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Wondering what is Salesforce? Or what you can do with Salesforce? This one’s for you.

We hear this surprisingly often: “Yeah Salesforce, I know you Salesforce. You do …”. This is where people falter. Because they do know us, but they’re struggling to put their finger on it, to name it.

“You do that thing. Don’t you? For salespeople?”. We sure do! We do that thing for salespeople, customer service people, marketing people, small businesses, big businesses, government, financial services – should we go on?

But hang on, what’s ‘that thing’? ‘That thing’ is a cloud-based CRM (the world’s #1 CRM!). But we think, number one or not, that just doesn’t cut it — a CRM is at the heart of what we do, but we do more. And we also kind of think ‘we do more’ is why we get the vague ‘that thing’ comments — people know it’s not just a CRM, but not really what else it is.

We call ourselves a ‘customer success platform’. ‘That thing’, to us, is helping our customers connect to their customers in ways they never have before – to drive exceptional customer experience. Okay, that’s slightly less vague. But let’s get specific: here are 10 ways we bring companies and customers closer together.

1. Gain a single view of your customer

Today’s customer expects businesses to deliver personalised experiences across all channels and departments — and you want to meet these expectations. Easier said than done, right? Well, with Salesforce Customer 360 every customer interaction is centralised in the one system, providing a ‘single view of the customer’. If a customer contacts you, staff can see which product they own, when they purchased it, reasons for their last call and much more. 

Imagine how pleasant that makes the interaction for the customer, as opposed to having to explain themselves, just like they did last time. 

And with the addition of Customer 360 Truth businesses will be able to authenticate and govern customer data. Meaning businesses can deeply personalise customer messages all while respecting and protecting their customer’s data and privacy.

2. Generate new sales leads

Want to close deals faster? Salesforce allows you to create highly targeted communications with people who closely resemble your current customer group. By analysing your current and past customer data, Salesforce builds lookalike profiles, meaning you can easily identify and market to potential customers.

3. Meet customer expectations before they know what they are

The concept of artificial intelligence can sometimes be daunting to teams, but in reality, it’s easy to implement within any business. Einstein is Salesforce’s AI and is built right into every part of the platform. Einstein automatically makes you smarter and more predictive about your customers — so much so you may know of a sales or service need before the customer even does. And if you contact the customer in advance of that need you can delightfully disrupt their expectations.

4. Be guided through business decisions with voice technology

Voice technology is moving from the home to businesses thanks to the announcement of Einstein Voice Skills. Salesforce has embedded Einstein intelligence into Amazon’s voice service Alexa — bringing powerful voice technology to CRM. So what does this mean for the everyday business? For example, Einstein Voice will help service agents spend less time on cases by identifying keywords from calls and transcripts and suggesting the next best action.

5. Building apps can be fast, easy and fun

So much of today’s business is conducted on the go, with managers and employees constantly stealing small moments to look after important business. Imagine how much more efficient this process would become with mobile apps custom-built for their needs. With the power of the Salesforce Lightning Platform and Heroku, businesses can build and deploy no and low code apps quickly without needing to use expensive in-house developers. Building apps on the Salesforce Platform has already proven to elevate the employee experience, raise productivity and create amazing experiences for customers. Just ask our Trailblazers.

6. Build an online community

Leveraging technology to build an online community strikes the right balance between AI-powered chatbot and human interactions. Salesforce Community Cloud helps you create a single location where customers can go to ask for answers, discuss products and share ideas. Not only are you creating a community around your product and service, but it means service reps are freed up to concentrate on difficult cases and the business can search these discussions to find out what customers really care about.

7. Personalise services with automation

According to the latest Salesforce State of the Connected Customer, 75% of customers expect companies to use new technologies to create better experiences. Major brands are expected to offer personalised service and customer journeys, just as small businesses traditionally did. Salesforce makes this possible through automation, data analysis, interactive systems, journey planning and artificial intelligence. No IT team required!

8. Create impact regardless of business size

The reverse of the above is just as true — SMBs are expected to offer systems and technology to make customers’ lives easier, just as enterprises and mid-markets do. 

Whatever the size of the business, Salesforce introduces the single most powerful competitive advantage — a delightful and consistent customer experience. And growing SMBs are already seeing the benefits: 54% noticing faster/better customer service and 37% are generating more leads.

9. Leave behind the shared customer service inbox

With an integrated CRM, you can manage cases and help customers at lightning speed. Data and insights are at your fingertips, which means no more time trawling through an inbox and deciphering email chains. On top of the ease of customer service, self-service sites help those customers who want to find their own answers, while customer insights make scaling frictionless.

10. Opportunities to continually learn

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is changing the way we live and work — creating opportunities and shaping industry practice. Salesforce’s online learning platform Trailhead is designed to help you learn new information and skills in a fun and engaging way. Trailhead is so popular it has its own community of Trailblazers — fellow learners who support each other, meet up regularly all over the world, and answer each other’s questions.

Bringing your customer closer

Did we mention there’s too much to talk about here? Suffice to say, everything you can do with Salesforce is designed with one goal in mind — to help bring companies and customers closer together.

To help you transform the way you sell and form deeper connections with your customers to generate more business than ever before, download our ebook 50 Pro Sales Tips for 2020.