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Digital Transformation

Becoming a Customer Company

Vivek Kundra, EVP at Salesforce and former United States CIO, talked about becoming a customer

Quote from IBM 2012 CEO Study

For some time, busienss have been refining and optimizing their networks of suppliers and partners.  But something revolutionary has been happening — the sudden convergence of the cloud, social, and mobile spheres — connecting customers, employee and partners in new way.

This will involve fundamentally rethinking how you connect with your customers, partners, employees, and others.

Quick stats: Salesforce had $893 million in revenue last quarter which represents a 30% increase year over year.

Parker Harris took over and stared talking about today’s platform connecting an ‘internet of things’  It’s cell phones, cars, devices, thermometers, etc. These trends drive the customer revolution.  The customer revolution is influenced by the 4.5 billion social users who connect via 1.7 billion mobile device. (yeah, stats don’t make sense) .  Of course, all the devices and people push a lot of ‘big data’   There’s a lot of customer insight there.

Everyone expects people to come together.  Users look for an application and a community today.  Cloud systems are a key force behind that.  The connectivity of customers, employees, partners, and products.

A customer company

  • is available 24/7
  • listens first
  • can be access from any place
  • connects their consituents
  • knows conversations never stop
  • create communiities
  • repsect identity privacy and money
  • knows you are the same person no matter how you contact them

Quote: Sam Walton said, “There is only one person who can fire every one of us.  It’s the customer who doesn’t buy from us.”

Five questions to become a customer compnay

1. How do  you market to customers when they are everywhere.  Gatorade built a social command center to monitor and engage with customers.  

They did this using their marketing cloud.  The cloud is made up of Radian 6, buddy media, and social.com.  They showed social.com managing a variety of campaigns.  They target people by where they live, demographics, and other things.  All of this information comes from public facebook pages.  They also get information from saleforce to further target the ad campaign.

The rest of the steps push ads to facebook based on a budget you already define.  Finally, they can track the success of the campaigns.

Announcement: Omnicon Group (5,000 agencies across 100 companies) has entered into a strategic partnership with Salesforce.  Shiv Singh, Digital Marketing VP spoke about digital marketing. “We are a brick and mortar company.  We want to engage the customer as close to purchase as possible.  That’s why we are excited about the Marketing Cloud.”

2. How do you sell as a team with your Customers?

3. How do you Service Customers when they are everywhere?

Examples is Phillips which connects toothbrushes to dentists, MRI’s to hospitals, etc.  Phillips has seen a 37% increase in customer satisfaction.   They connect a variety of devices.  This allows them to see how they are used and when they are using the tools.  (lamps, breadmakers, tooth brushes, etc.)

Best quote from Phillips: You are no longer selling a product on function and features. You are selling a solution.

Sarah Patterson of Product Marketing talked about the Service Cloud.  He uses his feed to track new information and to track what’s happening to his customers.  It’s all about the feed.  The Service cloud not only connects people who use the feed. Because Chatter is connected to the sales and service clouds, the feed becomes even more useful.  Sarah mentioned a use case where a connected MRI machine’s utilization report was created and attached to Chatter.  (again, connecting more than just a person to the feed.)

4. How do you build a customer platform

This comes down to how you engage customers and extend the functions with Heroku, Force.com, and the App Exchange.

Case Study: Leviev Extraordinary Diamonds

Employees interact with their inventory.   Phones and tablets keep them in touch and personalize an experience.  They know when a product is viewed. They know if a marquis diamond isn’t even being looked at in their London office. They use the tablets to share ideas.

Quote from the CEO: I can run my business from my phone

Demonstration:

Customer check in to Chatter. They view their diamond inventory on an ipad.  They use the iPad to help design the perfect ring.  They use the iPad to kickoff the order to actually create the ring.  This front end app feeds data to Salesforce.  A designer can see the entire chatter feed, the digital renderings, customer interactions, etc. The ring designer can add his new design which is again added to the feed.  At the same time, the customer can view the final rendering from their Leviev iPhone application where the can approve the ring design.  That approval hits the Chatter feed.

part of the demo was to push the ring to a 3D printer to print a scale model to send to the customer or to use for internal reference.  (ok, this was just a cool thing to highlight)

Leviev literally runs their business on Salesforce.  That started with an inventory problem.  Once the inventory was online, it allowed to move their whole business online.

What’s next?  Working on a new app.  Traditional diamond business relies on rare and beautiful.  However, people are viewing diamonds as an investment item as well.  Leviev wants to create a virtual jewelry box.  They can view the diamond, the documentation, the certification, etc.  They can also see what matching jewelry might look like.  The investor would see their diamonds along with information on it’s current value and other information.

5. How do you transform the way you work?

Chatter mobile can help.  195,000 active Chatter networks exist.  Sarah Patterson showed the integrated Chatter client that gets all the information from a variety of sources like Sales and Service Clouds.  (side note, I talked to Brenden Callum and you can integrate a variety of external feeds to Chatter as well).  The mobile client lets you do it all anytime and anywhere.

 

 

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Michael Porter

Mike Porter leads the Strategic Advisors team for Perficient. He has more than 21 years of experience helping organizations with technology and digital transformation, specifically around solving business problems related to CRM and data.

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