Three years ago V5 Digital, a leading Digital Marketing Agency based in Windhoek, became a Salesforce Consulting Partner, offering game-changing benefits to clients and helping businesses in Namibia and beyond grow to exciting new levels.
So what is Salesforce, and how do brands and businesses benefit from it?
Salesforce is a US-based Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform that has become increasingly popular in the African market in recent years. One of the main reasons for this is its ability to help businesses streamline their sales, marketing, and commerce processes and better understand their customers. The Customer 360 platform gives every department a shared view of every customer.
In particular, Salesforce's cloud-based platform allows companies to access customer data from anywhere, making it easier for teams to manage leads and track customer interactions. This is especially important in the African market, where many businesses operate across multiple countries and regions.
What prompted the development of Salesforce Customer 360?
In 2019, Salesforce commissioned Forrester Consulting, to evaluate the use of CRM systems across a wide range of industries, involving 484 business leaders in the survey. A majority of respondents (57%) reported that CRMs are somewhat fragmented across the organization, with a few, many, or all departments having their own CRM.
This is a result of individual departments pursuing initiatives in silos; for example, modernising sales and customer service, or updating existing applications. Unfortunately, siloed initiatives result in siloed data. As the results show, "customer data is coming from too many sources to make sense of it easily, and these silos are negatively impacting the quality of customer and prospect experiences."
Business leaders indicated that they wanted a single source of customer information. Their view was that their CRM system should have functionality well beyond the sales and service departments, but they are struggling to combine and merge data across their teams and systems. In fact, the report shows that “creating a single view of the customer across teams and systems is the greatest customer experience challenge faced by business leaders today.”
The design and development of Salesforce Customer 360 solved this challenge by connecting the various team silos. Jody Farrar, Senior Director, Product Marketing, at Salesforce, describes the process as follows: “Salesforce helps break down technology silos in your organization so no matter where they are, employees in marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT share a single customer view.
This enables a deeper understanding of customers on one customer relationship management (CRM) platform. We call it Salesforce Customer 360 because it gives you a 360-degree view of your customers.
How does this help your teams?
This holistic view of each customer shortens the time it takes for your company to resolve customer issues, eliminates redundancies in your communications, and allows you to personalise interactions in order to grow relationships with your customers. Our tools are also completely digital, so you can respond to customer needs quickly, from anywhere.
Efforts to integrate CRM systems with core operational systems are paying off: the research shows that businesses which successfully connect departments on a well-integrated CRM platform report significantly higher customer satisfaction.
A good example is Adidas, a Salesforce customer since 2011. Their 1100 agents can now access a single view of their customers using various Salesforce products.
The Adidas digital channel, powered by Salesforce, is essential to the company’s growth and future success, according to Smith-Dubendorfer, VP of Digital Experience Design. “The scale and consistency at which we're able to deliver and bring our brand to life are incredibly important,” she said. “And the partnership we have with Salesforce has enabled us to do that across many, many markets. It’s enabling us to be faster to market, to deliver better experiences quicker, and to drive scale and consistency in a way we weren't able to do before.”
A senior director at Salesforce reminds us that “Digital transformation isn’t one size fits all. That’s why you can tailor Customer 360’s capabilities to your specific needs, from AI to analytics to integration to training. And beyond the technology, our global ecosystem of experts, app partners and services is always on hand, 24/7.”
V5 Digital can help you select the suite of Salesforce products that meets your business needs, and then either train your in-house team on how to implement the Salesforce software or do this for you by setting up your ideal digital & customer relationship management (CRM) ecosystem. Don’t hesitate to contact V5 Digital for a free, no-obligation consultation.
