The verdict is in - customers expect more and businesses are failing them. Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer reports that at least 85% of customers expect consistent interactions with a business or organisation, across all departments.
But, only 60% of these customers say they actually feel like they are engaging with one business, while the other 40% report feeling like they’re talking to different organisations depending on each department.
Does this mean businesses aren’t trying their hardest to meet customer needs when and where they appear on every possible platform? Definitely not! As an organisation, your primary goal is to provide the best possible customer experience, from lead generation to conversion and retention.
You may be using digital tools and channels to do this, but they’re likely lacking the connectivity and granular insights necessary to knock your customer experience out of the park.
In a world where customers can - and will - switch between brands at the drop of a hat and a single negative experience, like sending one irrelevant marketing message, can cause them to disengage permanently, building perfect cohesion between your departments has never been more necessary!
The good news is that you don’t necessarily have to work harder - you just have to work smarter. Implementing a single solution that creates a free flow of data and collaboration between all of your departments to deliver an exceptional customer experience almost sounds too good to be true, right? Meet Salesforce Customer 360 - your new customer service silver bullet.
Customer 360: Let Your Data Flow
Salesforce Customer 360 is a CRM platform made up of a full suite of tools and capabilities offered by Salesforce, targeting every phase of your customer journey - from lead generation and nurturing to support and upselling.
Customer 360 allows you to break down the barriers that exist between your departments, empowering them to collaborate with each other in a shared goal: delivering an out-of-this-world service experience to your customers.
How exactly does it do this? The answer is simple: it lets your data flow.
By connecting your teams across a single, unified platform, your customer data is captured and stored every step of the way, accessible to anyone from any department - from anywhere!
Instead of being siloed and stored in multiple systems, your data can be shared, viewed and securely accessed by any team and department member. Working together to deliver proactive, personalised customer experiences has never been easier!
What Can Customer 360 Do For You?
Consisting of an array of clouds and integration capabilities, 360 makes it easy to reach and engage with a customer, no matter where they are in the customer lifecycle.
With the power of aggregated customer data creating profiles and the prowess of AI-powered analytics, your teams will not only be able to create better, more tailored marketing campaigns and messaging, but analyse what drives more engagement in every single customer at scale.
360 does the heavy data lifting, delivering you advanced reporting on every measurable performance metric to ensure your teams are on track to meeting and exceeding targets.
With Sales Cloud, sales reps can view and control entire sales pipelines, from prospects to conversions. It automates manual data entry and management tasks, so reps can spend less time searching for and inputting data and more time connecting with leads and prospects.
Marketing Cloud helps your marketing team unlock deeper insights that finesse their marketing campaigns, increasing conversions and reducing overhead costs. Aggregated customer data and profiles make for easy segmentation for targeted, high-conversion campaigns with real-time performance data to monitor.
Providing proactive services while offering personalised, engaging customer interactions is easy with help from Service Cloud. Your service teams can view customer data collected from sales teams to determine what products and services a customer bought. Using these insights, they can respond more quickly to their needs, across multiple channels, including phone, email, social media and chat.
Commerce Clouds lets you build customisable digital storefronts and create data-driven ecommerce experiences for your customers engaging with your online store. Customers can also enjoy self-service purchasing options, putting purchasing power directly in their hands.
On top of these clouds, 360 also offers comprehensive but agile analytics and reporting capabilities. Einstein, Salesforce’s very own AI-powered analytics software, recently released their much anticipated Einstein GPT: powerful, intuitive analytics driven by generative AI.
Along with Tableau that delivers rich, interactive reporting dashboards, Einstein GPT deploys generative AI to provide deeper insights, identify product and marketing opportunities and flag potential problems before they become problems.
It’s All in the Implementation
Through 360 you and your teams can reach and engage with prospects, leads and customers with an unprecedented ease and agility.
Aside from personalising the customer experience at every stage of their journey, your departments can enjoy easier collaboration, better productivity, higher accuracy, improved decision-making and quicker resolution. All of which translate into richer, more personalised customer engagements and memorable experiences that will delight them.
The key, here, is knowing exactly where and how to deploy Customer 360 within your workflows and systems. Working with a knowledgeable, experienced implementation partner that understands your operations, speaks your language and identifies opportunities for success will help you reap the maximum benefits 360 can offer.
At CloudSmiths, we’re Salesforce veterans, having long been the largest Salesforce implementation partner in Africa. We work with organisations across industries and countries around the world, and we’re permanently immersed in all things Customer 360.
Equip yourself with the insights needed to navigate the future. With CloudSmiths, explore technology's role in business resilience, digital transformation's holistic nature, and how generative AI is shaping the business landscape. Learn how Salesforce Customer 360 lets you know your customer like never before. Download our exclusive eBook today and take the first step towards successful digital transformation.
