Mark Polly

Analytics is a hot topic in the Customer Engagement world. Wes Moore of Teradata chaired a panel session on how to use analytics to drive customer engagement. The panelists included: John Dokes, CMO, Accuweather Leyda Hernandez, Director of Marketing, Priori Legal Merlin U Ward, Account Strategist, Renegade Here are what the panel had to say […]

This week I’m attending Customer Engagement World in New York. “The Customer is the New Boss” is Lawrence Dvorchik’s theme for Customer Engagement World. But hasn’t the customer always been the boss? We always say customer is the boss, but our engagements methods rarely reflect this. Too often companies are trying to engage in a one-way […]

Why community cloud? Communities are proliferating at a high rate. Yelp originates 200,000 calls to businesses. 78M bike rides are shared via Strava. 94% of recruiters use LinkedIn to vet new candidates. But most businesses are not connected today. We have Portals disconnected from the public website or social networks. Salesforce’s Community Cloud offers a […]

Salesforce shared their roadmap for the Salesforce1 Mobile platform.  Here are the themes for upcoming releases, especially for Winter 2014. For Users: Find and update customer data finder – new customer lists, self-curated lists, more information on the list itself so you don’t have to go to the details view as often.  All of the […]

In the Marketing Cloud Keynote at Dreamforce, the team showed off the capabilities of the Marketing cloud. Marketing Cloud has 5 pillar applications that allow marketers to connect 1:1 with customers: Journeys Journey Builder is the flagship component that you use to create customer journeys Marketing Cloud announced Journey Builder for Apps.  This new feature can […]

All this week I’m at Dreamforce, the annual Salesforce conference.  Salesforce has come a long way with their platform and they’ve recently introduced Community Cloud.  Community Cloud is an evolution of their portal product and includes many features that we see in other enterprise-class, horizontal portals. We are seeing a lot of interest in portals from […]

Many hospitals and doctors and patients are looking for better ways to connect with each other.  Based on my work with payers, they often want to engage more with their members so they can make good healthcare choice.  Patients often want to have a sense of community, especially those dealing with chronic conditions and diseases. […]

Salesforce Marketing Cloud has been a long-time player in marketing automation.  Journey mapping is probably the number one feature requested by companies who want to implement 1:1 marketing based on data coming in from their various marketing assets. When a new customer registers a new product, what do you do?  Most companies probably do nothing. […]

Here at Dreamforce 2014, the conference is really heating up. Today is Marc Benioff’s keynote, which is always a fun event. Right before that keynote, the Community Cloud team presented their roadmap for Winter ’15.  We see Salesforce Communities as a compelling portal for a lot of business uses, including Partner Portals, Employee Portals, Sales Portals […]

Salesforce Community Cloud can be used for a variety of applications, including sales communities, customer self-service, marketing campaign management, or anywhere you need portal, content and social combined into one experience. At Dreamforce 2014, Salesforce has been having a lot of sessions related to communities and I’ve seen a lot of communities focused on partners. […]

Zero Motorcycles needed a way to consolidate multiple partner-facing systems into a simplified user interface, track sales and monitor participation programs and automate workflows. As we’ve seen from other customers, partners had to login to multiple systems. Using Community Cloud, Zero was able to provide one interface for the partners to login into and get […]

Community Cloud is Salesforce’s newest and fastest growing cloud (until tomorrow). IDC has seen a huge jump in using social media to communicate with customers and respond to customer inquiries. The top 3 technologies that are planned to be used include discussion forums, public social networks, and online communities, which is where Community Cloud comes in. […]