Dreamforce 2019 concluded last week in San Francisco, CA, revealing exciting news about Salesforce’s future. To kick off the event, Salesforce CEOs Marc Benioff and Keith Block hosted the opening keynote titled, “Trailblazers, Together.” They addressed a fully-packed arena along with 13 million registered online viewers to introduce several upcoming Salesforce features. The keynote was broken down into two chapters – a section on Salesforce Customer 360 and a section focused on Data. Lasting just under two hours, this keynote was packed full of information, but we’ve managed to summarize the key points here:
Salesforce Customer 360
During the section about Salesforce Customer 360, Co-CEO Marc Benioff brought several key staff members on stage to talk about Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and the Salesforce Platform.
Sales Cloud
After acquiring Israeli Conversational AI company Bonobo earlier this year, Salesforce introduced its Call Coaching application at Dreamforce 2019. With this application, sales managers can help their reps improve their pitches through AI-powered insights. By processing and analyzing audio clips, Call Coaching gathers information about products mentioned, objections handled, and sales rep comfort levels. Managers can customize dashboards with this information, and they can use these findings to fine-tune their sales strategies. Additionally, they can build libraries by collecting successful sales calls to use as training tools for future hires.
Service Cloud
Service Cloud Voice not only transcribes service calls in real-time but also presents actionable insights to optimize customer interactions. When using this application, every word spoken is transcribed before the user’s very eyes through the power of Amazon Connect. At the same time, Einstein uses natural language processing in order to understand the conversation and recommend related knowledge articles. It also recommends the next best action to help customers, giving service representatives access to instantaneous customer support tools. When the call finishes, Salesforce auto-fills the call notes based on transcription information.
Marketing Cloud
Interactive Email allows customers to submit information through email forms without having to navigate to another site. Optimal for surveys and customer feedback, Interactive Email increases the likelihood that customers will respond to information requests.
Commerce Cloud
Einstein Page Designer allows businesses to customize their eCommerce sites without any coding required. Through point and click tools, companies can shape their online stores and optimize their page designs. Einstein Page Designer uses information from popular websites combined with user data to present personalized storefronts for all customers. By separating product listings into different components (image, title, and price), this tool finds the best component variation to present to each individual shopper.
Platform
The Platform team spoke about advances related to in-store sales applications. These apps can be easily designed through drag and drop customization and can be used by in-store sales personnel to improve the customer experience. Simply by entering a customer’s name, the app reveals customer information such as chats, previous purchases, and Einstein-recommended products. With this information, sales reps can offer personalized support to their customers.
Data
For the keynote section about data, Co-CEO Marc Benioff included guest speakers to address MuleSoft, Tableau, and Einstein developments.
MuleSoft
For no additional cost, MuleSoft’s AnyPoint Platform™ will allow for integrations without writing a single line of code. By selecting the data to be included, users can create a Customer 360 Truth Profile, or a Single Source of Truth that incorporates data from all available sources. Additionally, MuleSoft Accelerators will available through Exchange, an app store for APIs. These accelerators reduce time and costs for data integration with common systems by offering point and click integration solutions.
Tableau
Representatives from Tableau demoed their product, showing the different interactive capabilities built into their reporting application. By showing dynamic data manipulation through simple click drill-downs and filters, they showed how users can navigate from summaries to detail views easily. They highlighted that Tableau works with many data sources, and they previewed a function that allows users to ask a question in plain text and receive a data-driven answer.
Einstein
Einstein Voice previewed how voice recognition technology will be an area for future Salesforce exploration. Through their partnership with Amazon, Salesforce has embedded Einstein into Alexa, allowing users to ask questions and receive answers. Using the Einstein Voice Skills Builder, users can build applications that interact with Amazon’s Alexa.
Trailhead Updates
On a separate note, as part of the new partnership between Amazon and Salesforce, Trailhead will be offering free AWS skill development. Trailhead will now also be available on Apple mobile devices with the Trailhead Go iOS App.
Too Much Information?
Let’s face it – this opening keynote presentation contained a lot of information. If you’d like to learn more about any of the announcements made at Dreamforce 2019, stay tuned for more articles or get in touch with our team. Over the past week, we’ve been tracking Dreamforce updates, and we can address any of your questions and concerns. We can walk you through new features and explain Salesforce’s roadmap to help you prepare your business for the future. Just reach out online today for a FREE consultation!
