Growing a business is always a journey. And if you want that journey to be a successful one, you need to keep meeting your customers’ expectations – every step of the way.
But keeping pace can be far from easy. Indeed, as customers demand ever smoother, more personalised experiences, 58% of SMB leaders admit that meeting those expectations makes growth difficult.
It’s a challenge that Salesforce Regional Sales Director Denise Wyer explored in her session at Salesforce World Tour London 2019 – with the help of disguise, the trailblazing brand behind some of the world’s most spectacular live events.
Meet disguise – a brand delivering ‘star quality’ customer experiences
disguise is the fast-growing company behind some of the world’s biggest shows. It creates the software and hardware that lets show creators put on amazing live experiences – like Beyoncé’s Formation World Tour, the Circle of Light Moscow International Festival, and this year’s Eurovision Song Contest.
The company sees customer engagement as the key to growing its business. They're using the Salesforce Customer Success Platform to bring together Marketing, Sales, Service and AI to deliver that engagement at scale.
“We are committed to bringing our customers’ visions to life,” says disguise CMO Christian Vaughan. “With Salesforce, we can enable creatives and technologists to wow the crowd at every show and make it easier for our customers to do business with us.”
Christian let the crowd in on the company’s future plans with Salesforce, saying “We’re just embarking on the creation of a community portal, where our customers will be able to share challenges and ideas. We’re constantly looking at how we can improve the customer journey at every point.”
Christian was also joined at World Tour by his marketing colleague, Sagar Shah, and they shared some of their thoughts around driving customer experience and marketing ROI in this short video interview.
What does that look like in practice?
Here is a typical journey a disguise customer may go through... Take our fictional show creative, Maria.
- Maria’s journey starts when researching the tech she needs to take her artist’s next tour to a whole new level.
- Pardot sends an email encouraging her to register for a local tradeshow. Then another, a little while later, as a gentle reminder.
- Maria signs up, and her account manager is automatically notified
- Maria’s attendance is logged in Salesforce, which disguise is using to track the tradeshow’s ROI, and the opportunity is handed on to Sales.
- The rep who contacts Maria can see her entire history with the company, from the show she’s just attended, to the equipment she’s previously bought or rented.
- While he’s talking her through her needs, Salesforce Einstein – our built-in AI – is analysing every aspect of the opportunity. It suggests that everyone would be better off if Maria bought the equipment through a local partner.
- A few weeks later, it’s rehearsal time – and Maria’s struggling to set up her massive video projection. When she phones up the disguise support team, the agent she speaks to can see all the equipment she’s just bought.
- Even better, Einstein quickly surfaces the knowledge article they need to walk Maria through using it.
Let’s take a closer look at some of the Salesforce solutions supporting Maria’s experience.
Drive prospect engagement
Surpassing customer experience expectations means personalising your communications from the get-go. With Pardot, you can create nurture journeys that serve prospects relevant content at the right moment.
You might have one journey for leads you’ve captured through a trade show, one for those who engaged with your recent webinar – and even one to nurture seemingly dead leads back to life over time.
Boost sales rep productivity
Your customers don’t think of your business as a collection of functional teams. They think of your business as a single brand. So once you’ve carefully nurtured those leads, the hand-off to Sales has to be seamless.
Take full advantage of the Salesforce Customer Success Platform, and your sales team will be able to see the journey each lead has taken – with dashboards customised according to their job role. You can also create a sales path in Sales Cloud, to help make sure every rep follows your process.
Keep customers happy
Just like sales reps, service agents need to see the full picture to do their best work – including whether customers have any ongoing conversations with Sales and Marketing.
They also need a simple, centralised way to respond across the tens of channels customers now use to get in touch with brands. And that’s where Service Cloud comes in, improving agent productivity, reducing response and resolution time, and letting you deflect simple enquiries (think password resets, etc.) to self-service resources.
Take advantage of AI
Only 45% of UK SMB leaders think their business is ready for Artificial Intelligence. But AI can be a powerful tool for a growing business – helping you orchestrate marketing, prioritise sales leads, handle mundane service requests, and generally scale up operations without increasing headcount.
And Salesforce Einstein makes it simple, seamlessly embedding AI into every function of your business.
Ready to innovate and grow?
We believe that successful, sustainable business growth depends on putting the customer, and their experience, first – just like disguise has. You can find out more about growing your business at our dedicated site for small-medium businesses.
