Being a Salesforce administrator or enterprise user, you should keep track of all strategic moves by this industry leader in CRM. It will help you not only be technologically updated but also that these new updates may come out with feasible solutions for many of your enterprise challenges. In this note, we will have a deep dive into some of the major trends revolving around the Salesforce suite, which may be deciding the future of Salesforce in the FA 2020-21. It is expected that the major trend which may change the face of this enterprise platform, will be Salesforce automation (SFA).
Top Salesforce trends
Trend #1) Lightning gets stronger
The intuitive and user-friendly Salesforce 2.0 (Lightning) was released back in Spring 19, which receives some elegant upgrades this year. The user of the classic version may miss out on several of these cool and high productive features on being unaware of these updates. Severn of the new features is just available only on Lightning like:
- Customizable dashboard
- Enhancement in calendar
- Snap-in chat
- Einstein and
- Smart Macros
So, in the case of Salesforce usage, we have now reached a stage where enterprises must have to change from Classic to the Lightning to avoid the risk of being left behind in terms of effectiveness and efficiency in the changing marketing and economy. A Forrester study shows that it could deliver about 475% ROI over three years of usage for service orgs.
Considering all these, Lightning can clearly be found as the immediate future of salesforce, and enterprises must adopt these change management tactics in order to ensure a very smooth transition. The DPAs (Digital Adoption Platforms) like Whatfix etc. may also help to speed up the migration process without any compromise on the production quality from the Classic UX to more intuitive Lightning for:
- Shortening the learning curve – Leveraging DAP is an ideal way to cut short the learning curve as it features a sequential microlearning curriculum that can support different styles of learning. In order to get the users at east with Lightning UX, DPAs like Whatfix will let them learn things while doing through micro-sized lessons. It can also help connect the existing LMS (learning management systems) in order to deliver both on-the-job and formal theoretical training.
- Contextual guidance – Whatever features of SF DevOps suite your employees are using, DAP can help to deliver task-specific and event-specific training to them. This contextual support offers interactive step-by-step walkthroughs to speed up and ease the onboarding. Whatfix also offers scheduled beacons, which help the users aware of the latest releases or announcements from Salesforce.
- Self-help – DAPs like Whatfix also have a 24×7 training assistant who can address the user queries personally without having them raise tickets and wait to get those answered. So, whenever users get stuck while using the Salesforce app, the self-help, and contextual Tooltips can respond quickly to their queries and concerns in real-time. Alon with quick support, it can also offer a reduction of cost by 50% or more.
- Automation – Another core objective of DAP is to get the users to learn more in less time with less effort. The automation AI elements help to achieve these goals. It can execute repetitive tasks by detecting such elements of the app during workflow creation. It can also integrate chatbots, which may deliver instant responses to queries. This, too, helps in about 60-80% cost reduction in content creation in various formats like videos, pdfs, slides, etc. Customer 360 will allow the marketing department to help customers deliver a personalized experience across service, sales, and support. In addition to personalization, the customers’ choices will be recorded which will provide a clear picture of customers’ demands and expectations. Meeting customer demand will eventually lead to generating better sales. You can also use salesforce surveys to gather complete feedback of the customers.
All these Whatfix DAP features will make the onboarding of the users easy and quick without disrupting the live workflow. This is a definite improvement with which you can avoid the physical books, class-room style modules, and handouts and be future-ready.
Trend #2) Seamless data and system integration
Customers already have the need for a connected experience and seamless integration possibilities. The information is getting shared through different touchpoints ranging from personal data sharing to social media, phone support, physical forms, etc. But, according to the Connected Customer report of Salesforce, only 50% of companies can use customized customer engagement based on past interactions.
As most of the customer data now resides in clouds and various organizations connect their Salesforce to various off-platform systems, service, sales, and marketing teams may better understand and easily connect with customers with seamless integration possibilities.
In order to enable enterprises to deliver a personalized data-driven experience to customers, Salesforce is constantly working on Customer 360, which is the most advanced customer data platform now. It launched the latest edition back in June of 2019 and getting an advanced update since then.
Customer 360 can connect various clouds as Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, etc. in order to deliver a centralized view of the customer journey within and outside the enterprise circle. The web-based integration platformslike MuleSoft, Salesforce Customer 360 can help the businesses to make smarter decisions and also deliver more contextualized customer experience. The latest upgrades in Customer 360 will also help in greater unification of available customer data and enrich the audience segmentation and consent management etc.
Despite all these advanced efforts, unlocking siloed data and offering a fully connected experience across various channels may take some time to be fully active. But such a product strategy by Salesforce is better focused on data integration surely has the potential for delivery ng a bright future where the organizations may get more than 100%ROI from the CRM tools.
As we had seen above, modern-day enterprises are increasingly using Digital Adoption Platforms in order to connect different levels of sales systems. DAP may not only link various Salesforce Clouds but can also link other allied CRM systems like CPQ, CLM, etc. SharePoint type of end-user collaboration and SAP cloud-based Sales Performance Management, ERP, and HCM systems, etc. Overall, it is known that only the time when enterprises offer the sellers with a seamless digital sales experience, they will ever be able to offer a fully connected customer experience.