Search is in a private beta stadium with only a few customers using it. General availability is planned for 2020 but limited to customers on Unlimited, Enterprise, or Performance Edition plans with 150 or more active licenses for the Sales or Service Cloud. So far the implementation of Einstein Search covers the top 5 searched objects: accounts, opportunities, contacts, cases and leads, but is intended to support further objects. According to Will Breetz, VP of product management for Einstein Search at Salesforce, Einstein Search is...
Salesforce Customer Service Solution becomes Botty

Salesforce Customer Service Solution becomes Botty

The News On June 17, 1019, Salesforce announced an enhancement of its customer service abilities by adding further channels for customer service and adding chatbot capabilities to these channels. This has the goal of offering the ability to create a more seamless service experience by offering engagements on the channels that consumers use. For your easier reference here comes the announcement. Expanding our Digital Customer Service Capabilities with New Channels and Bot Innovations Author: Meredith Flynn-Ripley, VP of Digital Engagement, Service Cloud   Disconnected customer service experiences are still far too common. Almost everyone has had to repeat basic information during routine interactions with companies, or found themselves unable to get answers to fairly simple questions on the channel of their choice. In fact, only 16% of consumers say companies excel at delivering connected experiences. I am happy to report times are changing, for two reasons. First, companies are realizing service can be their main competitive differentiator, and second, today’s empowered and vocal consumers refuse to tolerate bad service. 57% of customers will stop buying from a company not because they don’t like their product, but because a competitor provides better service. Today’s customer demands service on their terms, uses an average of 10 different channels to connect with companies — including messaging, chat, social, email and phone — and expects a personalized and consistent experience across all of them, every single time. Salesforce empowers companies to deliver on these expectations, with a complete customer service platform that powers connected customer experiences across channels from one central console. And today I’m excited to announce new innovations in Service Cloud...
CRM evolution 2019 – A Recap

CRM evolution 2019 – A Recap

CRM evolution 2019 just ended. It has again been a highly interesting two and a half days filled with interesting presentations and discussions. A big thank you go to the organizers and the chairs. It has also been the first time that the venerable Brent Leary chaired it, stepping into the big footprint that Paul Greenberg has left. Unsurprisingly, Brent did very well. Of course, Paul, being Paul, was still there as a speaker with an engaging presentation, concentrating on what he calls the commonwealth of self-interest, on how to be highly successful because of applying an outside-in view. CRM evolution is part of a group event of related conferences that all happen at the same time. This year, in addition to Smart Customer Service and Speechtek, there was a dedicated event focusing on DigitalExperience. This acknowledges how important this topic, that actually touches all the other topics, has become in the past years. It also raises the question again why these four events are marketed as different events. With the possible exception of Speechtek all topics are related enough to be warranted as facets of the same. And they are, in my eyes. I do not know, how the chairs do it, but they continue to attract a number of high caliber speakers, starting off with Jarno Duursma as the main keynoter of day one, followed by a very knowledgeable Barton Goldenberg on day two. While Jarno focused on AI, which is arguably the most exciting topic these days, Barton showcased how to actually get CX profitably done using a community scenario. This breadth explains a good part...
Salesforce adds more Einstein and Quip to the Service Cloud. Is it good for the Experience?

Salesforce adds more Einstein and Quip to the Service Cloud. Is it good for the Experience?

The News Today Salesforce announced the next release of its Service Cloud. It brings together more Einstein AI as part of the Service Cloud and adds Quip to it. This enables more agent empowerment and efficient work. In order to augment the tools with the necessary knowledge and soft skills, Salesforce also just launched Trailblazers for the Future, a program that is targeted towards increasing the soft skills of service managers and service agents. Einstein now is delivering reply suggestions as well as article suggestions to inquiries that the service representative can easily use to reply to questions. At the same time Einstein suggests so called next best actions that are designed to help increase satisfaction and unearth cross- and upsell opportunities. Additionally, Einstein now optimizes case routing leveraging machine-learning processes on the inquiry to find the ideal queue for processing it. Additionally, Salesforce embedded the collaboration tool Quip into the Service Cloud to increase productivity and to increase service agents’ access to knowledge. The press release is here but for your convenience you can read it below. The Press Release Salesforce Empowers Service Agents with Einstein AI and Quip for Service   Service Cloud expands Einstein AI portfolio with new intelligent recommendation and routing capabilities so agents can spend more time where it matters most — building customer relationships and solving complex problems   New Quip for Service boosts agent productivity with incident swarming and cross-team collaboration available directly in the agent console   SAN FRANCISCO—March 19, 2019—Salesforce [NYSE: CRM], the global leader in CRM, today announced new artificial intelligence and productivity solutions that empower customer service agents...