por Max Epelbaum hace 5 años
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Welcome to my mind map!. My name is Max Epelbaum and today I will be your guide through this interesting and exploratory map into how the company Salesforce has used operational innovation and customer intimacy in order to make startups and already settled and well known companies even greater competitors in their own industries!. Below here you can find Table of contents of the topics we will be covering today in order for you to navigate easier through the whole structure:
Table of contents:
Lean is very simple actually but its simplicity requires high organizational culture and transitions in the way activities are made. Lean is also an adaptable system that is not solely defined for manufacturing This is also true for the service Industry as we will soon see in the next subtopics.
Lean is a constructive system in that you improve it by learning and engaging in the process to understand them better, it is the counterpart to mass systems in terms of efficiency and reducing waste as much as possible. The notion and bare essence of salesforce is based on the lean principle of elimination waste by using the cloud as their main platform for their services, making it all online through common access and saving up millions of terabytes in terms of space and information that would otherwise be lost withing organizational gaps. Even so they are able to use lean in their own provision of services by using the cloud itself, minimizing time and efforts in live customer service and use built in orientation courses and acquired learning technologies like their trailhead program to train customers, and other salesforce users to reach their goals and improve their skills to dominate their software in a fun and effective way.
Another way they practice their lean service is their use of the appexchange in which they possess this marketplace that allows other vendors to sell their own software and apps that could be a better fit than Salesforce's own apps and hence allowing other firms to access a medium to sell their app easily but also provide Salesforce with extra opportunities to fulfill more demands and requirements from their customers in a way where they don't even have to spend money on R&D or constraint customers to a rigid choice of options. In addition they can discharge efforts and resources the those vendors in terms of customer services to cut costs while also providing solutions effectively as they themselves decide which apps have enough quality to be sold on their market (in order to maintain a threshold of quality).
Check out their appexchange link:
https://appexchange.salesforce.com/
The AppExchange is an online marketplace for Salesforce apps, components, and consulting services. If you're a Lightning Platform developer or consultant, the AppExchange is the gateway for connecting customers to your business solution
AppExchange is the leading business application marketplace of the world. ... You can also determine some of the best components, partners, consultancies, and other software developers who can help you in extending the power of the platform and run your business smoothly with the applications.
To support the audio, I must also mentioned that Salesforce has its own training support site based in a gamification strategy which basically treats learning as a game, and the learning refers to the many courses available on the their trailhead course which are prepared and differentiated for different roles in their customer's companies such as managers, entry level employees, marketing assistants, etc.
Here is a link to the trailhead course page:
https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/home
Hence, the main idea of Salesforce service is almost allowing the customer to do everything themselves as an exploratory process that in the end allows them to master the apps ans systems better than they would through faulty customer service experiences, and therefore leave everything to masterfully planed orientation programs and courses
Trailhead is a series of online tutorials that coach beginner and intermediate developers who need to learn how to code for the Salesforce platform. Lessons are presented in a specific sequence, so customers have a predefined path to follow and a "guided, curated" experience
Salesforce provides numerous services that are made to break down business silos that not only serve as a CRM tool to provide excellent customer service but it is an ERP tool in itself as you can see in the video in this bubble with tools such as their lightning program that allows everyone to access real time information to maintain communication at all times as well as transparency at all times in the process to attain wide organizational goals and increase synergies with other departments
Silos can occur in global corporations or start-up ventures with 15 employees. And no matter the size, they are detrimental to an organization’s ability to succeed in a rapidly changing world. A siloed organization cannot act quickly on opportunities that arise in a fast-paced business landscape. Some of the problems with silos can be:
Destroy Trust
Cut Off Communication
Foster Complacency
"To eliminate silos you must bring people across the organization together"
Salesforce is able to break silo's by offering such services that fix or correct the consequences of silos with the use of technology specifically ERP based technology made with the purpose of making data as transparent and accessible across the organization in an attempt to work at a real-time rate throughout the whole organization and increase motivation and communication across departments so they can all work towards a common goal. In order to achieve this Salesforce recommends their clients to engage in some of these best practices:
These are just some of the core pillars which Salesforce built their products around but in essence, the company considers: trust, innovation, Growth and equality which also contribute to breaking their own silos and encourage others to do as well as a crucial point to exponentially increase company performance.
Lightning (Salesforce Lightning) is a component-based framework for app development from Salesforce.com that is designed to simplify processes for business users, who typically do not have programming experience. Experience, a graphical user interface (GUI) that is optimized for speed
Lightning makes it easier to build responsive applications for any device. Lightning components accelerate development and app performance. Develop custom components that other developers and admins can use as reusable building blocks to customize Communities, the Salesforce mobile app, and Lightning Experience.
Now we have seen theoretical links of Salesforce's capabilities to deliver excellent operational innovation capabilities for other companies by linking it to concepts of the class and overall knowledge of their services. However, it would be even better to see them apply all of these concepts in a practical way!, lets see some diverse examples of how Salesforce has been able to make increasing contributions to already wonderful companies around the world
See how Adidas stays a step ahead with Salesforce.
https://www.salesforce.com/eu/customer-success-stories/adidas/
-By putting shoppers at the center of its business, Adidas keeps winning
-A leader in athletic sportswear, shoes, and fashion, Adidas is disrupting manufacturing and retail with bespoke design and a digital approach that puts consumers at the center of everything the company does. “This generation, they expect something now. They want instant gratification. They want to explore. They want to discover,” said Jacqueline Smith-Dubendorfer, VP of Digital Experience Design. “We need to lead and be able to respond to those consumer expectations immediately.”
-The company’s most important store is no longer a physical store: It is the dot-com sites, and Salesforce is an important partner for delivering the company’s digital transformation.
-This evolution from brick-and-mortar retail to digital commerce has enormous implications for companies trying to keep up with people’s changing preferences. For Adidas, it meant prioritizing the digital experience by investing in a suite of Salesforce products, including Commerce Cloud and Service Cloud. It’s an investment with tremendous upside, as the shift to digital provides opportunities for Adidas to get closer to consumers and understand each one individually.
-With Service Cloud, Adidas empowers its staff of 1,100 care agents to deliver faster, smarter service in whichever format consumers prefer — phone, email, web, or social — all from a single application. As a result, customer service is more efficient for the company and, crucially, more personalized and convenient for consumers.
-Commerce Cloud has enabled Adidas to rapidly form relationships with shoppers anywhere in the world. Today, the company runs more than 50 stores across more than 40 countries, and can create, manage, and update its global presence quickly and easily, cascading changes across properties with a few simple clicks.
-mith-Dubendorfer credits Salesforce with giving Adidas the ability to treat consumers as individuals, and answer key questions about the customer in each interaction: Do we know this person? Where did they come from? What are they interested in?
“Those data points then enable us to adapt what we present when we present it, and how we present it to ensure that we deliver as close to what that customer is looking for as we can,” said Smith-Dubendorfer.
-Consumers are co-creators in the adidas brand
The Salesforce Platform has been integral to this process, because it creates the digital interface that enables the company to engage with shoppers. “Salesforce has a unique positioning with best-in-class platforms across an array of areas from commerce to marketing to service. The powerful part is when those solutions start to be interconnected, at a data layer and at a capability layer," said Godsey.
The consumer-centric, digital-first strategy that adidas has been pursuing is now paying dividends with record-breaking growth at a time when the retail industry is struggling. In 2016, the company’s overall sneaker sales grew substantially. Around that time, the company announced 24% currency-neutral growth in North America for its brands, and reported a 59% increase in ecommerce globally, which equated to approximately €1 billion in online sales.
Schneider Electric powers a global workforce for a sustainable world.
https://www.salesforce.com/eu/customer-success-stories/schneider-electric/
-In this age of instant connectivity, it’s surprising that more than 2 billion people around the world still lack electricity or reliable sources of energy. Schneider Electric, the global specialist in energy management and automation, believes that access to energy is a basic human right and that today’s approach to energy management is unsustainable.
-Schneider Electric makes bringing energy to everyone on the planet a core part of its mission — in ways that are safe, reliable, efficient, connected, and sustainable. By redefining power and automation — and by innovating at every level — the company invents connected technologies that ensure “Life Is On” everywhere, for everyone, at every moment.
-Schneider Electric power distribution products and energy management components are installed in 40%–60% of buildings in all major cities around the world, prompting one company executive to call it “the world’s biggest invisible brand.”
-Schneider Electric relies on partners like Salesforce across its diverse business. In fact, using Salesforce Salesforce Platform, the IT team at Schneider Electric is able to unite employees and partners in hundreds of countries with applications that transform how they conduct their business and share data across various departments.
-Rapid growth puts pressure on IT to catch up.
-One platform to connect employees, customers, and suppliers around the world
-Intelligent devices make for a more sustainable world.
(RED) is on the trail to help achieve an AIDS-free generation
https://www.salesforce.com/eu/customer-success-stories/red/
-To fight AIDS in Africa, (RED) uses personalized communication and data analytics.
-Ten years ago, more than 1,200 babies were born each day with HIV. Today that number is down to 400, and (RED), alongside global health organizations, aims to get that to virtually zero by 2020.
-When consumers buy (RED)-branded products and services, their purchases trigger corporate giving to The Global Fund, supporting HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention programs in Africa, home to roughly two-thirds of the world’s HIV-positive population.
-(RED) is collaborating with Salesforce to power communications and data management, enabling its team of just 18 people to make a profound, measurable difference in the world.
-Salesforce supports this ambitious initiative through its 1-1-1 model, which dedicates 1% of Salesforce’s technology, people, and resources to social impact organizations.
-Open communication about results is especially important to millennials, a prime audience for (RED). “Our generation, as well as our partners, are demanding a sense of transparency that we want to uphold,” said Carly Farmer, Operations Associate. “Salesforce has really enabled us to show that in an impactful way through Analytics Cloud. And being able to do so just keeps the trust between our partners and our brand so strong.”
-Team members at (RED) are able to share the kind of data that partners and consumers demand because they use Salesforce. “There is no way that we could have grown the way that we have and continue to grow our partnership base and our product base without a tool like Salesforce,” said Jadian Brice, Strategic Partnerships Associate.
Aston Martin gears up for growth with Salesforce
https://www.salesforce.com/eu/customer-success-stories/aston-martin/
-Every Aston Martin car is unique. And now the luxury brand wants to bring that same level of quality and care to every customer relationship too. Thanks to Salesforce, Aston Martin can get closer to both its dealers and customers, and unlock new insights to steer the company towards greater success.
-In its 103-year history, Aston Martin has only made 80,000 cars. It would take a mass manufacturer less than a week to create the same number. “We don’t produce cars with robots; we produce them with human beings, craft, and skill,” said Dr. Andy Palmer, Aston Martin’s President, and CEO
-In March 2016, the company unveiled the DB11, which brings together everything that Aston Martin stands for – exceptional design, excellent performance and timeless luxury. The DB11 is the first product to be launched under Aston Martin’s Second Century plan, a six-year roadmap to create a highly valued global luxury brand.
-To unlock these insights, Aston Martin first needed to bring all its customer and sales data together – not just from its own business but also from across its global dealership network. The iconic British brand collaborates with more than 150 dealers in 40-plus countries to sell and service its luxury sport cars.
-In June 2015, all this changed with the deployment of the Sales Cloud. “It took a matter of weeks to go from an aging customer database that only 10 people could access to a collaborative solution that can grow with us,” said Balmer.
-To help accelerate the implementation and adoption of Sales Cloud, Aston Martin’s IT team and administrators used Trailhead, which provides guided learning around the key features of Salesforce using interactive, online tutorials. “They fired through their trails;it was fantastic,” affirmed Balmer.
-More than 150 Aston Martin employees and 500 dealership staff now use Sales Cloud to share and track information about opportunities, leads, and customers. “We can all see the same thing; nothing is locked in someone’s inbox or head anymore,” explained Balmer. “We can stop sales falling out of the funnel.”
Taking the lead
-Aston Martin doesn’t just want to know about converted leads it wants to know about lost leads too. “We want to be able to connect with individuals to find out why they decided not to purchase from us. This will help us make our products more relevant to more people,” explained Balmer. “Our customers like the fact that every car has its own story.”
-Thanks to Aston Martin’s unique personalisation service ‘Q’, customers often play a role in writing these stories the Q team fulfils hundreds of requests every year. And with Sales Cloud, it can now fulfil them faster.
-With a central record not just for its personalisation services but also customer sales, Aston Martin now has global visibility of its business. “We’ve replaced fragmented systems with integrated dashboards. With Sales Cloud, we can ask – and answer – important questions about the business,”
Of course!, if Salesforce delivers the tools to provide excellent customer service then they also must have a deep knowledge in the art of satisfying the customer, and they do have a great understanding of it thanks to their customer centric approach and their promise and obsession to always grow in parallel to the customer. What does this mean?... Well it is the basic notion that if you grow your customers must do as well specially in a B2B context
Lesson 1: Base decisions on what the customer wants and expects
Of course Salesforce tries to get into their customer shoes and try to design a software service that complies with all of their needs in the short and in the long run considering the changing needs of the industry. In addition as mentioned before they also have the Appexchange system that possesses hundreds of other options to comply with the client
Lesson 2: Think and act in terms of the entire customer experience
Salesforce creates products that paint the big picture as seen before with the example of the lightning module or the 360 program that encompasses several wide factors of the company's needs and can be customized to enhance the customer experience
Lesson 3: Continuously improve all parts of the customer experience
2 of Salesforce's core values are growth and innovation for themselves and for the customers which is also their motto when it comes to their day to day operations. We can see they actually try to enhance their market position by acquiring firms like Mulesoft to acquire technologies that will keep adding to their products and services to comply with the constant needs of their customers
Lesson 6: Create and sustain a strong service culture
Selling customer service products clearly is contagious within the sense of knowing about the concept. This is in fact the idea within customer orientation and growth within Salesforce trying to embed an obsession of attending to their customers and keep adding to apps and systems that help enhance the quality of their service like their constant additions to their trailhead program
Lesson 8: Empower customers to co-produce their own experience
Finally, Salesforce heavily relies in customization which allows the consumer to select their right mix and match of products to create their perfect CRM system and even allow them to integrate them with the ones they already have. Ever since they acquired Mulesoft they have been able to increase their ability to integrate old customer data with their new CRM system. In addition they also have systems like Trailhead mentioned above that keeps their customer engaged in learning more about the system. In fact 42% of Salesforce customers come back to integrate more programs to further customize their software
MuleSoft is a data integration platform built to connect a variety of data sources and applications, and perform analytics and ETL processes. MuleSoft has also developed connectors for SaaS applications to allow analysis on SaaS data in conjunction with cloud-based and traditional data sources.
Salesforce completed its acquisition in May 2018. The total deal was worth $6.5 billion, part cash and part stock, making it the largest acquisition in company history
How much does real-time service really matter?
-In short, it matters a lot. The old saying “the customer is always right” could be modernized to “the customer is always right now.”
In our research, we asked customers to rate a wide variety of service factors on their level of importance. The attribute with one of the highest ratings for importance was “real-time messaging when I need service.” Another quality with high ratings is self-service tools — for example, FAQs or account portals that let customers click around to find immediate answers on their own. In an age of near-constant connectivity, customers see real-time messaging and self-service capabilities as quick paths to a resolution.
What’s the impact of personalization and connected customer service?
-Research shows that 70% of customers say connected processes are very important to winning their business. What’s more, 70% of customers say service agents’ awareness of sales interactions is very important for keeping their business. So if customer loyalty and retention are metrics your service team is accountable for, you can’t underestimate the importance of connecting and personalizing service touchpoints.
What’s it take to deliver exceptional customer service?
-The average customer uses 10 different channels to communicate with companies. Customer service teams, who use an average of nine channels, are in a race to keep up.
While tried-and-true channels like phone and email have near-universal adoption, customer service is on the cusp of a digital revolution. Sixty-six percent of service professionals say their organization is seeing increased case volume through digital channels.
Customers look for proactive service
-An earlier Salesforce study showed that 59% of customers expect companies will soon anticipate their needs and make relevant suggestions before customer contact. Among B2B customers, 75% expect that by 2020, companies will anticipate their needs and make relevant suggestions before they contact them. Another 63% expect businesses to use artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically purchase or recommend products based on their company’s preferences.
Operational innovation is the invention and deployments of new ways of doing work
Operational innovation could be the key for big leaps in performance, but it is hard to apply due to several barriers of culture and standardizing structures (as well as flexibility and levels of adaptation) In order to convince people within the company, you must convince managers by telling success and comparable stories and setting unreachable standards on current operational standards
Salesforce is a true follower of these ideas and provides the same recommendations and insights to their clients as the main use of their product, as beyond their CRM solutions, they represent a tool that goes beyond relating to the customer but providing quantum leaps of performance for companies that use their services. Within this area Salesforce provides products that make operational innovation possible in ways that could not be achieved before.
How do they do this? easy... they create a system that not only provides employees and managers with an easy interface to operate but with real time data that is communicated to everyone in the company at the same time making every action and process transparent as well as their outcome which has caused leaps in performance and ideas and notions to help companies redesign the way they run their operations to make them more effective and begin efficient business reengineering process practices
Here is a more statistical way to explain my audio and the impact that Salesforce tends to bring to the table for their customers and their presence in their respective industries:
One of the 4 main core values of Salesforce is actually "Innovation" which just underlines the importance of the word and concept for the company as a whole and their "Kaizen" mindset to keep innovating themselves and their obsession to make their customers better
What exactly is salesforce?: Salesforce is a CRM service solution company that intends to combine all aspects of CRM of a company into an integrated customized platform for the company at hand, including several Sale and post-sale instruments that seek to boost's a company's performance in that respective area to exponentially increase revenues and customer service as a result and as a key target.
However the video within this bubble surely gives a more graphic explanation into how they work!
In addition here is a link to their website containing more information pertaining their main role and goal as a company:
https://www.salesforce.com/eu/products/what-is-salesforce/
As mentioned before Salesforce Provides CRM solutions including an all purpose platform called the 360 platform providing you with all of you sale, marketing and integration needs. However you can also buy the products individually and integrate them as you please within your company (Very similar to SAP and its customized modules)
Among these products or modules we can Find:
For further explanation of these please visit:
https://www.salesforce.com/eu/products/
In addition they also offer consulting services on their own technology and integrations as well as numerous other third party apps in their appexchange system allowing companies to further search for better solution in a wider market
Salesforce Customer 360 is a tool that allows companies to connect Salesforce apps and create a unified customer ID to build a single view of the customer.
A Quick Overview of their History:
-1999: Marc Benioff decided to start Salesforce in a small office in Telgraph Hill, San Francisco after quitting his job at Oracle on December along some partners and investors willing to follow him into this new venture
-2003: They introduce their first national convention called "dreamforce" attended by over 1,000 business representatives and other individuals which would later become an international event every year to this moment in time
-2004: They release their first IPO
-2005: The
, a third party marketplace to sell applications from Salesforce or independent ones that match better to the needs of diverse companies
-2009: They Reach the 9 Billion revenue mark
-2011: They reach to serve 100,000 customers and are named the most innovative company in the world by Forbes Magazine
-2013: Acquisition of ExactTarget for $2.5 billion
-2016: They make 13 acquisitions to position themselves as leaders in the market
-2018: Acquisition of Mulesoft to increase integration capabilities
