By Swatil Binte Mahmud, Blogger, Lava Protocols
We’ve collected all the announcements from Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2019 event, a few weeks ago. Here’s everything you need to know:
What is Dreamforce?
Dreamforce is the ultimate annual gathering of the Salesforce community; bringing together customers, employees, and partners. From November 19-22, 2019 Dreamforce gathered the entire Salesforce community consisting of customers, partners, employees, and key stakeholders for an exciting reunion. More than 2,700 sessions were held, and thousands of solutions were provided from the world’s largest cloud ecosystem. Dreamforce brought together thought leaders, industry pioneers, and thousands of their peers for four high-energy days of learning, inspiration, equality, and fun. Whether you’re a company of five or a Fortune 500, this is a must-attend event
Salesforce, founded in 1999, located in the heart of San Francisco, is a cloud computing, service as a software (SaaS) company that specializes in customer relationship management (CRM). Salesforce’s services allow businesses to use cloud technology to better connect with customers, partners and potential customers.
Major Announcements For YOU!
Major announcements took center stage at recently concluded Dreamforce event this year with Salesforce unveiling brand new products in their line-up. The handy new features and innovations that Salesforce calls Customer 360, Einstein Voice, and Tableau will address the issues you have been facing and improve usability far beyond the competition. Also, they have made some key partnership deals with Apple, Microsoft and AWS (Amazon Web Services) to improve the range of coverage in terms of cloud services.
How cool is Customer 360?
This is an integrated CRM platform which bridges the gap between companies and customers. Customer 360 Truth helps companies unify all their data across all touchpoints so they can build a single source of truth about their customers. This way, companies can connect customer data, authenticate identity, govern privacy, segment audiences, and personalize experiences. These featured capabilities include:
- Customer 360 Data Manager: This is available today at no additional cost which connects sales, service, marketing, and commerce customer data into a single global ID to deliver unified cross-channel experiences. With Data Manager, companies always have a complete, up-to-date, contextually relevant profile of every customer.
- Salesforce Identity for Customers: This authentication service provides a consistent and secure customer login across a company’s digital properties.
- Salesforce Privacy and Data Governance: Provides customers and business users with the ability to manage privacy, consent, and preferences via one single application.
- Customer 360 Audiences: This enables companies to capture, unify, activate, and analyse customer data at scale.
Just say, Hey Einstein!
Salesforce brings voice commands to every customer experience with a powerful voice technology to CRM with Einstein Voice, giving millions of Salesforce users a customized, voice-activated interface for their apps.
- Einstein Voice Assistant and Einstein Voice Skills (beta Spring ’20): They are expanding their Einstein Voice portfolio by introducing Einstein Voice Skills, which allows every Salesforce admin to create custom versions of the Voice Assistant for every user, whether they’re a sales rep, sales manager, service agent, marketer, and so on.
- Einstein Call Coaching (GA Winter ’20): You will be able to gain management-level visibility into your sales teams’
conversations through natural language processing that identifies keywords in sales calls so managers can quickly understand trends like a spike in competitor mentions, or best practices from the top performers.
- Service Cloud Voice (GA Summer ’20): With Service Cloud Voice, telephony will be natively integrated with Service Cloud, allowing Einstein to read keywords from call transcriptions in the moment and serve up the right knowledge articles and next-best actions for agents, reducing time spent on cases.
Tableau and Salesforce a match made in analytics heaven
Salesforce, world’s #1 CRM and Tableau, the world’s #1 analytics platform has merged together to transform the way people understand not only their customers, but their whole world by delivering powerful AI-driven insights across all types of data and use cases for people of every skill level. Tableau helps people see and understand data. Tableau’s self-service analytics platform empowers people of any skill level to work with data. From individuals and non-profits to government agencies and the Fortune 500, tens of thousands of customers around the world use Tableau to get rapid insights and make impactful, data-driven decisions.
- Help make smarter decisions: Tableau will make Salesforce Customer 360, including Salesforce’s analytics capabilities, stronger than ever, enabling the customers to accelerate innovation and make smarter decisions across every part of their business.
- The cherry on top: With Customer 360, Salesforce already provides organizations with a complete, intelligent view of their customers across every touchpoint. Salesforce pioneered AI for CRM with Salesforce Einstein, and today delivers AI-powered analytics for sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. Tableau pioneered self-service analytics with an intuitive analytics platform that empowers people of any skill level to work with data for any use case. Tableau will make Salesforce Customer 360 stronger than ever, and together with Einstein, will enable Salesforce to offer a complete AI-powered analytics platform for everyone.
Two Heads Are Better Than One
Salesforce went on to announce new and extended partnership deals with Apple, Microsoft and AWS. Here’s a look at what this collaboration entails:
Apple Partnership:
Apple and Salesforce ignite productivity and learning on the best devices for business. Their strategic partnership with Apple (originally announced at Dreamforce ’18) strikes again with two exciting flagship apps and the next-generation Salesforce Mobile SDK.
The Salesforce Mobile App, powered by AI and reimagined for iOS, delivers a powerful new user experience enabled by Einstein, with advanced analytics and features exclusive to iOS, including Siri shortcuts and Face ID. Trailhead GO, the first-ever mobile app for Trailhead, exclusive to iOS and iPadOS, empowers learners to skill up anywhere and at any time with more than 700 modules covering in-demand business and tech skills. Also, the new Salesforce Mobile SDK, optimized for Swift and iOS 13, enables Salesforce developers to quickly build and deploy native Salesforce apps for iPhone and iPad. Get started with the Salesforce Mobile SDK for iOS (8.0 coming in January).
Microsoft Partnership:
Salesforce and Microsoft expanded their strategic partnership to accelerate customer success. Salesforce will move its Marketing Cloud to Azure which will unlock new growth opportunities for customers. Also, Salesforce will build new integrations that connect Sales Cloud and Service Cloud with Microsoft Teams.
Amazon Web Services Partnership
Salesforce and Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced the expansion of their global strategic partnership.
Salesforce is introducing Service Cloud Voice, a new offering that seamlessly embeds Amazon Connect to provide contact centre agents with a complete set of tools in their agent workspace to deliver enhanced customer service support. As part of its Service Cloud Voice offering, Salesforce will now offer Amazon Connect, a simple-to-use cloud contact centre service from AWS that makes it easy for organizations to deliver better customer service.
AWS and Trailhead are partnering to address the growing technology skills gap. The first step in this partnership is bringing AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials learning to Trailhead, with additional learning forthcoming.
Salesforce is continuing its commitment to the Voice Interoperability Initiative by exploring ways to integrate Einstein Voice Skills with Amazon Alexa and other voice assistants and devices in the future.
Happy New Year!
Putting all of these innovations together, Salesforce has given it’s customer plenty to cheer about for the next 12 months. As a Salesforce Partner, we’ll be among the enthusiastic bunch waiting to hear what Salesforce has in store for us in 2020, with the next iteration of Dreamforce. Until then, stay tuned folks!
Source: https://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/ Accessed: 17/12/2019
Lava is a cloud service provider and an authorised Salesforce Partner in Malaysia. We have more than a decade of experience in cloud solutions which includes marketing automation, CRM implementation, change management, and consultation. We pride ourselves in not just being a CRM partner but in also understanding the needs of our customers and taking their business to the next level. Email us at asklava@lavaprotocols.com or call us at 03-7885 9720 if you’d like to know more about cloud technology.