6 ways to elevate the Salesforce experience for your users

Customers and partners that interact with your business, as well as the employees who engage them, all expect a modern, digital experience. According to the Salesforce Report, nearly 90% Of buyers say the experience a company provides matters as much as products or services. Whether using Experience Cloud, Sales Cloud, or Service Cloud, your Salesforce user experience should be seamless, personalized and hyper-relevant, reflecting all the right context behind every interaction.

At the same time, Salesforce is a big investment, and you need to show return on that investment as quickly as possible. Ensuring maximum user adoption and proficiency is key. The more useful and relevant the experience is, the more effective users will be on the platform—and the more frequently they will return to it.

Here are six ways you can elevate your Salesforce experience for customers, partners and employees.

1. Continuously inform and engage your users.

Keep users abreast of everything they need to know about your business, and share valuable, engaging content related to their needs and interests. Deliver timely information and critical alerts through tailored announcements. Keep your audience informed and engaged with virtual and in-person events and targeted news, blogs or other articles. Manage and surface all of this within Salesforce to minimize context switching and to keep users coming back to the platform.

2. Personalize the user experience for hyper-relevance.

Infuse context and personalized content to enrich the entire experience and make it more relevant to individual customers. Don’t make employees struggle with out-of-the-box search and list views; dynamically present what they need in the flow of work, so they don’t have to leave the current task to find it. Whether it is location mapping, embedded video, targeted news and events, assigned learning, or recommended products and knowledge articles, strive to give users the information they need when they need it.

3. Escape the confines of the typical Salesforce look and feel.

Break away from limiting, out-of-the-box layouts, view, and UI components to give users the beautiful, modern experience they expect. Follow current UX design principles and ensure that every touchpoint represents your unique branding look and feel, rather than just looking like any other Salesforce implementation.

4. Accelerate platform adoption and mastery.

Develop a plan to thoroughly onboard users and get them proficient with the platform as quickly as possible to start realizing value. Streamline and automate the onboarding process. Gathe data to drive users to the site or platform, personalize the experience, and equip them with the knowledge and resources they need for success. Then, go deeper and give your employees, partners and customers an immersive digital learning experience tailored to their specific needs. A highly skilled ecosystem is a loyal and effective one, and educated customers are advocates for the brand.

5. Enable users to serve themselves and each other.

Give your customers, partners and employees the ability to serve themselves 24/7, whether researching products, making purchases, managing accounts or troubleshooting and solving issues. This means making your product information, knowledge articles and other content easily accessible, searchable and filterable. Deflect cases by giving customers access to the same content your service employees use via the knowledge base or a chatbot.

6. Empower your users to be your advocates.

An effective way to get your brand and messaging in front of as many potential customers as possible is to give your users ways to advocate for you. Organically expand the reach and influence of your brand by enabling users to share, contribute to and interact with your content. Enable partners and employees to contribute blogs and articles, empower customers to share your content in their social networks, and enable users to rate and review products, services and other records. Use this active user base to crowdsource the best ideas for improving your business and your Salesforce implementation.

Achieve an elevated experience with IBM Accelerators for Salesforce

You can achieve this elevated experience with IBM Accelerators for Salesforce. Its library of pre-built components can be used to quickly implement dozens of common use cases in Salesforce with clicks, not code. You can drag, drop, configure and customize components to create engaging, hyper-relevant experiences for your employees, partners and customers on Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Experience Cloud. Accelerators like Announcements, Experience Components, News, Ideas, Learning Adventure, Onboarding, and many more enable you to create a highly relevant and personalized experience.

IBM developed these accelerators with the expertise we gained through thousands of successful IBM Salesforce Services engagements. Now, these same products are available to purchase and use in your projects! Unleash the power of our pre-built components to reduce customization efforts, empower administrators and speed the ROI of your Salesforce implementation.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading

4 trends that help organizations unlock the value of Salesforce

Over the past few years, organizations across the globe have been required to accelerate their technology investments to operate amid massive market disruptions. Companies that were already firmly rooted in digital and cloud technology endured challenges more effectively than their counterparts. The question is no longer whether to invest in these platforms — it’s how to strategically optimize those investments to accelerate business value.

Salesforce is one of the platforms leading the mandate for change. Today’s leading enterprises are maximizing the value of Salesforce through a holistic approach to business transformation and they are creating essential business systems that are agile enough to thrive amidst disruptions and uncertainty. These companies will outperform competitors and deliver consistent wins that accelerate progress.

The State of Salesforce report focuses on ways companies can unlock the next wave of value with Salesforce. We look forward and share insights into how business leaders around the globe envision Salesforce, and how Salesforce enables organizations to withstand constant change.

Below is a summary of the four trends identified in the report — trends that show the importance of using Salesforce across your entire business, not just in discrete business units or departments.

Trend #1: Unlock value by using cross-cloud solutions

The next wave of business value lies in using the cross-cloud capabilities provided by Salesforce to optimize digital operations. Leading companies are pursuing operational excellence to unlock results like profitability, higher productivity, streamlined processes and employee retention. With Salesforce, they have access to intelligent workflows, global partner networks and the features that provide customers and employees with a true 360-degree experience.

Businesses must tap into the power of the entire Salesforce platform and product suite to gain the benefits of a true cross-cloud experience. You’ll achieve results through automation, integration and collaboration to reduce costs, ramp up productivity and deepen connections among users.

Companies that embrace cross-cloud solutions come out ahead. More than 75% of organizations say Salesforce increases their business productivity, employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.

— The State of Salesforce Survey, 2022

Trend #2: Unlock value by becoming a trusted enterprise

We’ve entered the era of the trusted enterprise. People want to engage with businesses they trust, whether as customers, partners or employees. Building a trusted enterprise comes down to using digital technology in ways that live up to stated values regarding ethics, transparency, security, privacy and safety. Leading companies are using Salesforce to create responsive, trustworthy and intelligent systems that safeguard users’ peace of mind and implement AI with integrity.

Establishing a trusted enterprise requires coordinated effort and alignment between your business culture and technology. With Salesforce and its broader ecosystem as the lynchpin between your values and processes, you’ll seamlessly clean up and secure user data and design trustworthy AI that drives engagement and growth for your organization.

Becoming a modern, trusted enterprise means embracing AI, but taking care to do so ethically. 60% of executives cite customer and employee trust concerns as a top blocker to using AI, while 57% cite issues around transparency and the ethical use of data.

— The State of Salesforce Survey, 2022

Trend #3: Unlock value by innovating smarter

Leading enterprises are building systems and technology that can respond to fast-paced changes in the market. Modern business requires an innovative mindset that’s ready to support new visions and updated methods that bring them to life. The organizations that are modernizing most effectively are taking advantage of what Salesforce refers to as “configuration not code” and embracing the constantly evolving Salesforce ecosystem to innovate infinitely.

The core Salesforce platform and its numerous new releases ensure that your business always has access to the latest features and capabilities. When your leadership is aligned with innovation-based goals in mind, you’ll effectively orchestrate and execute enterprise-wide transformation.

Innovating smarter means finding the right partners to help you get the most out of Salesforce: 83% of customers work with an external partner to manage Salesforce, leveraging their insight and expertise to support ongoing innovation and take advantage of new features.

— The State of Salesforce Survey, 2022

Trend #4: Make sustainability a transformation catalyst

Environmental impacts and disruption within the global economy have made sustainability a strategic business imperative, and IBM and Salesforce are leading transformational environmental change. Progress is possible, and both organizations offer ways business leaders can embrace eco-friendly strategies and technology that move everyone forward.

Data-driven environmentalism is quickly moving to the forefront, requiring business leaders to account for not just their internal operations but for the far-reaching impact of their products and services. Data-driven transparency and insights help your organization achieve truly transformative sustainability objectives where core values are integrated into the very fabric of your enterprise. To begin this journey and establish a scalable and measurable approach, companies must focus on their data, culture and leadership. Platforms like Salesforce provide the technology necessary to integrate all aspects of sustainability into core business functions and transform the entire enterprise.

Turning sustainability ambition into action is essential for businesses moving forward. 90% of companies cite long-term sustainability as one of the most important challenges facing their organization over the next 18 months.

Source: ibm.com

Continue reading