Clash of Titans – Platform Play
A lot has evolved since my Clash of the Titans post that looked into how the big 4.5 (Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Adobe) and others are positioning themselves and their platform in the greater CRM arena. First, the commoditization of the business application has accelerated and the vendors’ focus on the underlying platform has increased. CRM, and enterprise software in general, has always been a platform play although this has not always been recognized and sometimes even negated. The obvious reason for it being a platform play is that the creation of positive customer and user experiences need a consistent technical platform. Or else we are ending up in engagements that are fragmented across interactions. This results in inconsistent and poor experiences. So far, so well known. A bit less obvious is the fact that there will be only few dominant platforms. Vendors, who want to become and stay successful on a grand scale need to be one of these few platform providers and attract partners and customers. This is the reason why I consult my customers that one of the very first IT strategy decisions that they need to take is the platform decision. As the article got a little longer this time and as I do not tend to write articles that are as long as dear friend Paull Greenberg’s (maybe I should consider to?) this revisit of the Clash of the Titans will become a two or three piece series, first covering the framework I want to use, the very definition of what I talk of when saying that CRM is a ‘platform play’. The...
Einstein smartens up Salesforce Service Cloud
The News A few days ago Salesforce released a new iteration of its Service Cloud Einstein after infusing its artificial intelligence, Einstein, into the Service Cloud in February 2017. This release comes with three major enhancements to the Service Cloud: Einstein Bots for Service Lightning Flow for Service Einstein Next Best Action Einstein Bots for Service is providing the ability to easily configure chat bots that enable instant response to customers and a seamless handoff to customer service agents. Lightning Flow for Service gives companies the ability to automate processes with contextual, step-by-step guidance for fulfilling requests and resolving issues, using a graphical interface. Einstein Next Best Action is delivering intelligent recommendations and offers on any channel to increase customer satisfaction. While Einstein Bots for Service and Lightning Flow for Service are in General Availability since July 11, 2018, Einstein Next Best Actions will remain in a Pilot phase for some more time. The reason for this is that Salesforce wants to be double sure that this functionality is reliable. It needs a good amount of data and a good training set. And Salesforce cannot look into the data. The bots themselves do need to get trained and, once active, take feedback from the service agents. All three features work hand-in-hand. Salesforce uses a credit card scenario to make this point. When a customer goes to the web site for help the chat bot takes over and gathers the necessary contextual information and then escalates the issue to a customer service agent who continues the chat at the position the chat bot exited with all information available. A Lightning...
The future of CRM – as seen by Salesforce
The News On June 13, 2018, during its annual Connections event, Salesforce announced a number of additions to their marketing cloud and their ecommerce and service clouds. The announcement goes into three main directions: Based on the strategic alliance that Google and Salesforce entered into in November 2017, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud will get a deeper integration with Google Analytics 360. Starting now it will be possible to combine Google Analytics 360 data and Salesforce Marketing Cloud data in a single customer journey dashboard within Marketing Cloud. Conversely, Google Analytics 360 can now leverage Marketing Cloud campaign data to better deliver targeted content to consumers. Both integrations enable a deeper understanding of customers and their behaviours. Later, in Q3 this year, Salesforce plans to offer a beta release of an integration that enables marketers to create audiences in Analytics 360 and to activate these audiences for engagement within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Marketing Cloud Einstein gets a segmentation and a split capability. The segmentation ability enables the uncovering of patterns in consumer behaviour and the discovery of new audiences that then can get reached with personalized messages. The split capability enables marketers to create unique personalized journeys for each customer with simple means, getting an optimized path for them, based on the marketing objective. There are a number of innovations to enable engagement across touch points. First, Salesforce announces their B2B ecommerce ability, second the new interaction studio that enables the creation of contextually relevant engagements and experiences in real time and third, the broadened availability of Service Cloud LiveMessage in 17 more countries. Live Message enables companies to...