Why Salesforce is a secret weapon for digital transformation

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As the IBM Bluewolf team publishes its ninth annual The State of Salesforce report, Luis Chiang, Salesforce Innovation Unit Leader, IBM EMEA, argues that businesses facing up to digital transformation can make significant headway by creatively building on a platform they’re probably already using.

I’m always excited about the release of The State of Salesforce, our annual study into ecosystem surrounding the CRM (Customer Relationship Management) giant and the many ways people are deriving value from its platform. We began publishing it as Bluewolf a few years ago and I’m delighted we’ve been able to continue doing so following our acquisition by IBM in 2016. It’s proved a great way of charting important trends in CRM and customer experience and I think it’s going to be particularly interesting this year, as the lens turns squarely on the way the business world has responded to an unprecedented global COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s hard to know exactly what to expect in this turbulent year, but I’m confident we’ll find that three of the key trends we’ve identified over the past few years have only accelerated.

AI is no longer an experiment

Salesforce reported that it has invested in AI technology, and it’s easy to see why. The days when businesses treated artificial intelligence as something quirky to experiment with are behind us. We have seen that both businesses and customers are seeing the value in automation and insights that deliver more valuable, productive and rewarding interactions. Not so long ago, the narrative was “How can we use a chatbot?” but today, businesses are asking questions like “How can we use AI to drive efficiency or customer experience improvements in a contact centre?”.

IBM, of course, has also been promoting our own AI-based agenda with its drive towards the cognitive enterprise. In the CRM space, the combination of Salesforce’s Einstein and IBM Watson has proved a compelling meeting of minds: the combined power of IBM Watson® and Salesforce Einstein can help enterprises make smarter business decisions, make employee workflows more efficient and customer interactions smarter, easier and more human.

Mobile is gaining momentum

Sellers are an increasingly mobile species and they need tools to match, specifically native apps that match the experience they get from other mobile software and from their day-to-day experiences as consumers. (Sellers, after all, are human beings too!). Accordingly, Salesforce has reported it has invested in mobile. And our own partnership with Apple has enabled us to provide further innovation and support the employee experience across mobile interactions with their enterprise platforms.

Given the disruption to traditional working models this year, a shift away from traditional desktop CRM is surely only set to continue.

Salesforce goes mainstream

We have seen that Salesforce’s initial promise of no-software CRM was hugely appealing to smaller businesses and start-ups, the kind of businesses that fueled its heady initial growth. In those early days, larger enterprises were naturally wary of putting sensitive data and business processes on the cloud. In a few short years, though, we have seen the landscape change dramatically with cloud-based, AI powered workflows becoming the norm rather than the exception and the power of the Salesforce platform, in particular, growing significantly. We view Salesforce today as an enterprise-grade platform and it’s increasingly hard to find an enterprise that’s not using it.

A platform to build on

As powerful as Salesforce is out of the metaphorical box, though, enterprises are complex beasts. They may operate across multiple geographies and industries, each with their own customer experience requirements and expectations. They almost certainly have a plethora of legacy systems and databases that Salesforce may need to access if it’s to build up the crucial insights it needs. And they may have many compliance, regulatory and governance challenges to address.

This is one of the reasons that an expanding ecosystem has built up around Salesforce: a host of businesses ready to provide services and add-ons that can enhance the platform’s use. This is the environment where Bluewolf was born, and it’s the space where IBM continues to operate so successfully today. The fact that IBM is also a major Salesforce adopter gives us the opportunity to drive further insights and innovation.

Our role as a Salesforce integration partner is threefold. We can help maximise the value of Salesforce by determining whether our clients are drawing on the right core functionality in the right way. We navigate the inevitable complexity of databases, workflows, processes and compliance (just as we would with any complex systems integration engagement). And we complement all this with additional IBM experience and technology to help plug any gaps and identify strategic opportunities to take things a stage further. Our vision is to help our customers to become modern enterprises operating on the most modern platform.

A force for change

Businesses have had no choice but to accelerate the transformation of their customer, employee and partner experiences this year.  Many businesses are realising that Salesforce is no longer “just” about customer relationship management. In the right hands, it’s a platform that can unlock strategic innovation opportunities and transform entire businesses.

The State of Salesforce 2020-2021 is expected to be launched in November. It is a special edition focusing on how global businesses have adapted and transformed through the pandemic, using Salesforce to do so. We will be revisiting key trends from last year’s report and providing some key takeaways for the future.

We also plan to release five industry-focused “deep dive” supplements to the main report in early Q1 2021. 

Download your copy of The State of Salesforce 2020 here.