Dreamforce is our annual conference, attracting over 170,000 guests to San Francisco. Through over 2,000 breakout sessions, thousands of product demos and a range of networking events, we jointly discuss innovation in the “Age of the Customer”. Please find below my personal list of top customer stories relevant to the Travel and Logistics industry.
1. Digital Passenger Apps at Air France – KLM
https://www.salesforce.com/video/309487/, start at 1:01:00
Air France – KLM is at the forefront of bringing digital innovation in the airline sector. Guido Van Til, VP Digital Strategy at AF KLM, spoke about various examples of which I would like to highlight two.
Firstly, the airline is investing heavily in social media as a new way of communicating with its passengers. AF KLM connected Facebook Messenger to Salesforce Service Cloud, and can now answer customer questions (e.g. “Can I take a stroller on the plane?”), share e-tickets, and do upselling (e.g. seat upgrades). This has an amazing impact on customer satisfaction and ancillary sales.
Secondly, AF KLM is piloting an app to speed up the turn-around process of aircraft. The pilot, gate agent, cabin crew and TLO are connected through an iPad app. A shared checklist provides transparency on any emerging issues and enables rapid resolutions of blocking issues.
2. Traveller and Partner Communities at The Travel Corp
https://www.salesforce.com/video/309487/, start at 1:26:30
The Travel Corp (TTC) is a leading global travel organization, covering more than 25 brands such at Contiki Travel and Trafalgar. Jon Pickles, Global Director of 360-engagement, explained how the company is using Community Cloud to better connect with its customers and partners.
TTC has rolled out the “My Travel Space” community to connect with groups of customers in new ways and share travel documents electronically. For TTC, this implies firstly more than $100,000 in annual cost-savings in printing costs and – more importantly – a great channel to get closer to the customers and deeply personalise marketing.
In addition, TTC implemented a “Tour Director” app to manage its complex network of 650 partners on more than 3,500 tours. Through this Community, TTC can process last minute changes to the itinerary and address any customer concerns, queries or feedback to help increase customer advocacy for TTC brands.
3. Pullmantur Cruises’ Commercial Transformation
https://www.salesforce.com/video/309487/, start at 35:30
Pullmantur is a Spanish cruise line serving over 450,000 guests per year with four vessels. Javier Alonso, Director of the Transformation PMO, spoke about their “Commercial Transformation” to significantly increase revenue, with Sales, Service and Marketing Cloud at the heart of it.
Firstly, Javier explained how the B2B sales team is now focusing on the right customers to realize a 10% like-for-like growth. Pullmantur is using better segmentation of the 10,000 points-of-sale, introduced different commercial models and implemented more effective incentives.
Secondly, Pullmantur turned the call centre into a ‘machine to sell’, boosting B2C sales from 2 to 10%, and significantly improved efficiency by moving from 17 apps to 1 console (Service Cloud). Finally, the cruise line improved marketing activities by deeply customizing the journeys.
4. KUKA’s Approach to Industry 4.0
https://www.salesforce.com/video/302497/
KUKA is a German robotics company providing, amongst other products, robots for car manufacturing. With a throughput of one car every 71 seconds, up time and efficiency in manufacturing is an important strategic concern as it costs over $1,000 per second – an issue that is similar to asset-intensive airlines and freight forwarders.
KUKA is investing heavily in "Industry 4.0” levers, where the Internet of Things, big data and artificial intelligence play a vital role. At this stage, KUKA is collecting input data in real-time from all of its robots using IoT Cloud, and analysing the state of each robot to detect or predict faults. In case of any deviations, the robot provides a “Chatter” message to the Account Manager, who can then update the customer. It also automatically creates a case, suggests ideas on how to solve the issue and escalates it to a field service engineer. Clearly, this idea can easily be translated to predictive aircraft engine maintenance and refrigerated transportation.
5. B2B Customer-Centricity at DHL
https://www.salesforce.com/video/309487/, start at 16:16
Stefanos Korakas, Head of CRM & Marketing Development at DHL, spoke about how DHL is driving customer-centricity through technology. Getting a snapshot of the company’s interactions with one customer, across multiple systems, across all business units, was very challenging and time consuming.
DHL created a “one-stop shop” for all customer data using Sales Cloud, easily bringing together critical customer information in one view. The Salesforce1 app provides mobile capability to the sales team. The results were amazing: <2% out-dated opportunities (down from 10%+), 91% user satisfaction, >70% of users logging in multiple times a week. As next steps, DHL is exploring Marketing Cloud and, in the medium term, Artificial Intelligence.
6. Facebook Messenger (and AI) for Delivery Updates at Crock-Pot
https://youtu.be/4RKphptG5d8?t=23m
Crock-Pot, manufacturer of cooking appliances, now shares delivery updates to its customers over Facebook Messenger, such as the estimated time of arrival of the new pot. Customers are encouraged to ask questions (e.g. “My Crock-Pot was damaged. What do I do?”). In the backend, Artificial Intelligence is able to process a majority of the requests, reducing the burden on the service centre.
This is a great example that can be implemented by most parcel delivery companies to have better “track-and-trace” functionality.
7. Artificial Intelligence in Sales at Amazon Web Services
https://youtu.be/ppMusUznzqs?t=28m
William Moxley, SVP Product Management of Sales Cloud, showed a vision of how Amazon Web Services (AWS) could extend the use of Sales Cloud using Einstein analytics. While the use case is not yet live, it did show a number of interesting insights as a concrete example of Artificial Intelligence.
Einstein will use data on the platform (e.g., CRM, email, calendar, social) to learn how to sell smarter and faster. It can show “predictive lead scores” to identify the best leads with intelligent scoring based on machine learning, which allows the Amazon sales staff to increase their win rates. In addition, “opportunity insights” will discover buying signals and recommend next best actions. This will help to ensure opportunities get closed faster.
Find out more
Interested to find out more? Please explore recordings of all the Dreamforce sessions, or come and meet us in person at on one of upcoming Salesforce World Tours or Essentials events in the coming months.
If you would like to know more about the role of AI in travel, have a look my recent article How AI Can Empower Airlines to Connect Better With Their Customers.
