It’s a ‘post CRM’ world! To win, businesses need to move to a Customer Experience Platform – ‘CXP/CXM’

Customer Experience is key; your customer wants to interact in the way that suits them best, at the point of need, and for their lifestyle context. It’s no longer about relationship management. Our social media-driven world has given even more control and choice to the customer, meaning that the customer wants the simplest, most useful and frictionless experience possible. In this article, I suggest a way for established institutions to effectively move to the ‘hallowed’ Customer Experience Platform by using the Salesforce Ecosystem.

So how do you give the customer that wonderful experience? It’s not easy! Not at all. Our businesses that serve large customer bases – think banks, insurance, telecommunications and utilities – have struggled to keep pace with the changing dynamics of the customer.

Why? I will offer a couple of reasons:

Fundamentally, their business systems and service functions have been driven by their core system of record – think account for banks, policy for insurance, billing account for telco and utility. Too much focus has been put on how to serve up their view of important information to the customer. Instead, they should be looking at what or how the customer would best interact and experience the service that the data in these systems would support.

Significant amounts of design and systems have centred on these, and how to serve up their view of important information to the customer. NOT what or how the customer would best interact and experience the service that the data in these systems would support.

These businesses followed the prevalent thinking of that era, that is to say siloed functions for service, sales and marketing, with limited or no interactions and/or coordination between them. Therefore, there was no possibility of a single view of the customer, nor of a joined-up set of interactions.

This is still very much the case today. EXCEPT in the new disruptors entering these industries. These tech-savvy startups are starting from scratch and with a mindset of customer experience first – on any device, but especially mobile. With teams that have grown up with the intuitive experience of the iPhone, Google and Amazon, it’s not hard to see why they are ‘the winning businesses’.

A good example is Virgin Money who have used technology from 10x Future Technologies (10xFT), the fintech startup established by former Barclays chief Antony Jenkins, to build a digital core for the new business.

10xFT’s API technology brings legacy systems together into a single secure network, which will help Virgin Money to pull together all the relevant data about a customer. This would include existing finances, lifestyle preferences and risk tolerance, all of which would find them the best product, such as a mortgage in a fraction of the time it currently takes…hence brilliant customer experience. See Virgin Money.

So is it all doom and gloom for our established businesses? No, not in the slightest. There is at least one option, one way forward…and it is using the Salesforce Ecosystem!

Established businesses can move to a customer experience platform. One way forward is with Industry Vertical Solutions; these are front-end solutions (marketing, sales, service) that are tuned to an industry using specific data models, standardised process libraries, omnichannel capability, and tools to improve the speed to implement.

The great news is because these solutions come with these ready built, industry tuned capabilities, they can be implemented faster than other custom developed solutions.
So do these solutions exist yet? The answer is most definitely yes…and they are in the Salesforce Ecosystem.

Three examples are:

• Salesforce Financial Services Cloud for Retail Banking
• Vlocity Communications & Media Solution
• Vlocity Insurance Solution

The Salesforce Financial Services Cloud for Retail Banking was part of the keynote at Dreamforce 17 – see the video here. Salesforce Financial Services Cloud Dreamforce 17.
The omnichannel front end of the Financial Services Cloud benefits from a relevant prebuilt data model, and the ability to define processes for specific functions without coding. In addition, it coordinates and works with Appexchange solutions such as Onfido for KYC, or nCino for back-office operations. Therefore, it is able to give a vertical solution that helps provide a new level of Customer Experience.

The Vlocity Communications & Media and Insurance solutions (see Vlocity Solutions) provide the capability to define and configure process and functionality in one place and then deploy to all channels.

This is achieved by first providing a relevant industry standard data model. Take Communications as an example: the data model is compliant with the TM Forum data model, which means that a data model and mapping to Salesforce are not required – it’s delivered with the Vlocity application.

Then there are predefined processes stored in libraries – the most mature process library is for the Communications industry.

Further capabilities such as a Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ), a process designer – Omniscript, and a data management tool – DataRaptor, all combine to create a vertical solution that enables easier linking of ‘front end’ to ‘back end’.

By doing this, Vlocity moves the capability and focus to creating the best customer experience in an omnichannel way, whilst also making it easier to connect to the operational backend systems. What’s more, it does so in a way that is based on ‘click and configure’, rather than coding.

So, in conclusion, established businesses can move quickly to a customer experience platform using Industry Vertical Solutions developed by Salesforce and Vlocity.

For further information see Salesforce & Vlocity Implementation.