Salesforce.com makes strong customer experience play at Connections conference

Salesforce.com has taken the latest step in its journey towards creating an overarching platform that integrates marketing, advertising, sales and service activities in a bid to become the customer experience environment of choice.

At the Cloud-based application vendor’s Connections conference in New York City yesterday, it unveiled the latest version of its Journey Builder product, which enables marketers to tailor their activities more effectively to customers’ requirements in real-time based on their behaviour, demographics and preferred communication channel.

With the new release, however, the supplier has also integrated its marketing, sales and service “Clouds” or application suites, and included pre-built triggers to create a more unified customer experience.

This means that if a customer interacts with the sales or services department, for instance, it becomes possible to target them with relevant marketing or advertising activity in real-time.

Moreover, if an individual submits a query to the company website or joins its loyalty programme, relevant, personalised communications from the relevant department, whether marketing, sales or services, will be triggered to help them continue on their “journey”.

If it is necessary to open a customer case, after the situation has been dealt with, an email will automatically be sent confirming that it is closed, but marketers will also be alerted and can follow-up with an SMS to say ‘thank you’ or to email a customer service survey. Any move would see the data in the customer’s contact record being automatically updated at the same time.

Scott McCorkie, chief executive of the Salesforce marketing cloud business, said: “Marketers now have an unprecedented opportunity to engage customers at every step of their journey. The next generation of the Salesforce marketing cloud uniquely helps companies take action on data from any customer interaction to deliver the right content at the right time across every channel.”

Deeper integration between Journey Builder and Salesforce’s Active Audience offering, which was released in March, also enables marketers to use their organisation’s CRM data to target customers with ad campaigns in real-time during appropriate stages of their journey - rather than simply rely on blanket provision using web cookies or email lists uploaded to Facebook.

The idea is to move display advertising campaigns from batch or blast mode in order to make them more event-triggered and personalised.