Advanced Communities is keeping its streak of hosting webinars this year. On September 12th, 2024, we had the pleasure of sharing a Zoom session with the industry front-runners: Salesforce and Fionta.
The speaker board consisted of Basil Tilmon from Salesforce, Jenifer Alonzo from Fionta, and Rebekah Hunter from Advanced Communities. During a one-hour session, they guided our webinar attendees perfectly through the ways an organization can use Salesforce as an association management system (AMS) and why they might need an implementation partner for that.
For your convenience, we’ve put together this webinar recap with all the key moments from the event. If you’d like to jump to the original 1-hour video, here’s your cue!
Salesforce for Member Organizations
Associations face similar challenges and priorities, such as enhancing member experiences, connecting disparate systems, creating efficiencies, and growing membership. Technology is changing the way associations operate, and Salesforce is excited to be a part of that.
Currently, many associations struggle with disparate systems that prevent effective member engagement and internal collaboration. Salesforce can solve this problem by connecting all aspects of the organization, including member experience, marketing, analytics, revenue streams, ticketing, and operations.
The Power of Salesforce Customer 360
Salesforce Customer 360 covers all sorts of industries, including nonprofit. The tools included in the Customer 360 program apply to everything that Salesforce does, from membership sales to delivering customer service to communicating through marketing tools.
How the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud Helps Membership Associations
As Basil has rightfully put it, Salesforce helps associations and membership organizations improve their customer service and communication through marketing tools. He highlighted the power of the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud in providing a connected member experience, delivering a handful of priorities and offbeat opportunities.
Such an ultimate approach provides organizations with more efficiencies in addition to having the ability to create new automation and new workflows that do more with what they have because the silos are gone.
What’s more, the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud provides a modern and secure platform that is constantly innovated upon through regular technology releases. It offers interoperability and integration to create a total view of members and their interactions with the organization. This enables the use of automation and artificial intelligence (both predictive and general AI) features to personalize and enhance the member experience.
The Nonprofit Cloud helps associations manage their membership by unifying and protecting data, enriching it through collaboration tools (such as Chatter and Slack), and tailoring communications to individual members. This leads to better engagement and allows employees to spend more time connecting with members.
In addition, the Nonprofit Cloud helps organizations build relationships that drive change across all of the different categories of your potential members:
New members – accelerate the acquisition
Existing members – deepen loyalty and engagement
Inactive members – re-engage inactive members
Community members – activate community
What Results Does the Nonprofit Cloud Bring?
Using the Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud isn’t just going to bring you elusive results. Basil has shared the numbers with the audience. Based on them, the Nonprofit Cloud:
Boosts time to execute new strategies by 21%
Increases member satisfaction by 33%
Increases retention by 27%
Decreases costs to acquire new members by 17%
Fionta’s Implementation Overview
Being a Salesforce consulting partner, Fionta has already served 1200+ nonprofit and association clients since 2001. The company takes a consultative approach to its work with customers and ensures every one of them is heard every step of their journey.
According to Jenifer, Fionta wants to hear from their clients about where they want to be rather than telling them where they should be, and then use their expertise to help them get there using Salesforce and AC tools.
Note!
Jump to 20:49 of the webinar recording to hear the full story of Fionta’s consulting evolution and team experience.
As part of the company’s consultative approach, there is a discovery stage. It’s needed to understand the main problems that a client has to work on and for that, Fionta usually holds a survey. This shows which features or areas are of interest to the client. Thanks to the survey, Fionta clearly identifies the client’s business units and personas. Lastly, they bring it all together to start the implementation works.
After the team’s assignment and discovery stage, there is a design part. Here, Fionta provides a customer with a summary of requirements and definitive assumptions of the project. Jenifer has also walked us through an example of the custom data migration process Fionta generally executes.
AC MemberSmart Overview and Live Demo
Advanced Communities is the team of Salesforce and Experience Cloud specialists who build class-leading Salesforce portals. Our expertise encompasses nonprofit and commercial organizations, including the development of comprehensive partner portals with Salesforce, Experience Cloud, and our apps.
AC MemberSmart is a membership management tool that allows organizations to manage their members to the best extent. Features included in the package are events, member directories, ecommerce tools, donations, fundraising, job boards, and continuous professional development specks.
AC MemberSmart has a user-friendly interface and is highly customizable to meet the specific needs of each organization. With the tool, organizations can create different membership levels and set up pricing structures based on the features and benefits offered to members.
Note!
Watch how the AC team has helped our customer – the African American Alliance of CDFI CEOs – to develop a well-oiled member directory, implement communities, custom design, and other useful features for member management. The success story starts at 34:37 in the webinar recap. Following up, there is a live AC MemberSmart demo presented by Rebekah Hunter. Please watch it at 41:10. Lastly, watch the Q&A part which is available at 56:10.
We Appreciate Your Interest!
Thank you for manifesting your interest in our webinar on unlocking membership success with Salesforce! We continue working on other massive sessions coming later on. Meanwhile, you can check out other events the AC is about to attend autumn of 2024 here and catch up with us. Stay tuned and see you next time.
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Have you recently attended an information-packed webinar? Think of your experience right from the get-go: how you found out about the event, how the promotion lasted, and how it went all along. It may occur to someone that arranging this stuff is a no-brainer. But…
Virtual event management entails a thorough preparation, involving event planning, event promotion, and post-event tasks. Keep reading to see how you can plan your online events in Salesforce without turning a hair and what you might require for success.
What is Virtual Event Management in Salesforce?
Managing virtual events is the activities you perform to make your online event flawless. It’s how you prepare to declare your thoughts or the ones from other subject-matter experts online. Why is it convenient to plan virtual events in Salesforce? All your data stays connected and flocks down to the unified storehouse – your CRM. Thus, you can manage all aspects of your event, from registration and ticketing to marketing and attendee engagement. No more multiple tools and chaotic planning.
Types of Virtual Events in Salesforce
When it comes to choosing the type of virtual event, there is a risk of being swamped. Without further ado, here is the list of the most common virtual events.
Webinars: being the most widespread type, webinars generally last from 45 to 80 minutes on average. They can be fee-based, but the rule of thumb is that they are completely free with an opt-in condition. Such virtual events let you hold a Q&A time, record the session, send it on-demand, and use it for further marketing purposes. To make the sessions more human, consider streaming both a slide deck and a speaker’s face during the event. This adds a friendly touch. The following screenshot is from our LinkedIn Live webinar on running events with Salesforce and Advanced Communities that we hosted together with Salesforce Ben this year.
Virtual conference: you may think that in-person events and virtual conferences are alike. They do have lots in common like keynote presentations, speakers, agendas, breakouts, etc. But the thing is that such virtual events don’t offer as many networking opportunities and lead capture insights as an in-person event does. Salesforce streams a dime a dozen online conferences every month on its Salesforce+ streaming channel. Dreamforce is one of the examples and by the way, the Advanced Communities team is visiting it this year, too.
Internal hybrid events: internal events and company-wide gatherings might not be the case for you if your teams are scattered across the globe. This is when internal hybrid events are your safest bet. Team training, department meetings, team building, and everything in between are not only time-effective but convenient for every party involved.
External hybrid events: these virtual events are arranged for people outside of your company. These can be industry conferences, organization reports, etc. One crucial thing to remember about external hybrid events is that you should make sure the video is high quality because even people on the other end of the screen should feel present.
Virtual exhibitions: event planning takes new features when it comes to exhibitions, museums, galleries, and other virtual events alike. You have to work wonders with presentations, visuals, or even guests invited. Locate additional cameras next to the expositions for enhanced presence or have specially trained guides or other staff members carry out mini-demos about them. Everything should be aimed at delivering the ultimate customer experience as if people are actually visiting the exhibitions.
How to Plan Virtual Events in Salesforce: 4-Step Instruction
How can you do everything right and minimize the risk of a mistake? Here is your go-to plan:
1. Create a Virtual Event Concept
Before we plunge deeper into managing a virtual event, let’s outline the following. You shouldn’t plan a virtual event the way you do physical events. Event organizers tend to paint all the virtual events with the same brush, forgetting that an in-person event has its own set of rules, from a visual setting to promotion. So if you want to organize a successful virtual event, answer the following questions first:
Who is the event for?
When will you run the event?
What will the event sell/promote/encourage?
What metrics should you gauge during and after the event?
Is there a CTA that you can track afterward? Are there any materials like an ebook that you would like to share during the session?
What will your plan be if the event goes south?
Don’t shrug off seasonal holidays and special dates as they might affect attendance. For instance, the summer season might pose a problem while potential attendees might have a time off.
Similarly, late December and early January aren’t the best months for a virtual conference. The reason is simple: the year is wrapping up and another one is just getting started, making the plans of the visitors adjust.
2. Select an Event Management Tool
Online meetings can’t run without proper virtual event technology. Luckily, Salesforce doesn’t lack robust functionality that would help you make a successful virtual event. So next time you are about to decide on the app for Salesforce event management, it’s paramount to consider several elements it should cover (by the way, following the link, you can download our exclusive AC Events Enterprise product sheet and uncover how it can accomplish your virtual event planning):
Fully customizable event pages that you can design and sell tickets through it;
Free compatibility with video conferencing tools like YouTube, Vimeo, etc.;
In-built marketing automation for promoting the event to the best extent;
Hassle-free event creation;
Ability to create recurring events without numerous duplicates and unnecessary information;
Pre-built reports and dashboards so that you can manage real-time metrics and store data within your Salesforce CRM.
AC Events Enterprise by Advanced Communities obtains all these elements and more. Thanks to the event technology our package is made with, you can create a virtual event on Experience Cloud seamlessly, using the Event Creation Wizard, customize an event page (we’ll discuss it further), and scrutinize reports.
Creating virtual events that resonate with your audience and achieve all the business objectives sounds back-breaking. Event planners often turn a blind eye to the whole preparation, just setting the date and topic for the event and calling it a night. That’s only the tip of it: you have to concentrate on crafting a compelling content strategy.
Utilize Salesforce Digital Experiences: with all the Salesforce event technology and other massive potential, you can create private or public Salesforce communities for attendees to connect, discuss topics related to an event, and ignite the excitement. This is the example of how you can present the Events tab on your Experience Cloud site:
Develop a personalized agenda: use the Salesforce AI suite and data analytics to segment event attendees based on their interests and tailor the agenda accordingly. Add speaker info, keynotes, sessions, sponsors, etc. Here’s the agenda created within the AC Events Enterprise package for Experience Cloud: this is the plan we have for our upcoming webinar happening September 12th.
Sprinkle your marketing magic: where would all the events end up without marketing, right? My point is that you have to send email invitations, reminders, pre- and post-event follow-ups for better reach. Plus, promote your virtual events on social media with an event hashtag, share speaker bios, and provide registration links.
Practice the event routine beforehand: this does help! I wouldn’t mention this step if we at Advanced Communities didn’t follow it as well. Have special dry runs before an event so that the speakers feel confident on day X and you can minimize unexpected scenarios.
Shoot video invitations: as easy as it gets, you can ask event speakers to make a 1-minute clip, inviting folks to your session. First, visuals are more digestible than a wall of text. Second, a video can be easily spotted on social media feeds and get reposted. To plant an idea in your head, here is how Rebekah Hunter presented her video invitation on our recent idea management webinar:
4. Design an Event Microsite
Just like in-person events, virtual ones, too, require a separate event page or a microsite, where all the key details are pointed out. If you run an Experience Cloud site, you can kill two birds with one stone (actually, more but you get the gist):
Create a dedicated event page, adding such key data about your meeting as general data, images, agenda with an hourly schedule, speakers/subject matter experts, sponsors, etc. They will be seen on the site as separate tabs. Plus, you can insert CTAs for register or visiting your main company website;
Use your membership management software to assemble a perfect place where your event attendees can gather and be the first ones to find out about the planned events. If your software allows, you can also generate reports based on data including top-visited events, top revenue events, and so much more.
The Ultimate Virtual Events Checklist
Start with the concept, proceed with the content
Adopt an event management app like AC Events Enterprise to reach your goals
Design an event page for your Experience Cloud site
Be creative with promotion and marketing
Final Thoughts
Virtual event management isn’t ball and chain if it’s executed wisely. Keep these things in your mind while event planning and the success won’t be long in coming: put together a steady plan for the event, outline the content beforehand, and have a contingency plan if need be. If you need help with virtual event planning, you can reach out to Advanced Communities and we’ll help you plan your virtual event with our finest expertise in the industry.
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Q&A
What is Virtual Event Planning?
Planing a virtual event involves different activities from discussing an event agenda with speakers to designing promo materials in sync with a marketing department. It is also about staffing, hosting, and choosing the right virtual event technology.
How Much does It Cost to Have Virtual Events?
The most exciting thing is that virtual event planning often doesn’t cost a thing. Of course, under one condition: the event programme doesn’t imply otherwise. Online event planning might be completely free for you if you use such platforms as Zoom or Google Meet. You can also use paid advertising platforms to promote your event. However, this might not be your safest bet if you are on a budget. One of the most obvious things that might result in fees is speaker expenses, virtual booths, or pre- and post-event materials.
What does a Virtual Event Manager do?
A virtual event planner or a manager, if you will, takes full responsibility for planning, organizing, and executing online gatherings. The role encompasses such tasks as event conceptualization, platform selection, content development, marketing & promotion, attendee management, technical support, and post-event analysis. Everything an event manager does is aimed at ensuring a seamless and impactful experience for both attendees and a company.
What Makes a Successful Virtual Event?
A successful virtual event is the one that reaches all the goals set and provides positive attendee engagement. Among the factors that mark an event a success, there are 1) engaging content – it should be relevant, informative, and interactive, 2) high technical ground – virtual event planning can go without a user-friendly platform, high-quality audio & video, and a quick troubleshooting plan, if something goes awry, 3) auspicious marketing & promotion – you should reach the target audience with segmented newsletters, regular social media posts, and clear communication, 4) measurable results – make sure you set perfect goals during virtual event planning, measure key metrics (attendance rate, event ROI, and others), and use data to unveil areas for improvement.
What is the Downside of Virtual Events?
Virtual events might present a number of drawbacks to companies. First, there are technical challenges you might need to battle. The Internet connection issues, platform crashes, or audio/video quality problems. Second, virtual events don’t always deliver networking possibilities for the audience as in-person events. Third, such events aren’t always accessible and pose a problem for those who need special treatment. Fourth, different time zones may become a barrier for coordinating online events as they limit attendance.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been making waves worldwide in recent months, with groundbreaking developments in the field capturing the attention of professionals across various industries. One such development that has caused a stir is the release of ChatGPT, a cutting-edge language model that has taken the tech world by storm. This has profoundly impacted businesses relying on Salesforce for customer relationship management (CRM) needs.
In March of 2023, the Salesforce CRM technology was topped up with the latest AI tool, Einstein GPT, which promised to revolutionize how companies interact with their customers. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what Salesforce Einstein GPT is, how it can benefit teams across various industries, and how customer behavior can alter because of it.
TL;DR
Einstein GPT is a groundbreaking AI technology, built specifically for the Salesforce CRM platform. The tool has seamless integration with all the major Salesforce Clouds and is famous for its natural language prompts. This GPT model can help businesses generate pinpoint, targeted content for miscellaneous purposes in marketing, sales, service, or programming. Thus, it can perfect customer interactions, unburden customer service teams, ease the lives of developers, and do so much more.
Besides, there are five common Einstein GPT products that you can use in various departments: Einstein GPT for Sales, Einstein GPT for Marketing, Einstein GPT for Service, Einstein GPT for Developers, Einstein GPT for Slack, and Einstein for Flow.
What is the Einstein GPT All About?
Salesforce promotes Einstein GPT as the world’s first generative AI tool for CRM. Built on the GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture and integrated into all of Salesforce Clouds as well as Tableau, MuleSoft, and Slack, Einstein GPT is capable of generating natural language responses to customer queries, creating personalized content, and even drafting entire email messages on behalf of sales representatives.
Einstein GPT is designed with a seamless CRM integration in mind, with the ability to fine-tune the model for specific industries, use cases, customer feedback, and needs. This makes it an incredibly versatile tool that can provide significant value to businesses of all sizes and industries.
Salesforce AI Einstein GPT aims to:
Help businesses using Salesforce CRM to deliver more personalized customer experience to their customers.
Boost teams’ productivity with generative AI by having the work done faster.
Improve customer engagement by leveraging the power of custom predictions and producing content tailored to specific demand.
Help connect with customers in a more intelligent, automated, and personalized way.
Make smart business decisions by getting automated insights for the entire organization using Salesforce data analytics products such as Tableau.
Why does Salesforce Claim Einstein GPT is even Better than Einstein AI?
Einstein GPT is the latest iteration of Salesforce’s Einstein artificial intelligence technology, which is already responsible for generating over 200 billion AI-powered predictions daily across the Customer 360 platform.
One of the most exciting features of Einstein GPT is its ability to combine proprietary Einstein AI models with ChatGPT and other leading large language models, allowing users to interact with CRM data using natural language prompts. This, in turn, enables the creation of highly personalized, AI-generated content and triggers powerful, time-saving automations that can help streamline workflows and improve productivity. By leveraging the power of both Einstein generative AI and GPT technology, businesses can unlock new levels of efficiency and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Einstein GPT and Einstein AI differ in several key ways:
Architecture. Einstein GPT is based on the GPT-3 architecture, which is specifically designed for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, while Einstein AI is a more general-purpose AI technology.
Focus. Salesforce Einstein bot GPT is primarily focused on generating natural language responses and content, while Einstein AI is focused on predictive analytics and machine learning.
Integration. Einstein GPT is designed to be integrated with other AI technologies, including OpenAI, to provide users with even more advanced generative AI capabilities, while Einstein AI is largely a standalone technology.
Features of Einstein GPT in Salesforce CRM
Salesforce Einstein chatbot GPT features & capabilities:
Through generative AI, Einstein GPT enables the creation of personalized content across all Salesforce cloud services resulting in more productive employees and better customer experiences.
Einstein GPT is highly customizable and extensible, with support for both public and private AI models that are purpose-built for CRM and trained on trusted, real-time data.
The integration of Einstein GPT with OpenAI provides Salesforce customers with powerful generative AI capabilities right out of the box.
The ChatGPT app for Slack uses advanced AI technology from OpenAI to deliver instant conversation summaries, research tools, and writing assistance to users.
How GPT Einstein for Salesforce Helps Different Teams
Einstein GPT can be used in a variety of ways to improve business operations and cultivate stronger customer relationships. For instance, it can create customized email messages for sales teams to send to clients, provide prompt responses for customer service representatives to quickly address customer queries, generate tailored content for marketing campaigns to increase engagement rates, and even automatically generate code for software developers which can improve developer productivity. With these capabilities, Einstein GPT can help businesses streamline their processes, enhance customer engagement, and ultimately drive growth and success.
Sales teams. Einstein GPT for sales helps to sell smarter and close the deals faster while automating and personalizing sales tasks like composing emails, scheduling meetings, auto generate sales tasks, and preparing for the next interaction.
Service teams. Einstein GPT for service empowers agents to be more productive on digital channels and deliver faster, more personalized service by auto-generating personalized agent chat replies to increase customer satisfaction. Plus, Salesforce Einstein GPT can create AI-powered conversation summaries, which can be used for your further service activities.
Marketing teams. Einstein GPT can help marketing teams to be more efficient by generating targeted content, building and automating email campaigns, enhancing mobile messaging, personalizing advertising across channels, and many more.
Commerce teams. GPT Einstein platform AI tool helps commerce teams to grow business faster with intelligent product recommendations, tailored product sorting, and meaningful search results.
Developers teams. Einstein GPT supports developers by letting them generate code and ask questions for languages like Apex.
What is AI Cloud for Einstein GPT?
The AI Cloud for Einstein GPT lets users to integrate the generative AI best practices across the Salesforce CRM and its entire Salesforce Cloud ecosystem. Thus, Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Sales Cloud, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be optimized for greater performance with real-time and trusted generative AI.
With the presence of such AI models and this cloud in particular, Salesforce is a perfect place for keeping your data private. The security is boosted with Einstein GPT Trust Layer and Salesforce Data Cloud (more on that in a minute).
What are Six AI-powered Einstein GPT Products?
Salesforce provides a range of AI-fuelled products that are supposed to change customer experience for the better. The first one is Einstein GPT for Sales. This solution helps businesses automate routine tasks like email drafting or report generation, get AI insights on customer data, and improve sales outcomes.
Number two is Einstein GPT for Marketing. With its help, you can create targeted content for various marketing channels, optimize your strategy, and offer personalized customer journeys.
The third product is Einstein GPT for Service, with the ability to automate customer inquiries, automate case management, and analyze customer sentiment.
Number four is Einstein GPT for Developers. Having troubles generating a code snippet and, as a result, get stagnant development? Leave to Einstein. Besides, you can debug your work efficiently by letting Einstein identify and resolve coding errors.
Number five is Einstein for Flow. Thanks to this tool, you can design workflows based on a single text prompt. Simply put, you can describe the task to an AI chat assistant and receive a perfectly handled flow with all the details specified. What the Einstein for Flow will do is generate a special code instruction and you will see the end result depicted.
Last but not least is Einstein GPT for Slack with its conversation summaries and response generation. Such tool reduces manual error, drives greater outcomes, and improves the business bottom line.
Salesforce Einstein Copilot
Being a hit at the Dreamforce conference 2023, Einstein Copilot was first announced as an early prototype. In 2024, it went from the public beta launch to the general availability.
What is its hallmark feature? Einstein Copilot can shoot natural language prompts directly, which streamlines and eases customer interactions. Thanks to the AI-powered customer insights, your team can boost customer satisfaction, get work done in mere minutes using intelligent actions, and deploy conversational AI with trust.
What’s more, Einstein Copilot can help employees finish tasks faster by creating prompt templates that summarize and provide AI-generated content with clicks. You can create more relevant prompts to your business data from Salesforce CRM, Data Cloud, and external sources to polish every business task. The most exciting thing is that you can build prompts once and reuse them everywhere in Einstein Copilot, Lightning pages, and flows.
Einstein GPT Trust Layer
It’s often the case that a generative AI technology is used insecurely. To guarantee the secure and responsible use of generative AI with Salesforce, the company presented Einstein GPT Trust Layer. The framework provides a feature set that guards your CRM data, boosts the safety and accuracy of AI generated content, and declares the reponsible use of generative AI.
As for the key features this solution layer offers, there are:
Data masking – before sending sensitive information to AI, the system masks or redacts it which protects company’s customer data;
Toxicity detection – as the guardian for your data, the Salesforce’s AI technology, namely Einstein trust layer helps prevent the generation of harmful and offensive content;
Zero data retention – are you afraid of your data being stolen? Don’t be! Salesforce’s private AI models together with Salesforce Einstein GPT Trust Layer are designed in the way that doesn’t allow them to retain any of your info. This makes it private and secure.
Dynamic insights – thanks to a grounding data analysis from the Salesforce platform, the system allows you to provide AI prompts with context about your company.
Integration with Salesforce Data Cloud
Salesforce Data Cloud is a cloud-based data management system empowered with out-of-the-box connectors that bring in data from any source, including Salesforce applications, mobile, web, connected devices, and even from legacy systems with MuleSoft, in real time.
Data Cloud uses customer data to create a single, dynamic source of truth – the real-time customer graph that can be activated across the entire Customer 360 platform, enabling personalized experiences for customers. Data Cloud’s real-time data enables more powerful automation with Salesforce Flow and more intelligence with Einstein, all built on the trusted infrastructure of Hyperforce.
The result is an automated, intelligent, and real-time Customer 360 that can help companies save time and money while driving revenue growth.
Einstein GPT uses unified customer data profiles from the Salesforce Data Cloud to make every business-customer interaction personalized and effective at every step of the customer journey.
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Among the Einstein GPT products, you can see Einstein GPT for Sales, Einstein GPT for Marketing, Einstein GPT for Service, Einstein GPT for Developers, Einstein GPT for Slack, and Einstein for Flow. All of them serve as a stand-alone unit and help you overcome numerous daily tasks, from sending an automated follow-up email after a deal to debug a code snippet. Besides, it can help you design workflows even if you have zero programming skills: just write everything you need in simple words and let Einstein do the rest. So they are worth a try!
Can Einstein GPT be used for Experience Cloud sites?
At the moment, Einstein GPT delivers AI-created content across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction, but can’t be used for Salesforce PRM portals or other Experience Cloud sites.
What is ChatGPT App for Slack?
The ChatGPT for Slack app, developed by OpenAI, seamlessly incorporates advanced AI technology to instantly provide users with numerous benefits. Thus, the app can generate conversation recaps to quickly catch up on everything, find research tools to beef up their expertise on different matters, and seek writing assistance directly within Slack, enabling countless businesses to increase their efficiency.
What can Einstein GPT do?
Einstein GPT can dynamically generate personalized content, emails, generate knowledge articles as part of the Einstein for Service tool, create specific responses to customer inquiries, design workflows based on a single text prompt, perform data analysis and visualize it, design targeted content for marketers, and even auto-generate code for developers. The capabilities are miscellaneous!
It’s right there in the name: if delivered the right way, an unforgettable customer experience will work its magic. How can your business do the same using Salesforce? The platform has various tools to help you understand customer behavior and deliver personalized customer engagement. One of these tools is Salesforce Customer 360.
Simply put, Salesforce Customer 360 takes after a revolutionary customer relationship management (CRM) platform that provides a single view of the customer across all touchpoints. But you shouldn’t mix these two notions (we’ll explain more in a minute). Keep reading to find out all the benefits and challenges you can expect from implementing Customer 360.
What is Salesforce Customer 360?
Salesforce Customer 360 is a special technology and a customer data management platform that helps businesses connect with clients and optimize business processes at every step of the customer journey, providing personalized experiences and enhancing customer satisfaction.
It unites your marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT departments, allowing them to collaborate seamlessly and achieve greater productivity, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness.
How Does it Work?
To lay our finger on the whole idea, let’s imagine a possible situation. A user is navigating an online cosmetics shop. They then top up their cart, fill in all their customer data (email, phone, even occupation details), and eventually sign up for the shop’s newsletter.
Here is when the shop’s sales team steps in.
Thanks to the integrated CRM platform the shop adopted, sales and customer service teams know the customer’s name, occupation, and preferences. This is what Salesforce Customer 360 is about. With data integration from multiple sources, Salesforce Customer 360 creates a single, unified view of the customer. It includes customer information, transaction history, engagement data, and more.
Having this data, businesses can gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs, using this information to tailor their marketing and sales efforts.
Salesforce Customer 360 Architecture
It’s a cloud-based solution that is highly scalable and secure. Unlike other software products that function as a single product, Customer 360 is a complete suite of Salesforce products, including Experience Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and more, all offering a range of features. Traditional software products work independently to collect and use data for specific departments.
With Salesforce Customer 360, sales, marketing, service, commerce, and IT teams can connect and access unified data. This shared data structure enables different teams to use the data according to their use cases and take further steps accordingly.
The clouds we discussed above aren’t the only ones that come with Customer 360. Among them, you can also find Salesforce apps and other integrated products such as Salesforce Tableau Analytics – a data visualization tool and predictive analysis, MuleSoft – used for automation of IT processes and API integrations, and Slack – used for better customer communication, app integration, and so on.
Salesforce Customer 360 Features
Salesforce Customer 360 offers a wide range of features designed to improve customer engagement and drive business growth.
These include customer data management, segmentation, personalization, marketing automation, sales forecasting, and more.
The platform also incorporates AI-powered tools that enable businesses to automate routine tasks. Let’s look closer at three main features.
Unified Data and Improved Consent Process
Salesforce Customer 360’s greatest strength lies in consent management and its ability to unify data.
With this solution, businesses can collect data and gain insights into their customers to create a comprehensive profile of their preferences and behavior. You can manage customer data in the form of cookies for first-party members, whether known or unknown.
With the framework’s consent received, the business can give their employees access to this information to help them make better-informed decisions.
AI-powered Einstein Analytics
Salesforce has already become an association for all things AI. Its Customer 360 product isn’t an exception to the rule. By leveraging artificial intelligence, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of consumer behavior and develop better relationships with their customers.
For instance, AI algorithms can analyze what ads users have clicked on, and what products they usually buy, as well as information from customer profiles so they can make personalized product recommendations to customers.
Personalization Options
Use client data to create a personalized customer experience. The thing is that personalized engagement is crucial in closing more deals as it focuses on the specific problems or challenges that customers face and the solutions they seek.
For instance, if a customer segment purchases products in a specific category, like kids’ items, sales reps can offer discounts on this product category to encourage them to complete the purchase. This personalized engagement can lead to higher conversion rates and increased customer satisfaction, ultimately benefiting the business.
Salesforce Customer 360: Key Benefits
Sure thing, Customer 360 brings excellent advantages. Everything from better employee efficiency to higher revenue counts. But is there anything more to the story? Of course, there is! We connect all the dots and break down the main Customer 360 benefits right here, so dive in.
Improved Employee Productivity
If you decide to opt for Customer 360, be ready to unburden your team. The platform takes the guesswork out of the collaboration between the company’s departments, minimizes data silos, and automates a dime a dozen of routine tasks.
Scalability
Customer 360 represents a scalable platform which means it grows as your business does. For instance, your value proposition has just been topped up with additional products or services. That has led to new hires, more interested customers, and more data. With Customer 360, you can forget about processing this info manually: it accommodates increasing client and data volumes.
Reduced Churn Rate
We have already talked about the personalization options that Customer 360 provides. This is directly connected to the next benefit – reduced churn rates and better retention. Thanks to the personalized approach you can take with this platform, your clients will get a tailored experience. For instance, a business using Customer 360 can detect that a client is at risk of churning based on the purchase history and engagement levels. Consequently, they can be proactive to retain that customer (suggest a special discount at the very least).
Higher Revenue
Struggling with upselling and cross-selling? Customer 360 can help you address this problem. Thanks to a unified customer view, a business can identify opportunities to offer additional products or services. Where’s the catch? It’s based on the customer’s preferences and behavior. Let me elaborate on this one. If a customer has recently purchased a smartphone, your system that has Customer 360 integrated may offer a compatible case, a screen protector, or a headphone set. Easy!
Enhanced Customer Loyalty
The rule of thumb is that loyal customers are more likely to recommend a company to their friends and family. And it works not only for the Salesforce world! Anyway, that often brings about new customer acquisition and, of course, greater revenue streams. So why not use that with Customer 360? The scheme is as simple as ABC. You deliver a personalized customer experience, your customers are wowed by it, and, as a result, word-of-mouth marketing is activated.
Stronger Compliance
It’s all about GDPR or CCPA compliance now. Customer 360 helps organizations comply with these and other data privacy regulations. It can securely delete customer data when requested or required by law, support PIAs (Privacy Impact Assessments) by providing data insights and risk assessment, and implement role-based access controls that ensure that only authorized employees have access to sensitive customer data.
Competitive Edge
If implemented smartly, Customer 360 makes your business ready for any challenge on the market. It helps you adapt to the ever-changing conditions in the industry and customer preferences, without any additional calls.
What Makes Salesforce Customer 360 so Useful to Businesses?
As you can see, Salesforce Customer 360 offers a range of benefits to businesses, including personalized customer experiences, scalability, usability, unification, integration, collaboration, productivity, and customer satisfaction. Using customer data, the platform can help create tailored messaging and provide a single source of truth.
With a low code interface, it has a small learning curve and can be scaled up or down to meet the business needs. It connects teams using different capabilities, breaking down information silos and allows for more integrated customer engagement. Automated enablement and simplified data intake enhance sales rep productivity, leading to faster and more detailed responses to customers.
Which Teams Can Benefit from Salesforce Customer 360?
Isn’t it awesome having company’s customer data stored in one place? In fact, you can use it to your advantage in every department:
Marketing: you can create marketing campaigns and target your audience based on that data, leveraging the results for further activities. Your marketing teams will only thank you for that opportunity.
Sales: a sales team can enjoy Salesforce Customer 360 as well. While marketing automation tools can be a lifesaver for both marketing and sales, they can achieve more in combination with Salesforce Customer 360. Your sales crew can improve lead qualification thanks to a comprehensive overview of potential customer profiles, enhance customer engagement (which leads to higher conversion rates), and manage customer data for streamlined processes and task automation (for instance, for sending follow-ups after the deal).
Service: as Salesforce Customer 360 offers a complete picture of customer profiles, involving their journey, which provides quicker problem-solving. Plus, the Salesforce platform made it easy to deliver proactive support with Customer 360. Service teams can identify potential issues before they arise and come up with preventive solutions.
IT: do you know that Salesforce Customer 360 can help you simplify integrations? You can connect Customer 360 with other systems and apps for seamless workflows and better security when it comes to customer information.
Commerce: customers expect only relevant suggestions when they surf the company’s website and choose a product. Data integration in Salesforce Customer 360 allows you to market relevant, personalized recommendations based on your user preferences. Besides, you can improve retention and nurture loyalty with rewards, special gifts, discounts, and any other elements your marketing campaigns contain.
How Much Does Salesforce Customer 360 Cost?
The cost of Salesforce Customer 360 depends on the specific features and services that a business requires. Pricing is based on a subscription model and provides two primary options: Editions and Add-ons.
Editions includes packages of our most popular features, tailored to suit different business sizes and requirements.
Add-ons offer tiered functionality to customize your CRM solution, so you can select any products to help your organization get exactly what it needs. To learn more about our products and pricing, please visit the Salesforce Products Pricing page.
For nonprofit, education, or philanthropy organizations, Salesforce offers a special version of the integrated CRM platform, and other reduced or no-cost solutions, through salesforce.org.
The Potential Challenges Businesses Face Implementing Salesforce Customer 360
No doubt that Customer 360 delivers significant advantages for companies striving to shape unforgettable and consolidated customer experience. However, it’s not a bed of roses. Let’s break down some common implementation challenges:
Data quality and consistency issues may become a barrier for the platform’s effectiveness. That will lead to scattered customer view and data silos;
Data integration from various sources may be complex and time-crunching which requires careful planning and execution;
Employee adoption may be a potential hindrance as they should receive all the necessary training to be able to support and use the platform to the best extent;
Ongoing maintenance and related costs may seem sky-high, especially for companies with gigantic customer bases, complex operations, or the ones that are on the budget;
Data privacy is paramount in this day and age. That is why Customer 360 may present a steep learning curve at first blush. However, when implemented wisely, there’s no need to worry about data leaks and other mishaps.
Final Thoughts
Salesforce Customer 360 is a powerful platform that enables businesses to build customer relationships in new and meaningful ways. You can equip your marketing, support, and sales team with the tools they need to save time, simplify their work, and achieve their full potential.
This powerful platform includes features like business opportunity management, sales collaboration, lead management, sales projections, email tracking, and much more. All designed to help take your company to new heights of productivity and meet customer expectations to the greatest extent.
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Q&A
1. What is Customer 360 in Salesforce?
Salesforce Customer 360 is a bundle of Salesforce apps that are designed for businesses to receive a bird eye view of their customer data at every point of interaction. It combines the CRM functionalities Salesforce generally provides with extra tools for marketing, sales, service, and commerce.
2. What is the Difference Between a CRM and Customer 360?
The difference between a CRM (customer relationship management) and Customer 360 is that the former acts as an umbrella term for any system or technology used to handle customer data and interactions with them. On the other hand, the latter refers to a specific type of a CRM system powered by Salesforce. Customer 360 offers a comprehensive view of each customer across all touch points, from marketing and sales to commerce and support.
3. What are the Features of Customer 360?
The features of Customer 360 are extensive. Among them, there are a unified customer profile, personalized customer engagement, increased operational efficiency, high scalability, and data-driven insights. Plus, you can also think of them as benefits – they all aim at managing customer interactions, build stronger relationships, and augment satisfaction.
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