You may have heard the term out-of-the-box (OOTB) thrown around when describing Salesforce. After all, Salesforce provides a savvy user interface, industry-specific products, plenty of online support and thorough training and certification resources.
The world of CRM software is a competitive and growing space. Implementing this software in your business’ everyday operations might perhaps be the best way to provide best-in-class customer experiences, whether you’re a retailer or business to business.
Today is the day that the Winter 20’ release goes global. We’ve scratched the surface with this article highlighting some new and improved features that enhance the way you use Salesforce. We dug through the Winter release notes and unearthed some pretty cool adds. Features like recycling bin access, mobile app launcher and enhanced Einstein Technology just scratches the surface of what Salesforce is doing to work for YOU. Check out some of the Winter 20’ release notes highlights below. If you want the in-depth overview check it out here.
Customization is the best. With the Winter 20’ release you can now customize account teams and opportunity contact roles. Add custom fields, triggers and business processes that reflect a certain member of your team and what role they play in your company. Improving collaboration across the board.
Customize your Sales Cadences to branch to steps based on different call scenarios. Every call is different and should be treated as such. Depending on the result of the call your Cadence moves to the next best step. This feature buckets your prospects in order of relevance, this allows managers to report on which cadence produced the best results.
The power of Einstein in combination with the quarterly forecasting schedule improves forecasting accuracy, predicts results and tracks how your sales team is doing. Einstein Forecasting is available to sales managers with the Sales Cloud Einstein license.
Einstein case routing automatically classifies and routes support cases. This allows Sales Reps to see cases faster and spend more time with customers rather than manually going through cases. Based on your preferred accuracy threshold. Once the case is classified it is automatically routed to the correct sales rep.
Customer service is working in real time with Salesforce. Deliver the right answers over any channel to your customers quickly and easily. With one-click your service agents are able to preview knowledge articles and contribute to the conversation in real-time.
Empower your customers with real time SMS messaging. Customers can send and track transactional text messages, such as purchase confirmations, delivery updates, password resets and receipts
Create and send Rich Communication Services (RCS) to your customers mobile app through Journey Builder. Your marketers can can directly interact with their mobile audience to increase engagement and drive conversation.
Select the best time to send emails to your subscriber list based on engagement. Simple as that.
Page Designer allows you to build with clicks not code. With the drag-and-drop component your vision can be executed in minutes not days.
On-demand sandboxes allows you to copy your site and fine tune it without impacting your production site.
Create and intelligently manage content. Build content and extend it to any channel not built on Salesforce. Your content developers can write, design and curate content in one convenient location.
Create a feature-rich portal for your independent insurance agents in the Insurance Agent Portal Lightning Template. Get a comprehensive overview of Clients, Policies, Claims and so much more right on your dashboard.
Keep a close eye on what is happening in your org. Build transaction security policies that alert you when unwanted actions or suspicious activities occur.
Customize the look, feel and functionality of your data. Build custom apps with ready-made or custom components. Unify your desktop and mobile experience.
On-board and engage with your user in lighting. Create prompts with your own written content and action buttons guiding users to the URL of your choice.
Discussing data has never been easier. With embedded Salesforce reports in Quip users can add salesforce list views and log calls directly within quip. Making it easy for teams to discuss and collaborate on Salesforce data they use every day.
Build a developer community around your APIS. This transforms your portal into a digitalized experience. Your technology and business teams can collaborate and promote products with API documentation.
Capture borrower information with data model enhancements for mortgage, so that data can be shared across all lines of business.
Easily track important healthcare provider information. Ensure your patients are getting all the care they need. Get a full view of your provider network.
By using Sales Agreements your business is able to negotiate long-term purchases and sales of products over time. Get a full overview of how your accounts are performing.
In all circumstances of retain marketing the 4 P’s are ALWAYS important to follow. Help your business make the right choices by tracking inventory, place orders at the right time and ensure that your business is tracking visit details to spend less time on operational activities and more time on building and nurturing relationships with your customers.
Integration has never been easier. Connect all of your tools that help run your business efficiently on one platform.
Get the support you need without leaving Essentials. In the first 90-days of purchase chat with an Essentials team member and get your questions answered.
Create a story by selecting a dataset and Einstein does the rest
Keep an eye on predictive models throughout your business. Einstein Discovery alerts you if one of your models is under performing so you never miss a beat.
Einstein Analytics Dashboard is now on mobile! Access all the data you know and love right from the palm of your hand.
Get your questions answered quickly and efficiently. With better Live Chat UI, improvements to case management and new case scheduler rest easy knowing that when you ask you shall receive.
Get 1-on-1 assistance with Salesforce specialists. Including refreshed accelerators for Service Cloud, Pardot and Marketing Cloud.
Marketing Cloud finally has a simulator. Create practice email templates, sending emails and more with Marketing Cloud simulation.
The end of each year brings with it the opportunity to slow our minds and reflect on the past year. It also provides a symbolic moment to start, stop or revise our behaviors and patterns.
Customer service is the assistance provided by a company to the people who buy or use its products and/or services. Customer service directly correlates with customer satisfaction. In the sphere of running a business, customer service often takes a back seat to the daily demands of the operation. While it’s easy to prioritize things like accounting, networking, and delegating tasks over customer service, it is just as important to acknowledge that without the customer, none of those other aspects of your business would matter. Without the customer, you wouldn’t have a successful business. Exceptional customer service is what keeps the business of existing customers and piques the interest of potential customers. Developing and maintaining relationships with your customers should be a top priority among employees.
We’ve got the answer to that question! We are currently in the midst of what is being called the “4th Industrial Revolution.” This promises to bring positive changes to the way we live, work, and relate to one another through the advancements being made in technology and cyber systems. These advancements are bringing changes to the business, government, and household spheres, all of which will eventually lead to a societal transformation similar to the previous industrial revolutions.
It’s no surprise that more and more people are taking advantage of the convenience that online platforms provide. Whether it be online shopping, bill paying, or consulting, all of these can now be done from the comfort of a home without even talking to a representative on the phone, in most cases. As these services becoming increasingly accessible to consumers, it is important to keep up with the changing technology and be there for your customers.
The saying “The customer is always right” might make you roll your eyes at first, but it’s not just an empty adage. Think about it: what do customers do? They purchase products or services, interact with employees, tell friends about their experience, and provide feedback. The success of any business lies in the hands of the people that support them. In order to keep up with the advancements within this revolution, it is our job as business owners, employees, and consultants to make sure we improve and maintain our customer service standards and protocol.
Since Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform with the main purpose of improving business relationships, it can exist as the overarching topic of this conversation. Salesforce gives users the ability to create individual profiles of customers that can be accessed by all departments, such as marketing, sales, finance, etc. This effectively puts the customer in the middle of everything. Marketing is a great example of how to perfect the customer service experience.
Salesforce products like Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud, for example, can provide you with invaluable tools that can help distinguish your company from the rest of the competition. Marketing Cloud features marketing solutions like Journey Builder, Social Studio, Datorama, and Interaction Studio. Each solution provides a different insight into each individual customer’s journey within the departments of your company. They also give you the best opportunities to engage with current and potential customers across social media channels in real-time. Service Cloud provides the engine that powers how productively agents handle actual tickets and customer conversations. Through Service Cloud, service processes, workflows and searches for relevant resources can become streamlined and automated. Other features like Service for Apps provides in-app mobile support, including live agent video chat, screen sharing, and on-screen guided assistance. Service Cloud provides even more ways to communicate with customers, with integrated social “listening” features and with easy integration with Salesforce’s Community Cloud. These are just some of the many ways a clear strategy for customer service and effective use of what technology and tools to leverage can help you maximize time and efficiency while achieving customer satisfaction.
Contemporary CMS solutions promise sophistication and customization even for users who have little to no exposure to coding or development. As simple as drag and drop, advanced user interfaces are giving users control over their webpages that would normally require the lift of both developers and designers.
The official page for Salesforce CMS already promises all the features you would expect from a modern CMS: collaboration across teams; responsive design; distribution to multiple communications channels; edit views of live pages; and easy to use interface. At a quick glance, you can already observe that the interface is as simple and customizable as current leading website builders.
Salesforce CMS, which considers itself a “hybrid content management system,” distinguishes itself by being built natively on, of course, a CRM. CRM data is baked into the CMS from the get-go, reducing the hassle and maintenance of setting up CMS-CRM connections. For businesses invested in digital transformation, the ability to visualize CRM data straight to content pages in ways that are easy, beautiful, on brand, and timely will be a significant difference than what other CMS solutions can provide. Further, users of Salesforce CRM solutions can now potentially be active content creators without having to lean on developers.
Yes, sort of. In the beta release of its CMS, Salesforce refers to Salesforce CMS as an upgrade to CMS for Community Cloud in its Summer ’19 Release Notes. Users of CMS for Community Cloud had their content automatically moved to the new Salesforce CMS, which included new functionality.
The release of Salesforce CMS marks that it is “now generally available” with more features, according to Salesforce’s Winter ’20 Release Notes. Content can also now also be shared to the B2B Commerce managed package and communities created using Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce. Lightning Communities can build customized pages, which are no longer limited to the preset layouts and navigation structure or menu components. Through Salesforce CMS, role-based access can now be assigned to team members for authoring content authoring and selecting setting.
As of mid-November 2019, commerce and marketing cloud features are listed as “Coming Soon.”
In the current landscape of CMS solutions, we are definitely not short options. We dare you to scroll through this list of available CMS technology. According to BuiltWith’s web technology usage trends, WordPress continues to be a clear world frontrunner with 27+ million live websites, consistently capturing greater than 50% of the CMS technology market share. Despite the many open source options available, Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify have captured a strong user base with 3.9+ million 1.7+ million and 1 million live websites, respectively, who are drawn to its convenience and affordability. This new guard of relatively out-of-the-box, developer-not-needed solutions, however, may be better suited for small- to medium-sized businesses.
From security to conformity, the difficulties for managing a CMS for larger enterprises can certainly get massive and complex. Setting up connectivity between CMS and a CRM can especially be a challenge for those organizations actively tracking their customers’ activities across many digital campaigns. There certainly is a growing market need for a new type of CMS for large organizations.
Thus, the Salesforce CMS poses an intriguing proposition to its loyal base of heavy-hitting enterprise CRM users. It further positions itself to be the CMS of choice for any new organization looking to get started on other Salesforce solutions.
Salesforce has demonstrated how they can grow fast and clearly dominate. Among CRM providers, Salesforces comprises nearly one fifth of the market, which is double the CRM sales of the runner-up, SAP, and three times as much as Oracle in third. The question remains whether adoption of Salesforce CMS will be just as significant.
© 2020 CRMD, Salesforce Consultants.
