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Financial Services at Dreamforce: Dynamic Solutions to Enhance Efficiency

By 10.19.22
Reading time: 4 minutes

The de-stressing puppy station – that’s what some attendees might remember the most from this year’s Dreamforce conference. 

The puppies were there to help with relaxation and mindfulness during a hectic few days at the event. Between the thousands of sessions, multiple parties, and many client conversations, the Silverline Financial Services team found a welcome break surrounded by some playful four-legged friends (even if they had no idea what Salesforce is!).

Besides the puppies, let’s look at some of the other Dreamforce highlights, including the latest tech announcements, major industry themes, and key learnings.

The tech buzz at Dreamforce

Many of the customers that Silverline spoke with at Dreamforce are looking to overhaul their entire web presence using Salesforce. This includes go-to-market programs, account-based marketing strategies, and leveraging customer data platforms (CDPs) to understand customer and prospects’ behaviors. Customers are seeking the best ways to measure the outcomes of these initiatives with dashboards and analytics.

Some of the new and enhanced Salesforce technological innovations presented at Dreamforce offered solutions to these customer challenges. The product that got the most buzz and was the topic of many conversations by the Silverline Financial Services team was Salesforce Genie, a new product described as a hyperscale real-time data platform that powers the entire Salesforce Customer 360 platform. 

But what does that really mean? Genie is built on top of Hyperforce, initially developed as part of Salesforce’s Public Sector Cloud, and is a new infrastructure architecture that provides greater scale and faster performance than the “standard” Salesforce back-end. It builds upon Salesforce CDP and adds on a real-time integration layer.

In the financial services space, Genie can help companies deliver highly personalized experiences across sales, service, marketing, and commerce that continuously adapt to changing customer information and needs in real-time. For example, with Service Cloud Genie, contact center agents can provide proactive service with real-time alerts that enable reps to intervene, engage the customer, and resolve issues.

Flow for Industries was another hot topic at Dreamforce. It’s an expansion of the Flow product suite that uses automation to empower financial services organizations with low-code tools. Flow for Industries enables businesses to complete more tasks with fewer resources, boost efficiency, and deliver better customer experiences at scale.

With Flow for Industries, organizations can power digital process automation (DPA) with tools like OmniStudio to build branded, dynamic customer interactions and employee workflows. For example, financial advisors can use clicks not code to design guided interactions that deliver more personalized service to high-value clients. 

Slack, Slack, and more Slack

Slack was such a central theme at Dreamforce that it deserves its very own section.

Silverline’s Managing Director Jill Harrison was at the center of the Slack conversations. She joined Steven Siler, Director, Eldridge, for the session “How Investment Firms Cut Meetings by 50% with a Digital HQ.” The session provided a unique opportunity to hear from a Slack and Salesforce customer on how they are redesigning the way they work in a Digital HQ.

Slack has evolved from what was once solely a communications tool to a Digital HQ for financial services companies. Slack is transforming business operations by bringing relevant notifications, approvals, and data from tools like Salesforce Financial Services Cloud right into Slack. Decision-making is accelerated by connecting relevant team members across the front, middle, and back offices with cross-workspace channels, and Slack provides the ability to onboard bankers, agents, and advisors faster with AI-powered, org-wide search tools to surface institutional knowledge. 

A new functionality called Salesforce Canvas was announced at Dreamforce. Canvas pairs Slack with Quip and should be released next year. Canvas enhances productivity by bringing together the real-time communication experience in Slack with Quip’s collaborative platform. To put it in perspective, Canvas helps solve all those times you might have thought a meeting would have been more beneficial if it had been held in a Slack channel instead.  

Silverline’s presence at Dreamforce

If you stopped by the Silverline Welcome Reception at the Commonwealth Club, you may have seen Silverline’s own Jill Harrison playing DJ. The fun-filled evening with our partner Equilar was a great way to kick off Dreamforce and greet our industry peers that we’ve missed seeing at in-person events during the pandemic. 

Silverline’s Danielle Laffey, Senior Director of Financial Services, led two Circle of Success small group discussions. At the Drive Lead Gen with Campaigns session, attendees learned how to maximize prospect engagement with best practices for planning, building, and reporting on campaigns. The Empower Customers with Communities session shared how the self-service experience can improve customer satisfaction, such as by launching a branded help center to deflect common questions.

Silverline hosted a Credit Union Breakfast at The Intercontinental Hotel for our financial services clients. The breakfast highlighted the relevant GreenState Credit Union success story. GreenState is Iowa’s largest credit union and one of the top financial institutions in the United States for returning profits to members in the form of better rates and lower fees. 

GreenState is rapidly growing by acquiring multiple different banks and credit unions and was looking for a digital platform that could scale with them now and into the future. The credit union had been conducting many of its member processes manually. It was challenged by siloed data spread across a lot of spreadsheets and the lackluster CRMs that came packaged with its internal core systems. 

GreenState began working with Silverline to implement Financial Services Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and MuleSoft. With Salesforce, GreenState can now see a complete view of the data for each of its members and track the activities associated with them, such as logging calls, maintaining to-do tasks, opening service requests, tracking referrals (recommendations), and creating sales opportunities.

GreenState saw these impressive results within two weeks of launching Salesforce: 

  • Call logs entered increased from 2,014 to 3,399 (69%).
  • To-do tasks for member follow-ups created increased from 181 to 348 (92%).
  • Member cases created increased from 268 to 476 (78%).
  • Opportunities created by users to track their own pipelines increased from 184 to 499 (171%).
  • Recommendations submitted increased from 326 to 845 (159%).
  • There were 297 won-sold recommendations and 35% of the recommendations resulted in a closed sale. $1,383,975 was opened in loans and $653,512 was opened in deposits from those recommendations.

How Silverline’s Financial Services team can help

Silverline tailors digital transformation solutions to meet your current and future needs. Our team leverages insight acquired not only at Dreamforce but also through 10+ years in the business and thousands of engagements, along with real-world expertise gained across the Financial Services industry. 

Silverline provides strategy, implementation, and managed services to help you take advantage of all the latest Salesforce innovations. Find out how we can turn the exciting news from Dreamforce into an opportunity for your organization.

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