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Basecamp 2018 brought the best of the biggest Salesforce event of the year, Dreamforce, to Melbourne. Here’s all the insights and advice – and a few sneak peeks into the future – for sales, service, marketing, admins and more.
“All I used to know about Salesforce was that it’s a CRM brand,” Zoe Lai told the Basecamp keynote audience. “And then I found Trailhead.”
The true Trailblazer, now five-times Salesforce certified, built her new career after working on a Salesforce implementation at RMIT.
“To me being a Trailblazer means finding the courage to get out of your comfort zone and learn new skills, try new things, help your fellow trailblazers and give back to the community.”
Basecamp is all about showcasing and learning from Trailblazers like Zoe Lai, and like Vision Australia’s CIO Damien McCormack.
McCormack told the crowd about the biggest challenges his organisation is facing at the moment – the implementation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). And while the cause of these challenges is particular to healthcare, the challenge itself is universal: customers expect more. They expect relationships rather than transactions, and business growth is dependent on deep engagement with customers.
“For an organisation like Vision Australia, the relationship with consumers is changing, and changing to Salesforce was part of moving from a clinical relationship to a consumer relationship,” McCormack said.
Vision Australia is a good way into the cultural and digital transformation required to achieve this, but there is more to come
“So far, we’ve been focused on service delivery, but now we're looking at how we can drive deeper engagement and relationship with consumers in their daily lives.”
will.i.am told us: “great times are coming”. Okay, it was via video, but the sentiment was spot on.
“We live in exciting times!” said Robert Wickham, our Regional VP, Platform and Emerging Technologies APAC. “The WEF refers to this as ‘the age of intelligence’.”
Wickham shared insights into the ways some of the world’s top companies are mobilising intelligence for efficiency and the best CX, all behind the scenes: Coca Cola’s vending machines that order their own top-ups, increasing efficiency and improving product availability, Kone’s escalators that detect busy periods and adjust speeds accordingly, as well as tracking and notifying of any maintenance needs to streamline field service teams’ workloads, Marriott’s personalised digital check-in process that sees guests checked in, room-key in hand and favourite drink waiting, before they even hit the lobby – these top brands are creating the connected experiences that remove the friction from their customers’ experiences.
This age of intelligence is not all ‘great times’, however. “AI is in its infancy,’ Wickham said. “And just like a young child, it's the values that we instill that will determine the outcome.”
Wickham spoke of Salesforce’s recently announced Office of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology – an initiative spanning the tech industry including customers and suppliers which will, Salesforce Co-CEO Marc Benioff explained a few months ago, “encourage, promote and publish and implement industry standards, guidelines and living frameworks around the ethical and humane use of technology. We have to make sure that technology strengthens our societies, instead of weakening them. Technology needs to improve the human tradition, not undermine it”.
Salesforce is far from the only organisation that enacts its focus on purpose – our Ohana is full of them! Xero’s Chief Customer, People and Marketing Officer Rachel Powell joined Megan Petersen on stage to explain why her title was such an amalgamation of traditionally separate functions – service, marketing and HR – a perfect insight into Xero’s purpose.
“Trust is at an all time low,” Powell explained, referencing the findings of this year’s Edelman Trust Barometer. “It's up to businesses to make that change, and this is only going to work if you start with the employee workforce, then take it out to the partner ecosystem, then to customers.”
As well as the impact of a business’s focus on purpose beyond profit on customer experience, Powell spoke of the impact of employee experience on CX – such an important point at Xero that they now use the same tech to shape EX as they use to create and optimise their customer journeys.
“Why not use Marketing Cloud to take our employees on a journey, from the moment they engage as a candidate to the time they leave the organisation as an alumni?”
Once we’d seen all that was possible, and all that we could do to improve the experiences of our customers and teams, it was time to dive into how this was all possible, with a look at some very exciting new launches:
Service: Customer 360
Trailblazing organisation (and purveyor of some seriously beautiful fashion) Brunello Cucinelli has been using Customer 360 to create a holistic view of every single customer, bringing in data from every source and matching records across every interaction of every channel to empower the brand’s teams to perfect an already-white glove CX. This is an absolute game-changer, especially for chair-swivelling service agents – but most of all for their customers.
Integration, automation and digital channels are reshaping service – and they are making agents superheroes. And with the ability to declaratively build service bots, the admin is just as likely to don a cape.
Sales: Einstein Voice
Sales teams, meanwhile, gained insight into just how Einstein Voice will change the way they work every day. Brigid Archibald walked the crowd through a day in the life of a voice-enabled sales superstar: waking up to a morning briefing – the very positive news that Einstein’s data analysis showed that her 9.30 meeting was an opportunity to double the value of an existing account, and an overview of the relationship – heading to the meeting and making the sale, and updating the account records on the way back to the office.
“This is not a voice recognition demo though,” Archibald explained. “This is an analysis demo.”
We’ve shared our excitement about Einstein Voice before (as has Tony Hughes), and we’ll do it again. Magnificent leaps in natural language processing means that Einstein can listen, analyse, identify the right customer records, update actions and notes, and even set the next meetings.
Sales reps will be freed up to spend their precious time selling, and they will also add more data to records – and more data that Einstein can analyse will make the sales team even better at selling.
Marketing: GA 360 and Datorama
“Marketing is no longer about one-off experiences or one-off interactions,” Jo Gaines said in the marketing session.
Gaines ran the audience through using Google Analytics 360 for journey analytics that uncover real opportunities as well as the strong and weak points of those journeys, and Datorama for cross-platform intelligence that will enable marketers to bring together all of their disparate data sources, see AI-powered insights from that data, collaborate on the actions those insights provide, and report across channels and and campaigns.
Find out more about what your customers expect, and how you can use the latest technology to provide excellent customer experience at every touchpoint. Download the State of the Connected Customer report.
