Dreams made real as V5 Digital becomes a Salesforce Consulting Partner
Updated: Jun 21, 2022
V5 Digital, a leading Digital Marketing Agency based in Windhoek, Namibia - serving Customers around the Globe - is proud to be an official Salesforce Partner.
So what is Salesforce, and how do brands and businesses benefit from it?
Salesforce is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution that brings companies and customers together. It’s one integrated CRM platform called Customer 360, that gives all your departments in your company - including marketing, sales, commerce, and services - a single shared view of every customer.
Salesforce.com, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California.
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 want a single source of customer information. Their view is 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.
Why 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.
An 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 is incredibly important,” she said. “And the partnership we have with Salesforce has enabled us to do that across many, many markets. It is 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, non-obligation consultation.