How to Raise the Bar with your Customer Experience on the Salesforce Platform
In 1968, the sport of high jump was irreversibly changed by an engineering student from Oregon. Up until then, every athlete embraced the same technique — the scissor kick — clearing the bar with their feet first. Then came along Dick Fosbury who decided lowering one’s center of gravity and leading with the back first was the best way to jump higher. He showed up to the 1968 Mexico City Olympics wearing odd shoes, performed what became known as the “Fosbury Flop”, and walked away with the gold medal and an olympic record of 2.24 meters. He never competed in another event, but by the end of the 1970s, every high jumper had adopted his new technique. Dick Fosbury truly raised the bar in the high jump.
When it comes to today’s standard of consumer experience, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google (FAANG) are raising the bar just like Dick Fosbury did. These companies deliver seamless experiences across every device, leveraging artificial intelligence for intuitive personalization, that have achieved unprecedented scale in a short amount of time. A quick look at the most downloaded apps on the App Store shows domination by Facebook and Google, and apps by consumer spend topped by Netflix. Let’s not forget who owns the marketplace these apps are distributed through — a marketplace that launched just over 10 years ago. For context, if you’d invested $10,000 in Netflix at the time of the App Store launching, you’d be a millionaire today, such is the power of creating amazing customer experiences.
It would be unreasonable to expect us all to jump as high as Dick Fosbury, and yet, now everyone expects digital experiences to meet or exceed the FAANG-standard. We get impatient when greeted with a paper form at the front desk of our dentist, or when we have to call our bank’s call center to update our information. Why doesn’t my insurance company have a mobile app like Facebook?
The answer is that legacy technology makes creating these engaging experiences hard. Companies that have been around longer than a couple of decades often have hundreds of different systems in use, fracturing their view of their customer. Older technology is not mobile-optimized, difficult to personalize and scale, and doesn’t empower anyone. It’s as if the ask is to clear the high jump bar with backpack full of bricks. Legacy technology weighs innovation down. So what’s Salesforce got to say about this? It’s just a CRM right?
Wrong.
Just like Amazon is no longer just a bookstore, Salesforce has outgrown its CRM tag. Salesforce is an industry leading Platform-as-a-Service. Customers of all sizes across all industries are creating amazing customer experiences on the Salesforce Platform. Here are three common use cases.
Develop Engaging Consumer Apps with CRM Data
Customers are creating engaging mobile and web apps for their consumers on the Salesforce Platform’s hidden secret, Heroku. Development teams love Heroku because they can code in modern languages with the complexity of wiring-up infrastructure abstracted away. What’s more, all experiences built on Heroku can be seamlessly integrated with their employee apps on Salesforce through a point-and-click integration tool called Heroku Connect. This ensures they’re maintaining the complete 360-degree view of their customer.
Align Technology’s Director of Consumer Marketing for North America, Kamal Bhandal, says “Our migration to Heroku has enabled us to more rapidly meet the changing needs of prospective patients and launch content updates at a quicker pace.” All of Align Technology’s consumer-facing apps are running on Heroku, including Invisalign.com, which is globally distributed in multiple languages and scales based on usage of the customers and consumers. Invisalign.com has a number of tools that prospective Invisalign patients can use, including the Invisalign Smile Assessment app which provides a personalized assessment with samples of similar completed cases and an Invisalign Cost Calculator that provides an estimated monthly payment scenario.
Build External Portals Fast
Often companies are looking for ways to empower their partners through technology. Perhaps there is important information in Salesforce that would be helpful in the hands of a company’s brokers, dealers, franchisees, clients, or other third parties. For this use case, there’s Lightning External Apps, an industry-leading offering that allows for the rapid creation of portals using drag-and-drop tools. As a product built natively on the Lightning Platform it inherits all the powerful enterprise services such as search, identity and authentication, process automation, component-based UI/UX, artificial intelligence and more. As a mobile-first platform, everything built for the desktop automatically comes ready for mobile devices. Now with Mobile Publisher these mobile experiences can be custom-branded and published to the App Store and Google Play with their own listing.
Auction.com’s Director of Enterprise Systems, Luke Martell, says that “Giving our clients the same real-time view into their property portfolio as our employees is a game changer for us.” The online real estate marketplace was able to replace copious spreadsheets and email communications between their clients and operations team with a simple yet powerful portal built with Lightning External Apps. Now their clients have a real-time view into the some 15,000 plus live auctions taking place on their marketplace each year.
Make Customer Logins Frictionless
Have you ever used several different usernames and passwords to engage with the one brand? Maybe your username for a company’s mobile app is different from their eCommerce store. No one likes these disconnected experiences. Not many people know that Salesforce is also a leader in Customer Identity Management capable of handling user authentication, social sign-on, two-factor authentication, single sign-on, custom-branded login pages and more. Not only does relying on the Salesforce Platform for these services make the user login experience frictionless, the real benefit is how all user login data can be stored in your CRM. Imagine running reports on your most active users, or leveraging login information to trigger more timely email campaigns and other business processes.
Leading agricultural cooperative Land O’Lakes Inc.’s Director of Enterprise Architecture and Innovation, Ananth Krishnan, says Salesforce Identity was “Easy to implement, reduced friction in the customer registration process, and allowed us to meet vital business goals.” The Minnesota-based company used to rely on a 15-year-old home-grown system to manage its 4,500 member cooperative. Since replacing with a custom-branded Salesforce Identity login experience they have reduced customer service tickets relating to login and user provisioning functionality by 33%. The custom-branded page looks great too.
In the world we live in with heightened customer expectations, the key is to leverage a future-proof platform that allows for rapid innovation. The Salesforce Platform lets you create amazing customer experiences, connected to your hub of customer data: your CRM. The question isn’t how will you meet the high bar of customer expectation, it becomes how high will you set the bar?
