Version 2.0 takes a more holistic approach to customer experience
Salesforce has launched a new version of its cross-channel marketing suite that expands its tools for mapping customer journeys across sales, marketing and service interactions.
Customers don’t care if they’re in marketing interaction or a sales interaction or a service interaction
gordon evans, Salesforce
It’s also made its CRM data available for targeted cross-channel display advertising through new partnerships with data platforms such as LiveRamp.
Salesforce announced the changes last week at its Connections event in New York, with 18,000 marketers and other Salesforce users in attendance. The update focused on Journey Builder, a tool it debuted last summer for orchestrating marketing campaigns and sales interactions with customers. Using the tool’s “interaction canvas,” marketers can literally map what they want the customer journey to look like, with decision nodes at each essential interaction (like “opening an email” or “calling a sales rep”) that trigger automated responses (like “send a cart abandonment email”) and notifications to marketers and sales reps.
With the Marketing Cloud update, Journey Builder has been expanded to map customer interactions beyond the initial acquisition. By adding new automation triggers like account changes, opened and closed service cases, and inbound signups, the tool can now be used to orchestrate interactions across sales, marketing and customer services. Another group of pre-built events and triggers enable journey planning for HR processes, like internal communications and new employee onboarding.
Example of customer support automation in Journey Builder
Gordon Evans, vice-president of marketing for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, told Marketing the changes were intended to reflect the growing importance of a consistent customer experience across all channels and points of interaction.
“Customers don’t care if they’re in marketing interaction or a sales interaction or a service interaction. They just expect great service from the brand,” he said. “They have one relationship with the brand.”
Of course, it won’t be entirely up to Salesforce to create a consistent customer experience. There will have to be some coordination and organizational changes to adapt to these kind of cross-department journeys. “If I’m the head of customer service, I don’t necessarily want a bunch of marketing interactions happening in a service context without my knowledge,” Evans said. “We definitely think that marketers are going to have to work with the other parts of the organization to create an effective journey.”
The second major update was to Active Audiences, a relatively recent product that assists marketers with exporting Salesforce data as audience profiles for online ad targeting. For example, Active Audiences could power an ad campaign targeted at a brand’s gold-level loyalty program members.
When it was launched in March, Active Audiences was only able to target audiences on Facebook and Twitter. But with the update, it’s been expanded to display media buying as well, through partnerships with four tech companies, LiveRamp, LiveIntent, Neustar and Viant. Using tools those partners have developed for anonymously matching online users to offline CRM data, they’ll be able to securely and anonymously identify customers online, and deliver targeted ads to them via display networks and programmatic buying.
Bringing the two updates together, Salesforce added Active Audiences events to Journey Builder, so marketers can choose to enroll a customer in a custom audience if and when the customer reaches a key stage on the path to purchase.
