Dreamforce 2019 takeaways: 3 ways to improve your business in 2020

Thousands of Salesforce community members converged in San Francisco last month for Dreamforce 2019. The weeklong event included several exciting announcements, influential speakers, impactful sessions, and insightful knowledge sharing among those in attendance. New partnerships with companies such as Microsoft, Tableau, Apple, and Amazon indicate major opportunities for organizations to elevate their customer experience in 2020 using Salesforce technology to be more agile, predictive, and strategic.

But which opportunities are the lowest hanging fruit? Or where should organizations place bets first to make an immediate impact? We narrowed in on three areas for organizations to focus on in 2020 to improve business through new Salesforce functionality:

1. Increase workforce productivity

Enabling your workforce to be as productive as possible will position your organization to thrive in any economic landscape.

The Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Salesforce partnership will create new efficiency opportunities – especially for contact center teams – through the newly announced Service Cloud Voice feature. This telephony tool will seamlessly integrate with Amazon Connect and will allow calls to be auto-transcribed and then analyzed by Einstein to provide moment-in-time service suggestions based on keywords. This will free agents up to provide better service by listening instead of taking notes or searching for specific solutions to customer issues.

The next release of Health Cloud data will be visible to users even without a Health Cloud license that will drive down the cost of combined/collaborative clinical and non-clinical operating models. Salesforce’s newest platform, Manufacturing Cloud, will centralize account planning and forecasting for greater transparency, predictability, and alignment between sales and operations teams.

2. Connect and simplify data to provide better service

Organizations are facing no shortage of data. Painting a meaningful story with that information is becoming a challenge due to a growing number of sources and disparate systems. Emerging Salesforce solutions will help simplify data management and enable connected, omnichannel customer service.

Customer 360 Truth will allow organizations to connect all Clouds, orgs, and third-party data sources into one single platform, creating a truly connected, 360-degree view of your customer base from which to pull deeper insights.

Einstein’s presence will continue to grow within all the different Clouds. Einstein Analytics for Marketing Cloud will integrate Sales and Marketing to more clearly identify sources, determine engagements by channel that are most effective, and create dashboards powered by Einstein. Financial Services Cloud will now come with Service Cloud licenses and will put a continued focus on improving data flows to simplify processes such as mortgage applications. Pricing guidance is now available to all CPQ+ licenses, so sales representatives can upsell and suggest products specific to their clients’ needs. Manufacturing Cloud will unify run-rate business in Salesforce with data stored in ERP and order management systems so both operations and account teams have a 360-degree view of the customer.

3. Take a human-centered approach to engagement

This message was delivered clearly throughout the week at Dreamforce: Customers view their experiences as being as important as the actual product or service, but experiences must be delivered authentically. Service Cloud already provides Customer 360, but they are now taking a customer-centric and employee-centric approach to platform upgrades that will allow agents and field technicians to provide more valuable and personalized service to customers. Community Cloud is introducing Mobile Publisher to meet the consumer community’s growing request to have self-service access to their portals.

New features are also rolling out to the industry Clouds that will put customers and employees at the heart of each interaction. Health Cloud is introducing consumer preference management functionality to help foster more personalized engagement. Einstein will be increasingly integrated into the Financial Services Cloud platform to provide smarter insights through dashboards and increased personalization through AI.

AWS and Trailhead are also working together to provide more resources to Salesforce users to close the skills gap that frequently comes along with new technology – an especially important focus for employee engagement.

West Monroe is uniquely positioned to help companies get the most value out of their technology investments using a human-centered approach backed by customer experience and industry expertise. Contact us if you’d like to talk more about your specific needs.