Almost 89% of customers who have a poor customer experience (CX) go for a rival brand. The lesson learnt here is that excellent customer service is the cornerstone of a company's expansion and development. Today, companies' data sleep in decentralised and disconnected silos; we can term it a spaghetti architecture - the pain point to have a customer 360 picture in place.

Salesforce, one of the dominant CRM (Customer relationship management) platform providers in the market, eliminate departmental technological silos and creates a complete picture of the customers interacting with a firm, regardless of location or device. To further enrich the understanding, we reached out to Arun Rangaraju, Head of Customer Experience and Advisory Services at Salesforce India, to delve deeper.

"The ultimate aim of CRM is to treat every customer as a segment of what to go down to that level of personalisation where every customer is treated individually. To achieve that kind of personalisation at scale, the only way to do it is to use artificial intelligence," said Arun. 

AI integration

The salesforce platform has a number of AI components, and the AI solution is called Einstein, with some core components,

• Einstein Vision - For end users in sales, service, and marketing to gain insights about their customers and forecast outcomes for smarter decisions, the platform enables developers to integrate image recognition technology into CRM systems and other third-party apps.
• Einstein's language - With NLP and deep learning, the system can comprehend conversations with incredibly high accuracy and speed. It helps automate email responses and even routine activities like allocating requests to other teams. 
• Einstein's prediction builder - The platform analyses any piece of data and creates predictions.
• Einstein's recommendations - It delivers the next best product, content, or offer to every individual through product and content recommendations for email and the web. 

These are provided by default on the platform. However, as per Arun, users can customise them for a particular use case with almost no coding; to be precise, configure AI models through clicks. Further to this, Einstein bots resolve many queries before they are passed off to an agent, help classify different cases and are directed to the right agent.

Recently, the Salesforce AI team released the language model CodeGen which combines conversational AI with natural language processing as a paradigm for generating code. "So far, we've been talking of no code and low code platforms, point and click models, and this actually takes it a step further where you can talk and describe what you want to do in the natural language, preferably the English language as of now, and it will try and convert it into executable form and completes the task," said Arun. 

The move towards Digital HQ

Last year, the team at Salesforce came up with the concept of Digital HQ. Until 2019, work from the office was dominant; the employees used to sit under a roof and collaborate physically. As the pandemic set in, everything completely went remote for two years. Arun said, "Now, we are back in a hybrid model where some people are at home, and some are in the office. There was a need to find a way to collaborate between people who are physically in the office versus those who are working remotely, and this is where the origin was."

The aim is to equip companies with the right set of tools to connect with not just their employees but also customers and partners and bring all of them together in a single platform from anywhere. The approach consists of four layers:

• At the bottom lies simple messaging, allowing people to do direct messaging, eliminating emails, and all these capabilities are provided through Slack - an enterprise-grade messaging platform that takes care of privacy and security concerns.
• Second, it is to have a place where people from different departments, sometimes even customers, are together and are actually collaborating in real-time, and is transparent to everyone on what is happening.
• Third, the channel provides an added advantage; it gives the user the flexibility to opt-in and out of any communication. Even if a user exits a channel, one can always go back and look at the whole history of the entire communications that had taken place.
• Fourth, one single window has out-of-the-box integrations to as many as 2600 different business applications. From scheduling a meeting to having a group discussion, reaching out to the HR system to raise a leave request, or raising travel and expenses, all can be done via a single channel.

"Our vision is to avoid any mismanagement and improve employee productivity by allowing you a single window through which you can do all your work," Arun said.

"We also have a number of customers in India who are now using slack, so we have Razor Pay, Vedantu, Zomato and Ola. So India is one of the big markets for this new digital HQ and collaboration. He added that we had increased our user base in India by 4X in one year, indicating the widespread adoption of this whole concept," he added.

Time to take off your rose-tinted glasses

Today, a lot of companies approached CRM in a very fragmented manner. Someone is solving problems for the sales or service centre, which only covers certain parts of the customer lifecycle and customer interaction. As a result, customer data sits in multiple places. "As a result, we are seeing a big trend towards building customer data platforms which help reduplicate and centralise customer data to understand who your customers are," mentioned Arun. 

Moreover, the multiple aspects of the interaction between a customer and a service provider are not connected. Hence, the Omni channel still needs a lot of work in India, especially regarding customer service. "Our vision of the future is CRM will increasingly become industry-specific, and that's where a lot of our investment and focus will go and, of course, the more and more adoption of AI into our services," said Arun.

Future play

Arun firmly believes that a lot of innovation comes out of the startup ecosystem, "we know that very well because we were a startup ourselves", and startups can innovate more quickly.

"Through Salesforce ventures, we actually invest in certain promising startups because we believe that they may have a piece of technology or IP which can in the future significantly enhance our offerings right to our customers, and that is something we continue to do. We continue to look for innovative technologies not just limited to AI but in anything that affects the whole customer 360 platforms," concluded Arun.