Tag: salesforce

Why Proficient Salesforce Administration Drives Business Growth

Salesforce administration is vital for businesses looking to drive growth and maximize their potential. A proficient Salesforce administrator can streamline sales processes, enhance customer relationship management, leverage analytics for data-driven decision-making, integrate Salesforce with other business systems, and support business expansion and scalability. In this blog, we will explore how proficient Salesforce administration plays a pivotal role in driving business growth.

The Fundamentals of Salesforce Administration

At its core, Salesforce administration involves managing and optimizing the Salesforce platform to meet specific business needs. A proficient Salesforce administrator is responsible for configuring the system, ensuring data accuracy, training users, and continuously improving its functionality. By understanding the nuances of Salesforce, administrators can effectively align its features with the organization’s goals and objectives, thus driving business growth.

Salesforce administration can also play a pivotal role in streamlining the hiring process for new workers. By leveraging a talent-as-a-service solution, administrators can integrate recruitment features within the platform, making it easier to manage candidate information and track progress through the hiring pipeline. This centralized approach not only simplifies the recruitment process but also allows hiring managers to make data-driven decisions, ensuring they bring in the best talent to support the company’s objectives.

Streamlining Sales Processes for Improved Efficiency

One of the primary benefits of proficient Salesforce administration is the ability to streamline sales processes. With Salesforce, businesses can automate lead management, track opportunities, and forecast sales, resulting in improved efficiency and productivity. Through customization and automation, Salesforce administrators can tailor the platform to match the organization’s unique sales workflows, ensuring seamless collaboration among sales teams and enhancing their overall performance.

For example, consider a retail company that implemented Salesforce and optimized their sales processes through proficient administration. By automating lead assignment and tracking, they significantly reduced manual effort, accelerated response times, and improved conversion rates. As a result, the company experienced a remarkable boost in sales and witnessed substantial business growth.

Enhancing Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Enhancing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is crucial for businesses to effectively manage and nurture their customer relationships. One way to achieve this is by leveraging the capabilities of CRM software, such as Salesforce.

CRM software, like Salesforce, provides a centralized platform to store and organize customer data, interactions, and preferences. Developers from this website share that efficient Salesforce administration allows businesses to gain a comprehensive view of their customers, enabling them to personalize communication and tailor experiences to meet specific needs. In addition, it helps businesses recognize opportunities to drive revenue efficiencies and avoid unexpected breaks that can result in business downtime.

By utilizing its features, businesses can streamline their sales processes, automate tasks, and improve efficiency. This includes managing leads, tracking opportunities, merging duplicates and automating follow-ups, which ultimately enhances productivity and saves time for sales teams.

Leveraging Analytics and Reporting for Data-Driven Decision-Making

In today’s data-driven business landscape, making informed decisions is essential for sustainable growth. Proficient Salesforce administration empowers businesses to leverage the platform’s advanced analytics and reporting capabilities for data-driven decision-making. Salesforce administrators can configure custom reports and dashboards, allowing stakeholders to gain valuable insights into sales performance, customer behavior, and market trends.

By analyzing this data, businesses can identify growth opportunities, optimize their strategies, and stay ahead of the competition. For instance, a technology company used Salesforce analytics to identify key market trends and customer preferences, enabling them to launch targeted marketing campaigns and develop new products that aligned with customer demands. This data-driven approach resulted in significant business growth and market expansion.

Integrating Salesforce with Other Business Systems

To achieve maximum efficiency and productivity, it is crucial to integrate Salesforce with other essential business systems. Proficient Salesforce administration involves managing these integrations, ensuring seamless information flow across various departments and systems. By integrating Salesforce with other tools like marketing automation platforms, ERP systems, and customer support software, businesses can enhance collaboration, eliminate data silos, and achieve holistic visibility into their operations.

For example, a manufacturing company successfully integrated Salesforce with their ERP system, enabling seamless order management, inventory tracking, and invoicing. This integration streamlined their processes, reduced manual errors, and accelerated order fulfillment, leading to improved customer satisfaction and business growth.

Supporting Business Expansion and Scalability

As businesses grow and expand, they need a scalable platform that can accommodate their evolving needs. Salesforce offers robust scalability features, and proficient administration is crucial in leveraging these capabilities effectively. A skilled Salesforce administrator can configure the platform to handle increased data volumes, user accounts, and complex workflows, ensuring smooth operations even during periods of rapid growth.

For instance, a startup company experienced exponential growth and required a scalable CRM solution. By employing proficient Salesforce administration, they seamlessly expanded their user base, integrated new sales channels, and efficiently managed increasing data volumes. This scalability enabled them to adapt to market demands, sustain growth, and establish themselves as a leading player in their industry.

Proficient Salesforce administration is the backbone of successful businesses that seek growth and maximize their potential. By streamlining sales processes, enhancing customer relationship management, leveraging analytics for data-driven decision-making, integrating with other business systems, and supporting business expansion and scalability, Salesforce administrators can unlock the full potential of the platform and propel organizations towards success. 

Cpl Adapts Faster to Talent Trends and Unlocks Efficiencies with Salesforce

Talent and recruitment specialist Cpl is using Salesforce technology to unlock efficiencies and fast-track growth.

Why it’s important: Recruitment is a volatile market with global events and economies constantly impacting the demand for talent. It can be very complicated, too, particularly in specialist and regulated sectors such as healthcare.

With more than 20 brands and 40 offices across 18 countries, Dublin-headquartered Cpl every month sources over 35,000 applications locally and internationally.

Combining AI, data and CRM, the group is unlocking ways to reduce the time to hire for their clients, deliver better candidate experiences, and expand into new markets efficiently.

The Salesforce Platform is at the heart of Cpl’s business, Cpl has developed custom workflows that automate repetitive tasks, accelerating recruitment and onboarding timings by 75% by simplifying data capture and candidate evaluation processes.

Integrated with over 90 internal and external sources, including job websites, finance tools, and applicant tracking systems, has created a single source of truth of client and candidate information and delivered business value worth around €1M within 18 months.

Cpl is continually adding new features to personalise the recruitment lifecycle, including creating their own candidate shortlists and sending tailored newsletters to clients to showcase new talent.

The Salesforce solution: 

  • With Experience Cloud, Cpl has created personalised recruitment portals for clients and to provide candidates with more self-service options.
  • With Sales Cloud Cpl can connect new business leads and insights across its global operations, creating a group-wide view of sales pipeline and performance.
  • Customising Salesforce workflows with Trailhead, Cpl can capture and analyse data at every step of the recruitment journey and identify trends shaping the future of work which helps clients compete more effectively for the best talent.
  • Migrating to Hyperforce has enabled the group to scale more easily into new markets whilst strengthening data security and regulatory compliance.

Lorna Conn, CEO at Cpl said: “Today, being able to source the right talent at the right time requires the ability for everyone involved – clients and candidates – to move fast and maximise productivity. With Salesforce, being able to support multiple teams and brands on a single platform has enabled us to simplify our processes and unlock greater efficiency.

“Shifting our recruitment strategy from reactive to proactive and transforming the insights we extract from our data is enabling more informed conversations with our clients and scaling our processes and teams quickly and cost-effectively.”

Carolan Lennon, Country Leader, Salesforce Ireland said: “Today, helping organisations access the talent they need to thrive, tackling the skills gap while strengthening your own processes to work smarter and faster is no easy feat.

“By bringing multiple teams and brands onto a single platform Cpl shows the power that data, AI and CRM can have in helping companies adapt to new business realities and unlock growth opportunities.”

Salesforce Announces AI Cloud – Bringing Trusted Generative AI to the Enterprise

Salesforce today announced AI Cloud, the fastest and most trusted way for Salesforce customers to supercharge their customer experiences and company productivity with generative AI for the enterprise. AI Cloud is a suite of capabilities optimized for delivering trusted, open, and real-time generative experiences across all applications and workflows. AI Cloud’s new Einstein GPT Trust Layer resolves concerns of risks associated with adopting generative AI by enabling customers to meet their enterprise data security and compliance demands, while offering customers the benefits of generative AI. This unique blend of capabilities and security solidifies Salesforce’s position as the #1 AI CRM.

At the heart of AI Cloud is Einstein, the world’s first AI for CRM, which now powers over 1 trillion predictions per week across Salesforce’s applications. With generative AI, Einstein helps make every company and employee more productive and efficient across sales, service, marketing, and commerce.

AI Cloud will enable sales reps to quickly auto-generate personalized emails tailored to their customer’s needs, and service teams to auto-generate personalized agent chat replies and case summaries. Marketers can auto-generate personalized content to engage customers and prospects across email, mobile, web, and advertising. Commerce teams can auto-generate insights and recommendations to deliver customized commerce experiences at every step of the buyer’s journey. And, developers can auto-generate code, predict potential bugs in code, and suggest fixes.

Why trusted generative AI matters in the enterprise: Company leaders want to embrace generative AI, but are wary of the risks – hallucinations, toxicity, privacy, bias, and data governance concerns are creating a trust gap. New Salesforce research found that 73% of employees believe generative AI introduces new security risks and nearly 60% of those who plan to use the technology don’t know how to keep data secure.

AI Cloud will help fill that trust gap with the new Einstein GPT Trust Layer. The Einstein GPT Trust Layer will help prevent large-language models (LLMs) from retaining sensitive customer data. This separation of sensitive data from the LLM will help customers maintain data governance controls while still leveraging the immense potential of generative AI. The Einstein GPT Trust Layer sets a new industry standard for secure generative AI for the enterprise.

“AI is reshaping our world and transforming business in ways we never imagined, and every company needs to become AI-first,” said Marc Benioff, Chair and CEO, Salesforce. “AI Cloud, built on the #1 CRM, is the fastest and easiest way for our customers to unleash the incredible power of AI, with trust at the center driven by our new Einstein GPT Trust Layer. AI Cloud will unlock incredible innovation, productivity, and efficiency for every company.”

AI Cloud will integrate Salesforce technologies, including Einstein, Data Cloud, Tableau, Flow, and MuleSoft to provide trusted, open generative AI that is enterprise ready.

Trusted and Open: The Einstein GPT Trust Layer will enable companies to get started with trusted generative AI faster by optimizing the right model for the right task. It will also provide deployment capabilities for any relevant LLM while helping companies maintain their data privacy, security, residency, and compliance goals.

  • Use of Third-Party LLMs: As part of Salesforce’s commitment to an open ecosystem, AI Cloud is designed to host LLMs from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Anthropic, Cohere, and others — entirely within Salesforce’s infrastructure. AI Cloud will help maintain customer prompts and responses in the Salesforce infrastructure. In addition, Salesforce and OpenAI have established a shared trust partnership to deliver joint content moderation using OpenAI’s leading Enterprise API and best-in-class safety tools in conjunction with the Einstein GPT Trust Layer to help keep data retained in Salesforce.
  • Use of Salesforce LLMs: AI Cloud will enable customers to use Salesforce LLMs developed by Salesforce AI Research to power advanced capabilities such as code generation and business process automation assistance, fundamentally transforming how businesses interact with their CRM software. Salesforce’s LLMs – including CodeGen, CodeT5+, and CodeTF – help companies increase productivity, bridge the talent gap, reduce the cost of implementations, and better detect incidents.
  • Bring Your Own Model (BYOM): Customers who have trained their own domain-specific models outside of Salesforce will benefit from AI Cloud while storing data on their own infrastructure. These models, whether running through Amazon SageMaker or Google’s Vertex AI, will connect directly to AI Cloud through the Einstein GPT Trust Layer. In this scenario, customer data can remain within the customers’ trust boundaries.

Business Ready: AI will fuel more than $15 trillion in global economic growth and boost GDP by 26% by 2030*. AI Cloud will harness the full power of Salesforce, helping make companies and employees more productive and efficient.

  • Generative AI across every Salesforce application: Salesforce is bringing trusted generative AI to every product with Sales GPT, Service GPT, Marketing GPT, Commerce GPT, Slack GPT, Tableau GPT, Flow GPT, and Apex GPT.  See more about Salesforce’s trusted, open, and business-ready generative AI-powered applications here.
  • Prompt template and builders: The prompts used to generate AI content directly influence the quality and relevance of the generated content. Salesforce is developing optimized AI prompts that use harmonized data to ground generated outputs in every company’s unique context. These context-rich prompts will help sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT teams get instant value from trusted generative AI, without hallucinations, while reducing time and cost.

The customer perspective:

“Our goal is to deliver more personalized member engagement, make our processes more efficient and cost-effective, and drive innovation across our team within a safe and trusted environment,” said Shohreh Abedi, EVP, Chief Operations Technology Officer, and Member Experience at AAA – The Auto Club Group. “We’re accelerating our digital transformation with Salesforce, and AI Cloud will help us implement AI across our entire business, including devops, support, sales, and underwriting.”

“Embedding AI into our CRM has delivered huge operational efficiencies for our advisors and clients,” said Greg Beltzer, Head of Tech for RBC US Wealth Management. “We believe that this technology has the potential to transform the way businesses interact with their customers, deliver personalized experiences, and drive customer loyalty. We are excited to explore this opportunity with Salesforce and drive the next generation of personalized customer experiences.”

Salesforce and Accenture’s Acceleration Hub for Generative AI

Salesforce recently announced plans to collaborate with Accenture to accelerate the deployment of generative AI for CRM. Together, the companies intend to establish an acceleration hub for generative AI that provides organizations with the technology and experience they need to scale generative AI for CRM — helping to increase employee productivity and transform customer experiences.

Pricing and Availability

Specific feature availability details as follows:

  • The Einstein GPT Trust Layer will be generally available in June 2023.
  • Service GPT is in pilot today, and will be generally available in June 2023.
  • Sales GPT is in pilot today, and will be generally available in July 2023.
  • Marketing GPT will be in pilot in June 2023, and generally available February 2024.
  • Commerce GPT is in pilot today, and will be generally available in July 2023.
  • Apex GPT will be in pilot in June 2023.
  • Flow GPT will be in pilot in October 2023.
  • Slack GPT is in beta today, and will be generally available later this year.
  • Tableau GPT will be in pilot in November 2023.

TEKenable Acquires Salesforce Specialist Tether

Technology and services company, TEKenable has announced its acquisition of specialist Salesforce consulting company, Tether.  As a Gold Salesforce Partner, Tether offers clients a range of services to help deliver strategic and business improvement projects through the use of the Salesforce platform.

The acquisition by TEKenable will strengthen the company’s Salesforce ‘Cloud’ offering, enhance its Salesforce practice, and provide a platform for further growth.

Nick Connors, Group CEO TEKenable said:

“I am delighted to welcome the Tether team to the TEKenable family.  Their proven track record in delivering Salesforce solutions to their clients complements TEKenable’s existing Salesforce practice, and combined will result in one of the largest Salesforce practices both in Ireland and the UK.  With this acquisition, we are continuing to invest in our Salesforce growth plans with the combined practice of TEKenable and Tether strengthening our delivery of a comprehensive suite of ‘Cloud’ services and expertise to support our clients’ ambitions.  With a continued focus on growth in the UK, the experience and the client base that Tether has in the UK is a fantastic fit for TEKenable – both strategically and culturally.”

As a result of the acquisition, a team of highly skilled experts from Tether will join TEKenable in Ireland and the UK, bringing with them extensive experience across diverse sectors such as Telecoms, Manufacturing, Medical, Energy, Retail and Logistics.  Tether, with offices in Dublin, Manchester and London, helps clients get the most from their Salesforce ‘Cloud’ investments.

John Hennessy, Managing Director Tether said:

“With our shared vision and values, I am confident that the Tether team will fit seamlessly into TEKenable.  Being able to offer deep technology skills, coupled with industry-experience at scale is critical to getting ahead in the market.  As a leading Salesforce Partner, we have those skills, and TEKenable has the scale.  We will continue to focus on delivering leading solutions that meet the needs of our clients, and I look forward to further building our joint Salesforce capabilities.”

TEKenable Group CTO Peter Rose said:

“This is an exciting time for TEKenable, Tether, our respective teams, partners and customers.  Together we will work with our forward-thinking clients to transform their businesses in the cloud.  The combined businesses will make us one of the most capable Salesforce specialists in Ireland and the UK.”

Salesforce and Google Cloud Announce Expanded Strategic Partnership to Unlock the Power of AI, Data and CRM

Salesforce and Google Cloud today announced an expanded strategic partnership to help businesses utilize data and AI to deliver more personalised customer experiences, better understand customer behaviour, and run more effective campaigns at a lower cost across marketing, sales, service, and commerce.

Two new data and AI innovations will bring real-time data sharing with enhanced predictive and generative AI capabilities, so businesses can use their data and their custom AI models to better predict customer needs and reduce the cost, risk, and complexity of synchronising data across platforms.

Why this matters: While 80% of business leaders say data is critical in decision-making at their organisation, 41% find their data too complex and inaccessible to be useful. These new integrations will help solve the problem of accessing and understanding data and allow companies to use their data to power AI insights across their business that drive better customer experiences.

Go Deeper: Turning business data into actionable insights and personalised experiences

Salesforce Data Cloud + Google BigQuery

The new integration between Salesforce Data Cloud and BigQuery will enable companies to more easily create unified profiles of their customers to provide new, highly personalised experiences.

Salesforce and Google Cloud will provide customers with seamless data access across platforms and across clouds, akin to having their data housed in a single location — with zero-copy or zero-ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) that can reduce the cost and complexity of moving or copying it while maintaining governance and trust.

Salesforce Data Cloud + Google Vertex AI

New integrations between Salesforce Data Cloud and Google Cloud’s Vertex AI will enable customers to bring their own models from Vertex and use them across the Salesforce Platform, addressing the specific needs of their businesses – such as predicting buying behaviour or churn likelihood – across their Salesforce Customer 360 data. Zero-copy data access for AI model training can maximize a company’s AI investment by providing immediate access to unified customer data, thereby streamlining the model development process and enhancing the accuracy and efficiency of AI predictions and insights.

How industries will use Salesforce’s Data Cloud and Google’s BigQuery and Vertex AI to improve the customer experience and personalize interactions

A fashion retailer can connect CRM data, like customer purchase history and service interactions, with non-CRM data like real-time online activity or social media sentiment. They can then deploy custom AI models that predict customers’ likelihood to buy certain types of clothing based on that data, and deliver hyper-personalized recommendations to customers via the most appropriate channel, including email, a mobile app, or social media.

A healthcare organization can connect CRM data, like appointment history and patient feedback, with non-CRM data like patient demographics and medical history data. They can then deploy custom AI models that predict which patients are at risk of readmission, which informs personalized care plans for those high-risk patients to improve medical outcomes through proactive medical care.

A financial institution can connect CRM data, like a customer’s transaction history, credit score, and financial goals, with non-CRM data like market analysis or economic trends. They can then deploy custom AI models that predict a customers’ spending habits, investment preferences, and financial goals to inform personalized banking services and offers.

Quotes:

“AI and data are revolutionizing the way businesses operate and innovate, and together Salesforce and Google are empowering organizations to unlock the full potential of their trusted data, put AI insights into action, and personalize customer experiences like never before. This partnership paves the way for unprecedented innovation and business value for our customers.” –David Schmaier, Chief Product Officer, Salesforce

“Google Cloud and Salesforce share a commitment to helping businesses accelerate their data-driven transformations. This new partnership brings together one of the world’s largest data clouds from Salesforce with analytics and AI capabilities from Google Cloud, and represents a significant leap forward in businesses’ ability to generate more value and insights from their customer data.” – Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud

Salesforce and Google Partnership Momentum

In 2017, Salesforce and Google launched a strategic technology partnership, bringing together two of the world’s most innovative companies to help customers turn marketing, sales, service, and commerce data into actionable insights and better business outcomes. Since then, companies of all sizes and across all industries have been leveraging Google and Salesforce together to enhance marketing, provide AI-powered customer experiences, and increase productivity.

Availability:

The Data Cloud and Google Vertex AI integration will be in pilot mid-2023, and generally available late-2023.

The Data Cloud and BigQuery integration will be in pilot late-2023, and generally available early 2024.

The Marketing Cloud and Google Analytics integration will be available later this year and compatible with GA4.

Salesforce Announces Einstein GPT, the World’s First Generative AI for CRM

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, today launched Einstein GPT, the world’s first generative AI CRM technology, which delivers AI-created content across every sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interaction, at hyperscale. With Einstein GPT, Salesforce will transform every customer experience with generative AI.

Einstein GPT will infuse Salesforce’s proprietary AI models with generative AI technology from an ecosystem of partners and real-time data from the Salesforce Data Cloud, which ingests, harmonizes, and unifies all of a company’s customer data.

With Einstein GPT, customers can then connect that data to OpenAI’s advanced AI models out of the box, or choose their own external model and use natural-language prompts directly within their Salesforce CRM to generate content that continuously adapts to changing customer information and needs in real time.

For example, Einstein GPT can generate personalized emails for salespeople to send to customers, generate specific responses for customer service professionals to more quickly answer customer questions, generate targeted content for marketers to increase campaign response rates, and auto-generate code for developers.

“The world is experiencing one of the most profound technological shifts with the rise of real-time technologies and generative AI. This comes at a pivotal moment as every company is focused on connecting with their customers in more intelligent, automated, and personalized ways.

“Einstein GPT, in combination with our Data Cloud and integrated in all of our clouds as well as Tableau, MuleSoft, and Slack, is another way we are opening the door to the AI future for all our customers, and we’ll be integrating with OpenAI at launch.” said Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.

Integration with OpenAI: Salesforce is combining OpenAI’s enterprise-grade ChatGPT technology with Salesforce’s private AI models to deliver relevant and trusted AI-generated content.

“We’re excited to apply the power of OpenAI’s technology to CRM,” said Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. “This will allow more people to benefit from this technology, and it allows us to learn more about real-world usage, which is critical to the responsible development and deployment of AI — a belief that Salesforce shares with us.”

Salesforce Ventures launches $250 million Generative AI Fund: Salesforce also announced a Generative AI Fund from Salesforce Ventures, the company’s global investment arm. The new $250 million fund will invest in high-potential startups, bolster the startup ecosystem, and spark the development of responsible, trusted, and generative AI.

Einstein GPT is the next generation of Einstein, Salesforce’s AI technology that currently delivers more than 200 billion AI-powered predictions per day across the Customer 360. And by combining proprietary Einstein AI models with ChatGPT or other leading large language models, customers can use natural-language prompts on CRM data to trigger powerful, time-saving automations, and create personalized, AI-generated content. Launching today are:

  • Einstein GPT for Sales: Auto-generate sales tasks like composing emails, scheduling meetings, and preparing for the next interaction.
  • Einstein GPT for Service: Generate knowledge articles from past case notes. Auto-generate personalized agent chat replies to increase customer satisfaction through personalized and expedited service interactions.
  • Einstein GPT for Marketing: Dynamically generate personalized content to engage customers and prospects across email, mobile, web, and advertising.
  • Einstein GPT for Slack Customer 360 apps: Deliver AI-powered customer insights in Slack like smart summaries of sales opportunities and surface end users actions like updating knowledge articles.
  • Einstein GPT for Developers: Improve developer productivity with Salesforce Research’s proprietary large language model by using an AI chat assistant to generate code and ask questions for languages like Apex.

ChatGPT for Slack, built by OpenAI: In addition, Salesforce and OpenAI today announced the ChatGPT for Slack app. The app provides new AI-powered conversation summaries, research tools to learn about any topic, and writing assistance to quickly draft messages.

The customer perspective: Customers like HPE, L’Oréal, RBC US Wealth Management, and S&P Global Ratings discuss the value generative AI delivers to improve customer engagement.

  • “Embedding AI into our CRM has delivered huge operational efficiencies for our advisors and clients,” said Greg Beltzer, Head of Tech for RBC US Wealth Management. “We believe that this technology has the potential to transform the way businesses interact with their customers, deliver personalized experiences, and drive customer loyalty. We are excited to explore this opportunity with Salesforce and drive the next generation of personalized customer experiences.”
  • “Advances in AI continue to facilitate deeper, multi-dimensional insights from market participants globally. Consequently, Sales and Marketing teams can improve their customer-centricity and become even more embedded in their customers’ journeys,” said Chris Heusler, Chief Commercial Officer of S&P Global Ratings. “The next chapter of AI has exciting implications for elevating the customer experience.”

Availability

Einstein GPT is currently in closed pilot.

64% of Irish organisations View Customer Service as a Revenue Generator

Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), the global leader in CRM, today released the fifth edition of its State of Service report that shares insights from over 8,000 professionals across 36 counties, including 100 from Ireland on how customer service organisations’ priorities, challenges, success measures, and strategies are shifting amid digital-first customer expectations and economic headwinds.

Key insights of this year’s State of Service report include:

Economic Uncertainty Prompts a Focus on Efficiency. As inflation takes hold and rate hikes dominate headlines, customer service teams are leaning into new success measures and technologies that promote productivity and efficiency. 78% of service organisations in Ireland use workflow and process automation.

Digital-First Customer Service Continues to Rise. Customer migration to digital channels took off during the pandemic, and shows no signs of slowing. 64% of service organisations in Ireland offer video support, and 63% offer live chat.

The “Great Resignation” Prompts a Focus on Employee Experience. With high turnover rates, service organisations are offering perks like remote work and improved career development opportunities. Service organisations in Ireland experienced an average turnover rate of 17% over the past year.

Customer Service Continues to Expand Beyond the Contact Center. Field service is now table stakes beyond its original domain in industries such as energy and utilities. 93% of service organisations with field operations in Ireland say it’s critical to scaling their business.

Comments on the news:

  • “Customer service is on the forefront of shifts to digital-first customer engagement.” said Brian Solis, Salesforce Global Innovation Evangelist. “As economic uncertainty prompts customers and businesses to reevaluate their priorities and investments, it will be all the more critical for leaders to take stock of how their capabilities, success metrics, and strategies reinforce customer service’s position as a revenue generator that drives customer loyalty. This research provides valuable baselines and differentiators that help inform important decisions .”

For more information:

Salesforce Report Shows 86% of Irish Respondents Say Experience Is as Important as Products

Salesforce, the global leader in CRM, today released the fifth edition of its State of the Connected Customer report that shares insights from nearly 17,000 consumers and business buyers across 29 countries, including 650 from Ireland on the new digital-first customer engagement landscape.

Key insights of this year’s State of the Connected Customer report include:

A Trust-Based Economy Has Emerged. As customers navigate a rapidly changing world, questions of trust, values and integrity are increasingly impacting their relationships with companies. 91% of Irish respondents believe trust becomes more important in times of change.

Digital Acceleration Is Sparking Demand for Personalisation at Scale. Customer engagement is decidedly digital-first, but brands are under pressure to merge online and offline interactions into a personalised experience as in-person interaction re-emerges. 69% of Ireland respondents have purchased products in new ways since 2020.

New Realities Are Testing Brand Loyalties. As priorities and behaviours shift, established brand loyalties are undergoing tests of strength. 73% of Irish consumers have switched brands at least once last year.

This new digital-first world has changed the norms of commerce, work, and everyday life, prompting customers and brands to re-establish how they connect. As customers continue to shift their preferred experiences with brands to online channels, brands must re-imagine digital-first experiences that engage customers in a way that is flexible, thoughtful, and provides a personal touch.

View a breakdown of key insights from consumers and business buyers, including generation and country filters, in an interactive Tableau dashboard.

“It is more important than ever for companies to understand their customers’ needs and expectations,” said Deirdre Purcell, Country Sales Leader at Salesforce Ireland. “While businesses are navigating a changing landscape, so too are customers, with an increased importance on trust, values and integrity impacting their relationships with brands.

 “The accelerated demand for digital technology is set to continue, but it is not the only challenge leaders have to grapple with, they also need to focus on merging online and offline interactions into more personalised experiences. This new digital-first world means that companies in Ireland must re-establish how they connect with customers and engage them in a flexible, thoughtful manner.”

 

Seamless Salesforce & Outlook Integration With Revenue Grid

After having spent numerous working hours on processing emails and searching for necessary information, you made up your mind to go digital and apply Salesforce and Microsoft Outlook to your company workflow. However, many pitfalls can become a wall behind the effortless integration of user data between these two systems and your business efficiency. For you not to devote too much time and effort to fix things that have been successfully managed by others, read our helpful guide on one of the most powerful solutions that can aid you on your way — Revenue Grid.

Problems of Using Salesforce and Outlook Simultaneously

It might be tricky for an average business user to deal with tons of scattered data sources. Constantly updating reports and waiting for replies from IT is both time and energy-consuming. Although modern analytics tools can provide you with privileges over competitors, they usually require specialized knowledge and skills to be utilized on a regular basis. 

 

The lack of the latter can worsen forecast visibility and opportunity analytics, and prevent you from getting predictive insights. Luckily, modern solutions such as Einstein Salesforce Analytics or Revenue Grid can help you store all business data in a single place, gain powerful insights, and instantly make data-driven decisions. 

 

When trying to integrate Salesforce and Outlook, users usually have to pass several circles of hell:

 

  • switching back and forth between Outlook and Salesforce trying to duplicate the data in both systems;
  • making occasional errors when re-entering the necessary information into separate apps;
  • missing essential data during the inputting process;
  • wasting much working time on synchronizing the data manually;
  • addressing seemingly reliable at first sight, but ineffective on practice platforms, etc.

 

However, seamless data integration is not impossible with the right service at your hands, like Revenue Grid. Read on to find out which benefits make this software cover all the arising issues you might face when you sync and unify your data between Salesforce and Outlook.

Revenue Grid Advantages for a Business User

Here are the benefits your service, sales, and marketing teams can get with Revenue Grid:

 

  • easily manage Salesforce data in Outlook without logging into the CRM;
  • data auto-capture function to automatically update records for any project;
  • clickable time slots added in emails for optimized scheduling;
  • syncing Salesforce calendars with those used in Outlook;
  • automatically building new records without duplicates;
  • no manual data entry since Revenue Grid automatically captures emails, calendar events, contacts, attachments, and tasks; 
  • overall optimization of user Salesforce account;
  • building an improved sales process;
  • easy installation and straightforward use;
  • a free demo to decide whether you’d like to continue using the service, etc.

 

In the end, you will get a well-structured, easily manageable system of contacts, email threads, events, and tasks. Many users have claimed this smart solution helped them boost their sales and marketing efforts.

Salesforce Plus Outlook Equals to Revenue Grid

By integrating the Outlook app into your Salesforce account, you can maintain and operate all the data in a single place, streamline business workflow, and provide your clients with a unified experience and better service. Using efficient, trustable software like Revenue Grid only enhances your chances to avoid typing mistakes and experience a smooth and seamless integration process. Centralize your company’s Salesforce data into Outlook, save you resources and time, and boost your business efficiency.