"AI is the next revolution that we are seeing. Einstein AI brings that capability into the salesforce platform. With all the customer data that is available with the platform, adding AI will make it smarter to respond better."
understand customers much better to enhance their experience. Customers want the best experience and if they are not getting that, they are going to move on very quickly.
How unique is your positioning in the customer engagement segment? There are companies that do layers or part of the aspects in customer engagement. But in terms of managing the entire customer journey from the time they are prospects to their acquisition, from onboarding to adoption, renewals to retention etc, I don’t think there is another company that covers to the extent we do and the way we do it. A platform like ours, which is live, always connected, is flexible and manages the entire journey, makes us unrivalled. Are partners integral to your
success in vertical segments? We can’t go vertical without our partners. We have vertical solutions- for healthcare, financials etc. There is an entire ecosystem available for each of these verticals that includes applications developed by developers. We enable an ecosystem and that’s the way we work. Do your solutions work for managing employees? Our solution is not just about managing customers but also about managing employees and employee processes and partner engagement. We are in fact working with Al Futtaim who brought in our platform, not to manage customers but to manage their employees andthey actual won some
recognitions for these initiatives. Discuss focus on SMB segment? Salesforce started out as an SMB focused company. They continue to make a large portion of our revenues. A third of our revenues comes from enterprise, another one-third comes from the mid-market and the remaining one third from the SMB. It reveals the acceptance of our platform across the three segments. SMBs buy our platform because they want to be agile and they are cloud-first. Enterprises buy our platforms because they want to transform, become agile and move to cloud. In my view, SMB is the segment that adopts our innovations
faster and they are going to tell us first whether they are working fine or not.
How is your approach towards digital transformation? We have the platform for digital transformation. To really transform digitally, to have the omnichannel experience, you need to have the right platform to manage the entire customer data. That comes from all the silos including pre-sales, marketing etc and in traditional scenarios, they don’t talk to each other. Salesforce enables a consistent omnichannel experience by bringing all those silos together. That is what every company that we are talking to is asking for. A lot of traditional companies are worried about losing their customers if they don’t transform and aren’t able to enhance the customer experience.
A strategic handshake I
BM and Salesforce have announced a global strategic partnership to deliver joint solutions designed to leverage artificial intelligence and enable companies to make smarter decisions, faster than ever before. With the partnership, IBM Watson, the leading AI platform for business, and Salesforce Einstein, AI that powers the world’s #1 CRM, will seamlessly connect to enable an entirely new level of intelligent customer engagement across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. IBM is also strategically investing in its Global Business Services capabilities for Salesforce with a new practice to help
clients rapidly deploy the combined IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein capabilities. The partnership will bring new insights from Watson directly into the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform, combining deep customer insights from Salesforce Einstein with Watson's structured and unstructured data across many sources and industries including weather, healthcare, financial services and retail. Together, Watson and Einstein will ingest, reason over and derive recommendations to accelerate decision making and drive greater customer success.
“Within a few years, every major decision—personal or business— will be made with the help of AI and cognitive technologies,” said Ginni Rometty, chairman, president and chief executive officer, IBM. “This year we expect Watson will touch one billion people—through everything from oncology and retail to tax preparation and cars. Now, with this announcement, the power of Watson will serve the millions of Salesforce and Einstein customers and developers to provide an unprecedented understanding of customers." June 2017 | 15