Yesterday the team at Fintech Finance were lucky enough to go to Salesforce World Tour 2016. We managed to attend a variety of keynote speeches, one-to-one interviews and communicating with the representatives of companies who are both using Salesforce to enhance their business, and companies that are adapting the platform to improve it for everyone.
A keynote talk that particularly held our attention was delivered by Mark Bloom the Senior Director of Strategy and Operations for Service Cloud. During his talk he discussed that we are in the paradigm known as the "
era of the customer". The research that Bloom displayed shows that customer experience nowadays is more important than price.
The idea that a single customer can have a devastating effect on an entire industry is obviously scary to any company, and Bloom's presentation was how to navigate around that and adapt to the customer's needs.
Using a four point system Bloom was able to share the ways in which a company can please customers:
- Connected service
- Faster service- e.g. through their customizable single desktop
- Smarter experiences- intelligent routing and analytics provided for service agents
- Personalised service
Through research from companies that had started to use the Service Cloud, we could see that those companies had seen an increase of 45% in customer satisfaction.
Jeremy Roche, CEO of FinancialForce commented on the shift of customers being placed at the centre;
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One of our primary drives is our customers, yesterday we had 300 UK customers for a day and a half together listening to what we're doing, telling us what they want, we have them in workshops and groups."
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In 2016, if you create the right community, customers are right out there wanting to engage with you. Today, companies that are succeeding are thinking about opportunity to renewal or opportunity to reorder."
During the intermissions of Keynotes and 'Breakout Sessions' we were able to network with other companies building on the Salesforce platform. These ranged from ways to link up other services not yet available by Salesforce themselves, to improved security measures for those who expand their platform with other partners.
What we kept hearing throughout the event was the idea that businesses have to centralise the customer and personalise the experience. This notion may be very old, as every Tom and Harry know that the 'customer is always right'.
What is new however, is the rapid development of integration among these companies onto a singular platform. Not only this but the layout of the system which is very minimalist, making it very easy on the eye and easy to navigate between what could be complicated sections.
A significant amount of time form all the speakers and vendors was allocated to talking about this idea of needing transformation to benefit the customer. It was only later that we were told of certain statistics that had been found out through research which showed why there was this sudden panic to shift everything around within customer services.
Loyalty crisis is the factor that has worried a lot of businesses. As loyalty affects so many areas of the finance industry the notion that there was a statistic that 72% of people would rather bank with companies such as Google seems to explain their desire to change. This information that was provided during Rohit Mahna's keynote would be a massive blow to any industry.
Mahna's talk held particular interest because it was describing how a lot of financial businesses are really struggling with maintaining their customers. He went on to discuss how their new Financial Services Cloud was already helping companies substantially by helping to centralise the client.
By providing a one-to-one and customizable experience service providers will find that they are able to manage and micromanage their company, clientele and employees easier. This helps to offer a platform which enables all of these features in such a way that a fresh employee could turn on and figure out how to navigate through the system easily and efficiently.
During an interview with Mahna he commented that they take "
the approach of we don't know everything, so we brought customers in and collectively came up with the idea what problems we could solve".
"$19 billion has been invested in fintech, and 70% of that is invested in the front office" Mahna went onto say which is evidence that businesses have taken notice of the change that fintechs are hoping to achieve and that customer experience is everything.
Written by Dylan Jones