In the ever-evolving tech landscape, businesses must adapt, innovate, and thrive. Salesforce Experience Cloud (SEC for short) is at the heart of this revolution. SEC is reshaping enterprise engagement with customers and streamlining operations. But how do you win the race and stand out among numerous companies in terms of efficiency?
Consider the story of Southwest Airlines in the USA. Airline operations were disturbed in the past winter, in 2022, due to severe winter storms. All other airlines managed to pull off their flights somehow with minimal losses. But Southwest Airlines had to cancel more than 15,000 flights! The culprit? A decades-old flight scheduling system.
This article will guide you through digital transformation strategies, focusing on how Salesforce Experience Cloud can help you. We will focus on the nuances of digital transformation itself and how it is employed in the Salesforce Experience cloud. Moreover, we will unravel its transformative potential in easing business operations and management.
Understanding Digital Transformation
Digital transformation includes a broad spectrum of initiatives to reshape businesses in response to the evolving digital landscape. It spans from essential IT modernization endeavors, such as integrating cloud computing, to optimizing existing digital processes and innovating entirely new digital business models. The term is multifaceted, often applied in public-sector contexts to denote initiatives like online service provision or modernizing legacy systems, aligning more with “digitization” than a comprehensive ‘digital business transformation’.
Digital transformation involves deeper restructuring of traditional and non-digital business processes and services. Therefore, it often goes beyond mere technological updates. It seeks to meet the dynamic demands of the market and evolving customer expectations, fundamentally altering the management and operation of businesses and redefining how value is delivered to customers.
Why use Salesforce Experience Cloud and Digitization?
Various research studies and articles suggest that cloud systems are essential tools in modern systems. More specifically, cloud-based customer relationship management systems (CRM) are the must-have tools for cloud-based digital transformation initiatives.
Cloud CRMs like SEC help minimize the complexity of business operations and improve customer service. Furthermore, the SEC’s ability to adapt to changing customer requirements is quite efficient. The cloud-based CRM’s high customizability and agility allow organizations to build efficient, customer-centric business processes that increase productivity and conversions. Below are some of the best features of the SEC.
1- Customer 360
Experience Cloud incorporates the Customer 360 concept, offering businesses a unified customer view. This feature enables a comprehensive understanding of customer behaviors and needs, fostering personalized interactions and services and making customer interactions more productive and meaningful.
2- Preconfigured Themes and Branding
Through Experience Builder, businesses can seamlessly brand their sites using prebuilt themes. This includes customization options for colors, fonts, and styles. Integration of Lightning components further enhances the site’s functionality and visual appeal.
3- Question to Case
Businesses can transform user-generated questions into actionable cases through the Chatter Questions feature. Automation capabilities further streamline case creation, ensuring efficient handling of customer queries and issues.
4- Groups
Experience Cloud promotes self-service and collaboration by allowing site members and guest users to browse and join groups. Customization options for group detail pages enhance the user experience, creating a sense of community within the platform.
5- Templates
Experience Cloud provides ready-made templates that facilitate the creation of responsive and tailored experiences for both customers and partners. With well-written templates ranging from sales emails to business models, SEC accelerates the development process, ensuring a visually appealing and user-friendly interface.
6- Salesforce CMS
Leveraging the power of Salesforce Content Management System (CMS), businesses can centralize content creation, organization, and management. Integration with external CMS allows for the seamless posting of relevant content across all Experience Cloud sites, ensuring consistency and relevance.
7- Knowledge
Experience Cloud enables businesses to enhance customer support by incorporating a Knowledge base directly into their site. This repository includes articles, FAQs, notes, and documents, providing valuable resources for customers and support teams and avoiding unnecessary back-and-forth between the customers.
8- Chatter
The Chatter feature promotes engagement by facilitating quick communication. Members can use Chatter Feed to seek expert advice swiftly. Discussion Threads enable interactive conversations, fostering a sense of community and collaboration.
8-Mobile
The new mobile feature of SEC allows companies to continue to function from their mobile devices, thus increasing the up-time of the customer management team.
Case studies have shown that when organizations efficiently use these features of the SEC, they extract greater success in their customer management. The overall benefit that the organization in the case studies extract with SEC can be boiled down to 4 points, which are explained below:
1- Centralization
Once the business’ customer management system is centralized, it avoids duplication of work and provides a generalized understanding of the underlying issue.
2- Customizability
Being a one-stop-for-all solution, SEC allows companies to build business processes and solutions catering to their business cases. It provides creative freedom and empowers agility in processes that are not often industry standards but specific to the business case.
3- Business Process Automation
The various features of SEC, like chatter, groups, and CMS, have built-in additional features that help organizations automate repetitive tasks. Salesforce has also gone the distance with its AI-based customer chatbots. Furthermore, features like AI-based data processing and integration enhance the user experience on both ends of the business.
4- Data Management
Cloud services have the innate ability to offer companies the ability to keep centralized data storage. SEC goes a step further and allows for storing and managing digital data, processes, and communications, enabling an efficient centralized hub for data integration and management.
The Integration and Adoption Process
Considering the various features of the SEC, it is a great tool when companies endeavor for a complex digital transformation. Given the plethora of services offered by Salesforce, we focus on adopting the SEC for commerce sites, which is often the most common case of digital transformation. Salesforces lays down the process into three distinct steps.
The first steps include website/system deployment on the SEC manually or using generalized templates. Users buy the services of the SEC from Salesforce and adjust their commerce websites according to their needs.
The next step is finding an implementation partner to help businesses implement the more complex business processes on the SEC. These can be third-party organizations and companies providing cloud adoption services.
Finally, the data integration process exists where the adoption/migration partner helps the organizations store data more efficiently on the cloud—the process for the larger organizations continues. As new challenges emerge, they involve repetitive interactions with the adoption/migration partner.
This is where we can help you with our services. With a track record of X years in deploying systems on the SEC, we offer Y services to customers as an adoption/migration partner.
It must be understood that adopting the SEC is a complex task. It involves several challenges ranging from compatibility and cost management. We discuss them below.
Challenges in Moving to SEC
Integrating Salesforce Experience Cloud into an organization’s digital infrastructure presents several challenges that require careful consideration. These challenges encompass technical, organizational, and financial aspects, potentially influencing the success of the digital transformation initiative.
Integration Challenges
Integrating Salesforce Experience Cloud with existing systems is complex and time-consuming, posing potential delays and disruptions to digital transformation timelines. Navigating these challenges requires comprehensive planning and expertise to ensure seamless integration.
User Adoption and Skill Demands
Salesforce Experience Cloud’s robust features demand specialized skills, presenting a challenge in achieving widespread user adoption. Employees may require substantial training to effectively utilize the platform, emphasizing the need for organizations to invest in comprehensive training programs to bridge the skills gap and maximize benefits.
Data Quality and Security Risks
If not meticulously managed, centralizing customer data within Salesforce Experience Cloud introduces the risk of data quality issues. Only accurate or complete data entry can ensure information integrity, impacting decision-making processes. Given the sensitivity of storing customer data in the cloud, robust security measures are essential to counter potential breaches.
Financial Implications
Utilizing Salesforce Experience Cloud for digital transformation comes with associated costs, posing potential financial challenges, especially for small businesses. A clear understanding of these costs is necessary, prompting businesses to thoroughly assess the return on investment (ROI) and justify the financial implications of adopting Salesforce Experience Cloud.
Summing it up
In this blog post, we explained the benefits, features, and challenges of adopting SEC as the cloud-based CRM software if you’re a company. The Salesforce experience cloud is great to have in your arsenal when dealing with a large customer base, and your business processes are complex enough to demand input from multiple teams.
However, adopting this tool in your organizational arsenal is challenging and requires assistance from another organization. We at XYZ understand this dilemma and are there to help you integrate and fit in. With services ranging from A to B we are always at your service. So, ring us on number and let us know how we can help.
References
- Z. Tufekci, “Opinion | The Shameful Open Secret Behind Southwest’s Failure,” The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2022. Available: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/31/opinion/southwest-airlines-computers.html
- Whatfix, “What Is Digital Transformation? Overview, Why, & How,” Whatfix, 2023. https://whatfix.com/digital-transformation
- T. Chamorro-Premuzic, “The Essential Components of Digital Transformation,” Harvard Business Review, Nov. 23, 2021. https://hbr.org/2021/11/the-essential-components-of-digital-transformation
- Gartner, “Digital Transformation,” Gartner, 2023. https://www.gartner.com/en/information-technology/glossary/digital-transformation
- Karpenkova, “11 Must-Have Tools to Support Digital Transformation (2022) – Whatfix,” The Whatfix Blog | Drive Digital Adoption, Apr. 01, 2022. https://whatfix.com/blog/digital-transformation-tools/
- M. Herman, “10 Essential Tools to Support Your Digital Transformation,” LumApps, 2023. https://www.lumapps.com/digital-workplace/digital-transformation-tools/
- S. Arya, “The Role of Salesforce in Digital Transformation,” www.tutorialspoint.com, 2023. https://www.tutorialspoint.com/the-role-of-salesforce-in-digital-transformation
- Babur, “Salesforce Experience Cloud as a Way of Digital Transformation | Advanced Communities,” advancedcommunities.com, Dec. 27, 2022. https://advancedcommunities.com/blog/experience-cloud-for-digital-transformation/
- Salesforce, “Experience Cloud Features | Salesforce DXP Software,” Salesforce, 2023. https://www.salesforce.com/ap/products/experience-cloud/features/
- Salesforce, “AI for Customer Service & Support,” Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/products/ai-for-customer-service/
- Salesforce, “Experience Cloud Customer Stories,” Salesforce. https://www.salesforce.com/ap/products/experience-cloud/customer-stories/
