A thoughtful gift from “Salesforce Santa” – Manufacturers will know themselves and their clients better
This Christmas, Santa has something special in store for enterprise users.
The holiday season is the time for fun and mirth, but business leaders are often seen scurrying around, seeking real-time contextual awareness, and strategic alliance with partners in the ecosystem—essential ingredients of success in a highly competitive environment. Incidentally, Salesforce Santa has the perfect gift for them, in the form of a highly powerful collaborative channel that is sure to enliven their spirits.
Deep Collaboration
Salesforce Communities have always been a cozy platform where customers, partners, and other stakeholders could get together to collaborate. The collaborative engine pulls in data from multiple Salesforce and third-party sources, integrates advanced machine learning capabilities, offers delivery on mobile devices, and on the whole, facilitates seamless sharing of information. End users get ready access to a wealth of resources, such as technical blogs, product videos, and more. Key stakeholders discuss latest products, product specs or trends, and get authentic insights, directly from people who matter. Customers offer feedback, which directly reaches all relevant stakeholders, who then discuss it, and engage with the customer. Integration with Lightning Bolt ensures a deeper level or customization.
The Power of Artificial Intelligence
This Christmas, Salesforce Santa has gifted certain new capabilities to this collaborative platform; and true to the spirit of the season, it allows people to collaborate more, and collaborate better.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the goody for the season. The new Einstein-powered Salesforce enriches communities with machine learning and gamification capabilities, to deliver smarter, faster, more productive and personalized experiences to customers.
Have you ever wondered how Amazon recommends the most relevant products for you when you log in, or how Apple Siri gives near-perfect answers to your questions, or how browsing movie recommendations on Netflix always seems to generate results that match your interest? That’s Artificial Intelligence at work. In each instance, AI guides users to the best possible result, through the easiest path, factoring in several trends and insights gleaned from various sources, including social media, browsing history, and so on. The Santa has now gifted Salesforce communities this same power. The name of the gift is Salesforce Einstein.
How Einstein Enhances the Community Cloud
When users make a query, Einstein’s intelligence engine works in the background to glean relevant insights from various sources, and predict answers most relevant to the question. The engine makes recommendations on articles, questions, experts and topics relevant to the query initiated by the user.
Einstein takes search to a whole new level from the ordinary run-of-the-mill search. It keeps track of the most popular pages and posts, and guides users to new and the most recently active community members, groups, and resources. It directs users to articles with the optimal mix of recentness, likes, comments, and other key success or relevance factors. Einstein, moreover, learns from the user’s community engagement history to make proactive recommendations that have a high level of relevance and accuracy. It ensures that users get the best information available, in the fastest possible time, all the while personalizing the experience.
Community managers may boost the power of Einstein by feeding it with keywords and phrases, to direct results to a specific resource. A case in point: if a user includes “broken” in the query, the engine could trigger a need for immediate attention, and create a case for the service cloud automatically. There could also be a provision for automatic escalation if the case is not attended for a set period of time.
Integration of Channel Partners and Resellers
Many companies already provide the latest cutting-edge tools to their internal workforce. However, the productivity, efficiency and turnover gains resultant from such tools remain under-realized for companies who depend on reseller and distributor channels to drive sales. Resellers and other vital partners in the distribution channel still mostly make do with dated, difficult to use and disparate systems for checking leads, requesting support, closing deals, and everything else related to the customers. The Einstein enabled communities offer channel partners access to the same powerful tools and resources the internal workforce enjoys.
Getting partners tightly integrated into the development and distribution channel is a win-win solution, empowering partners to be more productive and close sales, and in the process improve the company’s sales and bottom line. And true to the Christmas spirit, it increases the bond of togetherness. A tightly knit community works with greater cohesion, working miracles on the sales front.
Einstein Powered Community Clouds in Action
A community that connects the manufacturing company’s distributors spread across the world offers the perfect way for these stakeholders to interact and gain visibility, with unprecedented transparency. The marketing team could not just pass sales lead to the distributor using the Community Cloud, and allow them the full cycle to manage the lead, they could also provide the distributors with more relevant data, such as sample requests, end user pricing, and more. The marketer retains full visibility into what is happening as the distributor works the lead, enabling them to make critical interventions as and when required. The distributor in turn could upload or enter end user sales information, offering the marketer valuable information on what sells, who buys, and other critical information, which would enable them to position their products and marketing collaterals even more efficiently.
The net result is improved efficiency, accelerated sales process and improved capability for distributors to close deals.
There are certainly some key challenges (which we will discuss in a blog later) that will need to be met for AI powered community clouds to offer a wealth of possibilities wholesomely. However, there is no doubt that the integration of Salesforce Community and Einstein furthers the cause of unified customer experience in a big way. The integration has the potential to bring together all the powerful internal sales tools and channel ecosystems, fostering the free flow of information, improving relationships, and empowering customers with greater accessibility. Such a great level of engagement with partners ensures a greater level of engagement with customers, the perfect gift from Christmas Santa!
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