Salesforce Journey Builder, a relatively new offering in the long line of Salesforce innovations, offers a powerful customer interaction management tool, with deep integration capabilities. The new gen Journey Builder in Salesforce Marketing cloud platform enables marketers and others to set up an automated response for each possible action from the customer’s end.

Scope of Journey Builder

The Journey Builder serves as a virtual whiteboard, allowing marketers to create logical IF…THEN flowcharts, based on how they need to respond to each customer interaction or behaviour. Marketers may sketch out each possible interaction, then list corresponding actions to take, and automate the execution of such actions. They can create both simple and complex journeys for customers, either on a segmented or one-to-one basis, with clarity on what exactly to do in every eventuality.

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Realistic User Interface

The Journey Builder’s user interface, apart from displaying fidelity to the technical best practices and adhering to standards that make it visually appealing, reflects the way a marketer thinks rather than the way a machine works. It succeeds in replicating the way marketers work with a normal whiteboard with sticky notes and drawing workflows, giving the feel of physical workspace.

A set of easy drop and drag tools help the marketer chalk out any “trigger” action, and devise the action to take based on the trigger. For instance, the marketer may identify “customer downloads an app” as a trigger, and chose to send push notifications to such customers. Another trigger may be “customer signing up for email,” the action for which could be “send customized email.”  Such interactions may be chalked out in a logical flow, and several such “interactions”, or sets of trigger and response may be grouped together based on common objectives. Different sets may be placed in separate sections of the customer lifecycle, such as “Acquire,” “On Board,” and “Engage”.

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Valuable Analytics

The Journey Builder, apart from easing the process flow for customer engagement, also enable businesses to draw out insights from raw transactional data.

Marketers may test the engagement they deploy. They may, for instance, design and send multiple emails for a single trigger, and capture analytics to identify the best or the most effective email among the lot. Marketers may also set performance benchmark goals, and compare actual performance to such goals.

Marketers may leverage the Journey Builder’s predictive intelligence to identify which type of emails or other engagement worked with specific customer or customers previously, to deliver timely, relevant content.

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Integrations

The Journey Builder is platform agnostic. The triggers created in the platform can be drawn in from multiple point-of-interactions, such as the mobile app, website, social media channels, and other options. Marketers may also create customer-activity based triggers in the Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, enabling a single view of a customer rather than multiple personas across different software.

Likewise, responses to the trigger needn’t be channel specific. A case in point is having the option to respond to the action of “customer abandoning a shopping cart” with a Facebook ad offering them a discount. The ad is created through Salesforce’s Social.com, and initiated through the Journey Builder, and reaches the customer on any device, be it the smartphone, laptop, or PC, delivering a unified experience for the customer.

In the back-end, the Journey Builder seamlessly integrates and syncs with intuitive tools in the Salesforce ecosystem and outside, such as Buddy Media and Radian6, the social media listening and publishing platforms, BlueKai, and more. Such deep and seamless integration across multiple platforms offer marketers highly accurate customer profile information.

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Application

The successful use of Journey Builder’s trigger based flowcharts and analytical capabilities require close coordination and interactions across departments. Today’s enterprises require teamwork, and marketers can achieve little in isolation. For instance, sending a survey email to customers would require a customer service team lead and the marketer to work in close coordination. Likewise, the production team needs to work closely with the marketing team to promote products depending on inventory gluts and shortages.

Applied well, the tool makes sales and service cloud insights more accessible to marketers, enabling them to deliver smarter and more consistent customer experience.