Raising the Bar: Key Takeaways from Salesforce ‘Connected Customer’ Conference

Living up to the Customer is the nouveau and delicate challenge surrounding digital enterprises today. The holisitic shift in focus has parlayed the reaps of experimentation around ‘customer loyalty’ a decade ago, into a new hymn praising the ‘extraordinary experiences’ that businesses can now deliver to their customers. Moreover, 84% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services – up from 80% in 2018.

Remarkably, business buyers are just as picky and choosy about their purchase decisions as the consumers they’re coddling — and with good reason too. 89% of business buyers vs 83% of consumers share similar views on the role of customer experience. Both groups also share similar expectations from companies engaging with them — they all need more product information, product choices, and product types to make the most informed buying decisions. 

Personalised Journeys

Salesforce’s recent report points the digital arrow towards intelligence in the connected customer journey. The expectations are as clear as they are loud — more personalisation. When customers’ needs are left unmet by their primary engager, even after several interactions, the relationship weakens. As a result, at least 52% of all customers (including millennials and Gen Z’ers) feel companies are generally impersonal. 

Modern customer engagement happens in real time, (71% of customers feel this way) — highlighting how hurriedly the consumer’s attention is split.

AI-powered Experiences

Truly the stakes have never been higher than they are now. To raise the bar, companies are turning to data to solve these challenges. An intelligent experience for any customer has to have AI built-in, be outcome-focused, complete, actionable, simple and trustable. 

Source: Salesforce State of the Connected Customer

All AI is based on data, specifically good data. But data can’t be sourced from within the company alone. Lots of external data sources are critical to training advanced machine learning models. Nowadays, most organisations are data rich, information poor and ineptly staffed.

Browsing and discovery are closely shaping the way businesses organize service and delivery. According to the report, more than half of customers expect to find whatever they need in three clicks or less. The future state of connectivity is already trying to reduce these clicks to zero, where the experience is hyper-connected and hyper-individualized, right before the customer even decides to buy.

Why Good Data?

Good data enriches unique insights into the customer’s behavior and interests. Customer buying decisions don’t always follow a well-defined rationale or logic. So, to train a model to understand human behavior and preferences — we teach the model a variety of identifiable patterns that the model will then learn and perfect on. Using this learned information, we can approximate for the next buyer! This way the model behaves like a sales rep who is able to identify who the best customers are, why they like your products or services, and even why they prefer yours over competitors.

Source: Salesforce State of the Connected Customer

From Multi to Omni

Millennials & Gen Z are the most omni-channel group among today’s consumers — utilizing around 11 channels on average. Noteworthily, the report reveals that business buyers are not that different; sixty-seven percent of them prefer to buy through multiple digital channels. Business buyers are more likely than consumers to value product

By placing the customer at the heart of the problem, organizations are under more pressure than ever to deliver real-time results, seamless hand-offs and ultra-contextualized experiences. An emphasis on developing strong policies surrounding the collection and use of data — demonstrates a level of commitment that doesn’t go unnoticed by customers. Infact, the ROI of sound data practices extends beyond trust. The key to winning customer experience begins with being transparent about their data. Companies focusing on the quick sale will have to take an ongoing investment in the customer relationship, well after the deal is done, to stand a chance at winning in the connected future.

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