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You have had to be living under a rock not to know that the world is changing unbelievably quickly right now. But it is always helpful to get some insight into the exact proportions of that change. In the Main Keynote on Customer Success at Sydney Advantage Tour, we were presented with some amazing facts and figures about the change going on all around us:

  • Cloud Revolution: The market is now worth a staggering USD$270 billion globally and 85 per cent of new apps are developed “cloud-first”. One of the reasons why everything is changing so fast these days is that Cloud technology affords us a whopping 70 per cent increase on time-to-market.

  • Mobile Revolution: when you consider that there are 7 billion people on the planet it takes your breath away to know there will be 6 billion smartphones out there by 2020!

  • Social Revolution: social media touches every aspect of our lives but it is surprising to know that there are 1 billion DAILY Facebook users!

  • Data Science Revolution: amid all of this is the explosion in data. In fact 90 per cent of all the world’s data was created in the last 12 months!

  • IoT Revolution: now not only just people are connected, but everything is connected - there will be 75 billion connected things by 2020.

We are used to hearing how global brands like Burberry or Western Union or Fitbit are using Salesforce to navigate these uncertain waters to innovate their customers’ experience, but two very special stories were told at Salesforce Advantage Tour in Sydney, two stories that touched everyone in the audience.

Long before Hikmet Ersek became CEO of Western Union, he was a customer - as a migrant to the US sending money home to his family. Indeed Western Union have been using technology to connect people for 160 years and today remain at the cutting edge of the customer experience. More than $6 billion are wired around the world on Western Union’s platform - 29 transactions every second.

“The number-one reason why people send money back home is education,” said Ersek. “Parents want their children to have a better life. So they leave home, work hard, and send money back so the children can go to school. It’s a very emotional moment.”

In this context, trust is so important for the Western Union brand and so they are using Salesforce to maintain that dialogue with customers and partners alike. There are more than half a million “indirect employees”, the third-party agents who form critical infrastructure. Western Union uses Sales Cloud to manage the entire lifecycle of those relationships, and onboarding of these agents is now 40 per cent faster. The Salesforce platform also provides the technology to build mobile apps to maintain a dialogue with customers. The result is an “omni-channel”, 360 degree view of the customers that means a far deeper understanding. You can learn more about how Western Union use Salesforce to enhance the customer experience here.

An inspiring example is the work Cochlear are doing in order to better connect with their customers:

As well as being the world leader in hearing implants, Cochlear fulfil their vision to become the “leading customer experience company for people with hearing loss.” Key to this is connecting all points of what Global Head of Marketing Technology, Vishy Narayanan, calls “The Triangle” of Employees, Customers (or ‘Recipients’) and Clinicians so that together that community can support the customer throughout their hearing journey. Salesforce technology enables a “Cochlear Concierge” - a Cochlear employee that is also a recipient AND audiologist - to engage customers online in whatever personalised way suits them.

As Chris Smith, Cochlear CEO, says: wherever you live “you have the ability to connect directly with the company”. Being able to provide this level of customer experience all around the world in real-time is critical to meeting to customer expectations that are increasingly set by other brands such as airlines and banks.

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