Dreamforce 2019 Takeaways

This week, I attended Dreamforce — Salesforce’s annual user event that brought more than 170,000 users, partners, analysts, press and others together in San Francisco. The event allows attendees to pick from thousands of different breakout sessions, hands-on learning, executive interviews, etc. Each attendee is encouraged to build a customized agenda —mine was focused on observing product announcements, market messaging updates, and discussions with end-users about how they use Salesforce and partner applications. Below is an overview of some of the key takeaways from the event.

Single Source of Truth

Single view of customer data has been a top focus area for many CX leaders for several decades now. In fact, it’s one of the fundamental problems that CRM was designed to solve for CX leaders as a system of record.

But companies today need more than just customer data to manage customer experiences in a seamless manner. For example, a commerce organization must have real-time and accurate visibility into systems used to manage product delivery to provide customers with accurate updates when the client inquiries about order delivery status through a mobile application or desktop site. To this point, Salesforce announced Customer360 Truth, which is designed to bring data across different systems together within the company’s Customer360 platform.

Single source of truth refers to integrating all enterprise systems, including CRM, ERP, marketing automation, order management, commerce, supply chain, contact center, billing, etc. By establishing a unified and consistent version of truth —whether it is product availability or last customer contact — companies can manage their activities more accurately. For CX leaders in particular, it enables delivering personalized and consistent experiences by using data across all the systems within the company.

This announcement shows that Salesforce incorporated the capabilities from its Mulesoft acquisition in 2018 across its product portfolio. Using Mulesoft capabilities, Salesforce users can integrate data from different systems through drag and drop functionality — making it easier to integrate disparate systems.

How Tableau Fits into the Broader Picture

In October 2019, Salesforce announced the completion of its acquisition of Tableau — a leading business intelligence software provider. Marc Benioff, the company CEO shared that this acquisition enriches Customer360 Analytics capabilities by adding enterprise-wide analytics on top of the current Einstein Analytics for CRM and Datorama acquisition capabilities for marketing analytics. Much like the aftermath of the Mulesoft acquisition, I anticipate that Salesforce will announce bringing Tableau capabilities within its product portfolio in the future through a dedicated product or as an additional layer across it’s various cloud platforms such as Service Cloud and Sales Cloud.

Adding Voice into Service Cloud

During the keynote session at the event, the company noted that Service Cloud is a rapidly growing product across the broad product portfolio. While Service Cloud provided Salesforce users the ability to interact with customers through various digital channels such as messaging, social media, online communities, and chat, it didn’t have telephony capabilities built in. The company announced that it partnered with Amazon Connect as a strategic provider of contact center services for Service Cloud Voice — the new product that brings together phone, digital channels, and CRM data into one unified console to provide superior customer service.

This partnership also extends into utilizing Amazon Connect’s speech analytics capabilities — enabling contact centers with sentiment analysis, speech to text transcription, and translation to preferred languages into Service Cloud Voice. From there, Salesforce’s Einstein analytics provides agents with contextual guidance such as relevant knowledgebase articles, next-best action guidance, cross-sell / up-sell opportunities, etc. This is important as Aberdeen’s November 2019 Contact Center WFO study shows that on average, agents spend 17% of their time seeking information they need to do their job. Reducing such unnecessary time helps boost agent productivity, reduce handle times, and minimize customer frustration.

Sales Call Coaching

While speech analytics is traditionally seen as a technology limited to the contact center, savvy sales leaders are finding ways to incorporate it within their activities. Specifically, they use speech analytics to monitor and analyze phone conversations between sales reps and buyers, and provide sellers with real-time guidance through the employee desktop on how to manage the conversation. This helps sellers with automated guidance to maximize rep’s ability to attain their quota, shrink sales cycles, and improve overall seller engagement levels.

At Dreamforce, Salesforce announced its call coaching capability — providing users with the above capabilities. Specifically, call coaching helps observe what works for top-performing sellers and uses this intelligence to guide other sellers in real-time with similar best practices.

Streamlining VoC Email Surveys

Yet another announcement at the event was that users of Marketing Cloud will be able to embed surveys within marketing emails without the need to build landing pages for surveys. For marketers who need to send separate VoC email surveys to their current and potential customers, this helps mitigate the need to build yet another email template and send more emails that may overwhelm buyers and minimize response rates. Instead, marketers can now incorporate customer feedback within current email campaigns to allow recipients to provide feedback without the need to click on a separate URL to fill a survey.

Einstein for Customer360 Commerce

After it’s acquisition of Demandware in 2016, Salesforce has integrated Demandware capabilities with its other cloud platforms. The company now also enables commerce organizations to use Einstein analytics capabilities in designing and updating commerce site to ensure delivering truly personalized experiences across all shoppers. It does so by using Einstein’s AI capabilities to observe the unique preferences of each buyer by utilizing data within the Customer360 platform, and offering content that is most likely to help convert those unique site visitors into buyers. The platform also helps provide commerce employees with relevant site design recommendations to make faster decisions about updating the commerce site — hence improving the overall employee productivity and agility in responding to evolving shopper needs.

Mobile Publisher

During the keynote, the company presented a demo of its new mobile publisher capability. It was interesting to observe how users can quickly and easily build and update mobile applications by clicking on various options within the platform as opposed needing to code an application. Such agility is important, as commerce and marketing teams can now rapidly update mobile applications with most relevant features that align with customer needs at the time.

Wrap-up

Similar to other Dreamforce events in previous years, this year’s event was rich in announcements. It’s also nice to see the company’s continued dedication for social issues and community involvement. Technology isn’t just about growing revenue or reducing cost. It’s ultimately people who use technology to achieve these outcomes and enriching the lives of current and potential users means further amplifying its impact.

Are you a Salesforce user? What are your thoughts about the announcements outlined above? Please share your thoughts through the comments section below.