Maximize your Salesforce investment with the latest customer-centric offerings

The Situation: Enterprises can expect more personalized solutions from Salesforce next year. The ISV continues to develop industry-aligned solutions and encourage enterprises to adopt a customer-centric approach.

Salesforce’s acquisitions, including Tableau, Slack, and Mulesoft, provide capabilities to integrate and leverage broad data inputs that go beyond its heritage in the front office. Salesforce is driving a OneOffice mindset to overcome the boundaries of the front, middle, and back offices while gaining access to new buying centers such as IT operations. The centerpiece of those ambitions is the “Digital HQ,” the Slack-enabled nervous system to support progress toward the OneOffice.

Access personalized services to support customer success

At the Salesforce World Tour in London in June 2022, Salesforce shared its roadmap to deliver offerings on silo-busting unified platforms. All customer initiatives align with the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, which provides connected customer data across systems to deliver a customer-centric experience. As we highlighted here, Salesforce is strategizing to expand its CRM focus and target the back office. With this OneOffice-inspired starting block, Salesforce’s enhanced offerings focus on personalized outcomes. A revamped Sales Cloud Unlimited includes automation and analytics to deliver insights into customers’ sales journeys. Enhancements to Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Commerce Cloud follow the themes of delivering personalization, improving loyalty, and creating trusted relationships with customers. Salesforce Net Zero Cloud provides environmental data across companies’ ecosystems. Moreover, Tableau is integrated with Customer 360 to deliver visualization of data to enable faster decision-making. Salesforce continues to market and establish Slack as the enterprise Digital HQ, connecting the ecosystem of people, tools, customers, and partners.

Salesforce also introduced a new NFT (non-fungible token) Cloud Pilot, which helps customers mint, manage, and sell NFTs sustainably and ethically. This is an interesting foray into the new world of web3. You can read our take on Web3 here and here.

Salesforce brought its capabilities to life with a case study presented by Currys, a UK-based technology and home appliances retailer. Currys moved from outdated and disconnected processes and systems to a slick operation focusing on the full customer journey, both online and in-store. Customers receive fast, accurate advice, and employees are motivated because they can provide excellent customer service.

Leverage Salesforce Trailhead to gain Salesforce skills

As we highlighted here, increasing wage inflation rates and the worsening talent crisis leave enterprises with a serious problem finding sufficiently skilled staff. Salesforce is trying to alleviate this with its flagship gamified learning platform, Trailhead. It is free and available to everyone. Trailhead is not new—it was launched in 2014—but it is an increasingly important option as enterprises and service partners face severe talent shortages. Enterprises should consider Trailhead to upskill and reskill current employees.

Select the right service partner to unlock the full value

Salesforce is spot on with its focus on personalization and customer success to deliver value. In the HFS SaaS XXV and the Business Operations Snapshot reports, Salesforce was ranked second for creating business value. However, service partners lead 70% of Salesforce implementations, so true success depends on the partner you select. Salesforce’s partner program for FY23 invigorates the ecosystem to adopt a customer success approach and invest in tailored solutions. Top of the list is proficiency in industry-focused solutions to prove an in-depth understanding of a customer’s business environment and needs. Our Salesforce Top 10 report in 2020 highlighted Salesforce service partners’ strengths.

Salesforce’s OneOffice ambitions are a work in progress

While the strategic intent of Salesforce is sound, the one caveat is that the Tableau and Slack integrations are a work in progress. It will take time to integrate the capabilities and culture. Note that large-scale M&A differentiates Salesforce from its peers like ServiceNow and Pega. Both competitors prefer smaller, easy-to-absorb, tuck-in acquisitions. All three will increasingly compete around industry-led solutions. Customer centricity and personalization cover all stages of the client journey from the front to the back office, and Salesforce’s investments in marketing will see it prominently featured in those discussions.

The Bottom Line: Leverage Salesforce’s strengthened offerings to achieve customer-centric business outcomes

Salesforce prioritizes connecting data to present one true view of the customer and provide the ability to analyze that data to make business decisions. It leverages its acquisitions to create solutions that deliver business outcomes. The real differentiator is the customer-centricity approach that keeps everyone aligned with customer experience. However, you must select a Salesforce service partner that can proficiently deliver the latest Salesforce technology and enhancements that deliver in-depth industry and function insights to gain the maximum value from your Salesforce investment.