Interesting tools for managing customer journeys effectively

Consumers move through different channels, products and brands. Businesses today are looking for new ways to connect with the customers, guide them on customer journeys from anywhere, and from any device. How to offer a seamless digital experience to consumers and optimize the customer journey? Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform offers different tools such as Journey Builder, Radian 6, Buddy Media, and Social.com to manage customer journeys, experiences – ensuring remarkable customer success.

1. What is Journey Builder and its benefits?

A powerful campaign planning tool to guide customers on 1:1 journeys across various channels. Its benefits:

• Companies drive deeper engagement with the users by connecting with customers directly from mobile apps
• Delivers personalized targeted messages
• Easier visualization through user friendly interface

2. What is Radian 6 and its benefits?

A social media listening and monitoring tool that helps businesses engage in social conversations. Its benefits:

• User friendly engagement console to share, coordinate, assign, and respond to posts
• Integrates Facebook, and multiple accounts for Salesforce Chatter and Twitter
• Generates leads by listening to your customers online – fostering customer relationships

3. What is Buddy Media and its benefits?

A social media content publishing and management tool. Its benefits:

• Simple to publish, engaging and interactive social apps
• Helps deploy content on social networks easily
• Easy to create landing pages by optimizing publishing strategy
• More streamlined social media marketing campaigns with analytics, community building, and monitoring

4. What is Social.com and its benefits?

A highly useful social advertising app for advertisers to manage their campaigns with just a few clicks. Its benefits:

• Increase in marketing productivity by managing Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter advertising
• Reduce third party advertising costs

Why is Customer Journey Management an essential practice?

• Provides streamlined customer experience
• Helps identify customers’ problems across myriad channels
• Provides appropriate, timely customer information
• Provides insights into successful and unsuccessful customer journeys
• Helps understand important touchpoints of customers

To choose the right marketing platform amongst leading options like Oracle, Eloqua, HP Explore Cloud, IBM Big Blue, Adobe, or Salesforce, can be a big fix. Over the last few years, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has emerged as one of the most globally preferred platforms and is one of the Salesforce solutions that helps brands personalize customer journeys and empowers them to connect with their customers in a whole new and convenient way with industry leading tools.

Adapting the Most Important Sales Process Strategies

A successful business knows the wants and buying behaviours of potential customers. Salesforce has been helping many organizations grow – empowering them with the tools to improve customer experience, identify customer behaviours and trends, and close more deals quickly.

Sales reps today need to connect from anywhere and from any device. But what strategies are required to engage and connect with prospects and customers better? The Salesforce sales optimization platform (Sales Cloud) answers many such questions – helping global sales organizations to overcome repeatable and likely challenges. The SFA (Sales Force Automation) tools that Sales Cloud offers not only solve these challenges, but also helps in tracking the sales’ performance, in quickening the sales cycle and in enhancing the teams’ productivity. Have a look at the mix of what matters the most to the organizations’ sales process strategies and how Salesforce is the sales hero:

• Aligning Sales and Marketing: Improves sales and marketing performance with the ability to track a prospect’s buying behaviour through real-time activity notifications by Salesforce1 Sales Reach. It combines Sales Cloud, Communities, and Pardot (Marketing Automation tool) for cross cloud synchronization and thus, better data. ‘Sales Reach’ helps organizations improve sales and marketing performance by empowering teams to make better decisions with deeper and quicker insights.
• Making the most of AppExchange: Helps sales reps be more productive through easy customization of different third party sales apps present on of the biggest online Marketplaces – Salesforce AppExchange. For e.g. Dashboards & Reports, Email & Calendar Sync, Sales Intelligence, Contract Management, and more.
• Mapping customer journey: Gives sales reps and managers a better view of how a customer moves through the sales funnel. Customers’ touchpoints are monitored through defined behavioural stages. A customer journey map is clear & simple, and helps a sales rep identify gaps and concerns that relate to customer behaviours.
• Implying Sales Analytics: Determines whether a business is meeting its sales forecasts through modelling, identifying and forecasting sales trends & outcomes. With sales analytics, sales teams have easy access to data that was once limited to just the data teams or the IT department.
• Being more responsive: Makes it easier for sales reps to connect with prospects & customers with Salesforce1 Sales Cloud mobile app.

Sales Process Automation or Optimization helps streamline the sales strategies of a business by identifying sales stages such as activity tracking, lead management, forecasting and more. It also enhances sales performance of different organizations through automation. Salesforce Sales Cloud is a salesforce automation platform that provides easy tools and customizations for a strategic and robust optimization process. It empowers businesses to close deals faster with the ability to connect to customers anytime and anywhere.

Salesforce1 accelerates Mobile App Development

According to a survey, the average person interacts with their mobile device 150 times a day.

We are living in an age where our thinking is not possible without Smartphones or electronic gadgets. As the internet world is becoming mobile, customers’ needs of having all the information at their fingertips is also increasing. So, if any organization is online and have a mobile app, they can provide better real-time support and services for their customers through mobile apps.

Why does organization need a mobile app?

Even a mobile website can cause issues and take time in processing information causing a loss to the organization. However, mobile applications have the ability to load information faster and have a user-friendly approach to complete the processes within the timeframe. They can also be used for:

Cross-platform marketing: Mobile apps can be used on various operating systems, and across tablets, phones and laptops, which could be a useful way to cross-promote a brand across multiple channels, and ensure a secured presence across them all.

In-store sale: Mobile apps can transform business processes by significantly reducing cost and generate valuable business intelligence and analytics. Also, they promote a better in-store experience by integrating various channels into a smooth customer buying journey.

Unmatched user-experience: Almost all mobile devices have the ability to track their users. For example, using WiFi or GPS tracking, an application can gather data about where a customer spends most of their time and the retailer can target deals accordingly.

Benefits of having a mobile app

Mobile apps have been around for quite some time and there is a lot of hype around the app-development market. Salesforce’s Salesforce1 platform is also delivering a component framework and a new set of tools to develop highly powerful and dynamic web apps offering valuable benefits to businesses and customers. Take a look:

1. Enhanced end user experience: With more mobile indulgence, it is very important for businesses to reach where people are and provide a mobile app that gives an easy access to their inventory.
2. Search: Just like Google search, mobile apps provide enhanced knowledge about the organizations and their products/services providing a user-experience that mobile websites or widgets are unable to provide.
3. Automated data collection: Mobile apps allow automated, instant data collection and enable participants to share their experiences without outside influence and hindrances.
4. Easier measurement of ROI: With mobile apps, organizations can easily measure the impact of an event on their brand, effectiveness of sponsorship, event satisfaction and more.

Mobile applications allow businesses to provide better and more targeted delivery of marketing material and enhanced experience to customers. Without a doubt, almost every business needs a mobile app today. With Salesforce Services, organizations can not only synchronize data sources with the CRM solution, but can also quickly create applications that more closely match the needs of their clients.

Social Customer Service for modern marketers

75% of marketers using social media identify customer service as a primary use of their social media platform.

Marketers understand their customers well. They identify leads, nurture them and bring them down through the sales funnel. But, the objective is not just to sell the product or service; they need to generate positive customer engagement by turning first-time customers into long-term buyers. To increase customer retention, marketers need to provide great customer service keeping the customer needs as the first priority.

Why do marketers need customer service?

Customer-centric marketing is a whole lot more than understanding an ideal customer profile. Organizations need to deliver a consistent and identifiable quality of service for an improved customer experience. So, to achieve these objectives, marketers need to have:

• Better understanding of customers: Customer experience can make or break a brand. Organizations need to have a deep customer insight and personalized engagement in order to deliver a relevant experience at every step of the customer journey.
• Enhanced customer experience: Customers contact support to get the solution of the challenges they are facing. Marketers can use this knowledge to draft new insights for future marketing efforts and tailor existing offers to meet customer needs.
• Better Content Creation Ideas: Customers constantly communicate with customer service agents, tell them about their problems, interests, and needs, which makes support teams an untapped goldmine of viable content ideas. This helps marketers to add real-life customer examples and success stories in their marketing content.

How can marketers provide excellent customer service?

Marketers need to team up with customer service agents to enhance their customer experience and safeguard their brand image. So, to manage customer issues more efficiently, marketers need to:

• Provide unique customer experience: Customers are very sensitive. Making them feel important and appreciated will create a good feeling and trust towards the organization.  An organization needs to make them understand their ability to deliver what customers are looking for and fulfill their needs.
• Know the customer base: Paying attention to customer details, allowing businesses to connect with customers on a more personal level will help an organization to serve them better.
• Think long term: Organizations need to give more than expected to maintain a long-term engagement with their customers. They need to ask themselves:
  What can they give customers that they cannot get elsewhere?
  What can they do to follow-up and thank people even when they don’t buy?
  What can they give customers that is totally unexpected?
• Offer seamless experience: Customers interact with organizations through more channels and in more places than ever before. Organizations need to provide a consistent experience through every single channel, whether it’s in the store, on the web, or through social media.

It may be difficult for marketers to find the time and/or the resources to apply marketing to their customer service organization. But Salesforce Services can help them produce results that outperform customer acquisition campaigns.  This is because Salesforce provides solutions across all business functions – IT, Support, Marketing, Sales, CRM, Analytics, and a lot more – by also integrating these functions together.