We’ve been talking a lot recently about apps and customer service. It’s just that mobile and especially wearable technologies have been expanding so fast, opening new paths for businesses that want to deliver outstanding customer service, that’s why this week one of our articles is dedicated to the 20 Apple Watch apps Salesforce released recently, as you might imagine, these apps are geared toward making enterprise employees better equipped to provide better customer service.
1) Road to Dreamforce
We are just a month away until Dreamforce, one of the most important “shows” in the cloud software industry; and we know many of you might be thinking: Do I need to start preparing? or might not know what to expect from it. Therefore we are here to give you a small preview of some of the highlights of this event and how to get ready for it.
First things first, there are several dreamforce groups, such as “New to Dreamforce”, or “Dreamfoce for Sales” that you can start following in order to connect with other attendees and start networking right away. You could also try to stay in touch and updated by following @Dreamforce, and keep tabs on the hashtags #RoadToDF15 and #df15 for all the latest. You can also check Salesforce and Dreamforce Facebook pages.
In addition, the agenda builder is now available, and it will be the most easy to use and helpful tool in planning the best conference. You can narrow the sessions by industry, role, and topic, so it becomes easier for you to look for those sessions that interest you the most.
And lastly, this year, as other years, there are a lot of visionary speakers that are going to be there to open your eyes to industry trends. You are going to hear from Salesforce executives and industry leaders during the product and industry keynotes and you are going to be able to see for yourself how they use Salesforce products to connect with customers, so make sure to be there when they do.
Some of the keynote speakers:
- Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft.
- Academy Award winning actress Goldie Hawn and founder of The Hawn Foundation, a public charity with a mission to equip children with the social and emotional skills they need to lead smarter, healthier, and happier lives.
- Susan Wojcicki, Chief Executive Officer of YouTube.
- and of course Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, within others.
We also encourage you to read Salesforce blog “What Every IT Professional Should Include On Their Dreamforce ‘15 Agenda”, that’s if your an IT guy of course. Here’s the link to it: https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2015/08/2015-IT-professional-dreamforce-agenda.html
2) Salesforce and Microsoft Closer Than Ever
Not only is that Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, has now committed to appear at Dreamforce, in September, as one of its keynote speakers. but now they are also doing business together.
In May 2014, they announced their first major partnership that connected Salesforce’s CRM software to Microsoft’s various cloud offerings, and they have been continuing to engage in different partnerships and integrating the two companies, such as the recent release of Salesforce1 Mobile App for Microsoft Office.
Now they recently announced becoming strategic investors in the Informatica deal as the company became private. The two joined the biggest leveraged buyout of the year to date, taking ownership stakes in the company, whose products combine and analyze customers’ data. It is not public how much each company invested nor how many stakes they bought.
Before both companies had strong partnerships with Informatica and both collaborated on data integration technology.
Benioff frequently lauds Nadella in public. “Before, we just were not able to partner with Microsoft. Satya has opened a door that was closed. And locked. And barricaded,” Benioff told Wired.
3) Salesforce: Transforming Every Community Into a Place of Business
Salesforce Community Cloud is now enabling companies to embed a buy button into online communities. Salesforce is the latest software company to adopt the “buy” button joining other companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest but the difference is that what Salesforce is doing extends the concept beyond retailers, enabling other sorts of companies to enable transactions in the moment.
The new e-commerce capabilities enable communities of customers to discover, research, discuss and buy products in a single location while introducing a new sales channel for companies, the idea its to embed e-commerce features right into customer support sites, feedback forums or other online resources that someone might use to research a product or order a service.
The main reason of this “buy now” button is to help companies to have higher conversion rates, its a way to speed up and improve the ability for users to convert and place transactions online. They’re designed to eliminate as much friction as possible in the buying process, to provide a shortcut for customers and convince them to complete a transaction right on the spot. “This makes things more frictionless,” said Mike Stone, senior vice president of marketing for the Salesforce Community Cloud. “Most businesses have separate community and commerce sites. Normally, combining the two would require a significant engineering effort.”
Many big consumer-driven companies have the capabilities to offer this buy button in a way of offering a better service and drive more revenue, but many other companies that want to offer this same service are left aside because of difficulties that arise when trying to do so in a reliable way, that is compatible with their online communities, and that’s when Salesforce steps in. “Our goal is to make it easier for our customers to grow their businesses and today we’re the first enterprise solution that enables buy buttons for any online community,” said Nasi Jazayeri, executive vice president of Community Cloud, Salesforce. “Now any company can deliver the same click-to-buy experience as popular consumer services and grow their businesses with social commerce.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/salesforce-launches-buy-button-community-120000306.html
4) The Small Business Big Impact Contest
Salesforce has announced a special competition for small businesses making an impact.
Potential finalists must have an innovative product or service and a positive impact on customers, employees and the community. Companies with 100 or fewer employees which do good while doing business can participate in this contest.
Companies that want to be involved in this have until August 21st to join in. Top 10 winners will be announced by Sept 1st. These 10 “winners” will be invited to Dreamforce and while being there 5 semi finalist will be chosen to pitch their business to a panel of celebrity judges and industry insiders, and one business will walk away with the ultimate price worth more than $50,000.
To learn more on how to participate visit: https://www.salesforce.com/campaigns/smb-contest/?d=70130000000NR2F&nc=70130000000NP4S&ban=Entrepreneur
5) App of the week
Salesforce releases 20 Apple Watch Apps.
A collection of more than 20 apps were built by industry partners on the Salesforce1 Platform. This makes Apple Watch a central part to Salesforce wearables strategy.
What can this Apps do for businesses? And what do they even have in common? A focus on helping employees steal back five minutes here and there throughout the workday, said Lindsey Irvine, head of the Salesforce Wear initiative.
The new offerings cover a range of processes from looking at customer profiles for upcoming sales meetings, to keeping track of project tasks among a team, to providing logistics information for workers in the field; all of them focusing in improving customer interactions and retrieving data that might be useful to someone on the go. The apps are really meant for workers who have to move around a lot and can’t work from a desk.
Some of them are:
- BetterWorks – Offers key performance indicators that help sales team stay focused on meeting goals.
- ContactWorld – Alerts the wearer to incoming VIP phone calls, based on the value of an account to the company or the individual.
- TaskRay – Maintains a list of “to-do’s,” which can be added using the Dictation feature.
- Vlocity Wear – Highlights information and notes that could be relevant for incoming customer service.
- NVM Connect – The App recognizes hot and important sales prospects, then arm the salesperson with key facts to use in the call.
If you want to learn more go to the Salesforce Appexchange web-page or Contact us for more information by clicking here