In a year unlike any other, Salesforce saw one third of their customers increasing their current Salesforce package in 2020 despite the uncertainty of the global pandemic. 

Whilst the world around us begins on the road to recovery, it is still uneven, yet every business leader should now take this opportunity to build a better business and a better world—and it starts with reimagining what’s possible in a post-pandemic future.

So as a direct result of COVID-19, why was it that Salesforce saw their customers increasing their Salesforce investments?

With the recently published end of year report on “ The State of Salesforce, Special Edition 2020-2021”, written by Salesforce partners IBM who gathered feedback from their customers to discuss how the platform’s alignment with AI has made it a necessity to make effective business pivots. 

The Top AI use cases across Salesforce included:

1. Service Cloud:

1.a. AI assistants and next-best action plan

In response to COVID-19, demand for AI assistants sky rocked, and at the peak customer inquiries had over exceeded when government orders were announced for people to stay at home. 

The public sector in particular with Banks saw the highest surges in calls from the public with urgent questions and needs, and so Salesforce Service cloud products helped to create AI assistants to guide such customer needs. With the introduction of AI assistants, Banks could better deal with FAQs through implementing dial filters to facilitate seamless handoffs from calls that require a human touch from the right call agent. 

The Service Cloud platform for such companies has helped to aid this teamwork between people and AI assistants to provide better, faster, and a more personalized service that in turn lowered costs while increasing customer confidence and use.

2. Marketing Cloud:

2.a. Analytics and reporting, and email personalization

COVID-19 has exposed companies who have not developed their CRM systems, and with new laws in data protection such as GDPR, this has further impacted the global CRM landscape. These regulations—and customers’ desire for better security and control over how companies use their personal data require businesses to redesign their email marketing. 

Many IT leaders have prioritized increasing their Salesforce Marketing cloud investment to sync email marketing with security requirements to maximise ROI conversion results. 

These initiatives deliver on bringing value to the end recipients whilst ensuring compliance on security of their data to bring an overall trustworthy experience to market faster, increasing customer loyalty, retention, and growth.

3. Sales Cloud:

3.a. Market intelligence including social media listening and key opportunity alerts

COVID-19 has accelerated the pace of digital transformation globally and thus the need to recreate an in store customer experience for the customer whilst they are quarantined at home needs to now be redesigned from the inside out. 

Whether this be redesigning the customer journey from a visit to a retail store, to an online order or to email marketing communications - all these touchpoints are opportunities for companies to optimize the journey and personalize these processes using Salesforce. 

Sales cloud has helped companies particularly within the ecommerce industry to decrease the levels with shop cart abandonment, from sales incentives that include email marketing to sending promotional emails on items last viewed. These tailored emails that are customer centric to the customers interests has given many online retailers a life line to continue to trade because of the value they give to their customer which is the need to convenience when shopping online. 

4. Commerce Cloud:

4.a. Product recommendations, personalized product assortments, and demand forecasting

Due to COVID-19’s impact, 68% of companies stated their top Salesforce priority is to improve and build upon customer loyalty and trust. 

Companies have formly traditionally focused on selling more and more year on year and finding new customers, but this year however has exposed the importance of having loyal customers and to continue to deliver value to them to ensure that the company is serving its customers in a trusted way. This needs to be the center of the business bottom line today and in the future. 

Salesforce has therefore never been more critical for businesses in this new digital-first world. 

Companies at the peak of the pandemic last year began to accelerate their investments within Salesforce to respond to current needs and gain a competitive advantage to emerge smarter from this crisis. Spurred by the ongoing effects of COVID-19, they’re integrating Salesforce with AI within both front- and back-end systems. 

This has been the golden nugget to add customer intelligence and bring speed to their decisions to deliver a connected, human experience and stay ahead of competitors in the market.

If you require further information and are ready to speak to us about your Salesforce projects we would be delighted to offer our consultative service offering around delivering top talent to fulfill your project needs. 

We have an established Salesforce database of candidates that are available on a permanent and/or contractor level to fulfill your project needs abelit offshore or nearshore. 

We are excited to share that Savant Technology has partnered with CloudGaia, a Worldwide Platinum Salesforce Partner who releases the potential of the most qualified Salesforce Professionals to build the next evolution of your business.

Savant Technology offers a range of recruitment and search services across Salesforce and Cloud, Transformation & Change, Analytics & Data, Security & Architecture, Development & Testing and Infrastructure & Operations. For more information please visit www.savantrecruitment.com or contact Peter Kyriacou directly on peter.kyriacou@savantrecruitment.com.