On September 30th, 2020, Salesforce kicked off its Industries Summit with great fanfare. Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh’s, EVP of Salesforce Industries, interview with Derek Jeter was both inspiring and entertaining, which is extremely high praise coming from this diehard Red Sox fan. At Silverline, however, we were far more excited about the formation of Salesforce Industries and what that means for our mutual clients, who are yearning for technology partners with industry expertise that can help them digitally transform their businesses.
Silverline has been a Salesforce Consulting partner for over ten years. From day one, we’ve focused on delivering Salesforce solutions from an industry perspective, with a team of consultants comprised of former bankers, insurance underwriters, and healthcare practitioners that understand our clients’ challenges, because they once faced them too.
From the launch of Salesforce Health Cloud and Financial Services Cloud in 2016 to the acquisition of Vlocity in 2020, Salesforce has continued its focus on driving innovation on its platform not just through improving the technology stack, but also incorporating industry specific functionality that solves for critical business challenges.
Take for example, a retail bank’s process of managing referrals, which is a key source of revenue for all banks. Prior to the launch of Salesforce’s Financial Services Cloud for Retail Banking, a consultant like Silverline would need to custom build that solution for each bank, usually replacing an Excel Spreadsheet or pen and paper solution. For Salesforce and Silverline, this was an early version of digital transformation, taking a manual process and automating it through Salesforce. Over time, Salesforce realized these common business solutions should be a part of Salesforce out of the box, and thus, the Industry Clouds were born.
With Salesforce quickly building more functionality into the Industries Clouds, Silverline spent less time building these common features and more time on change management, solution adoption, and building integrations to mission critical back-office applications. Together with Salesforce, we are doing amazing things for our customers and transforming their businesses. In fact, many of our clients who had Salesforce running experienced far less disruptions to their business due to Covid, and were able to respond faster than their peers not on Salesforce. A few examples include the following successes:
From Vlocity to Salesforce Industries
Meanwhile, our friends at Vlocity were building something even more exciting. Founded in 2014, David Schmaier and some really amazing people had a vision for what the Salesforce Platform was truly capable of. As the EVP and Founding Team Executive at Siebel, David led the Products organization responsible for all CRM and Industry-Specific Applications, and helped grow the company from an idea to 8,000 employees and $2 Billion in revenue, which was eventually acquired by Oracle. In Salesforce, David and his team found a platform where they can not only support clients with front-office functionality typical of CRM applications, but also mission critical back office processes.
Take for example, a property and casualty insurance carrier. CRM based solutions like Salesforce have been able to effectively manage the interactions with both customers and brokers, managing the sales and quoting of policies, and renewals. We’ve custom built this for clients in the past and with Vlocity, this functionality comes out of the box. However, prior to Vlocity, during the underwriting and claims processes, Salesforce would be configured to initiate a workflow that sent a task via integration to respective underwriting and claims applications, often legacy, off-premise solutions with their own databases.
While that was fun to do, it was complicated work and Silverline experienced challenges, both technology and competition based, in integrating to some of these applications. Now, with Vlocity, these mission critical processes are built in Salesforce and able to leverage all the power of the platform.
Salesforce Industries is the evolution of all the innovation brought to bear by both firms. Where Salesforce alone drives breath and scale, Salesforce Industries addresses depth and complexity. For Silverline, having a technology partner that can provide such an immense industry-focused value is a gamechanger, allowing us to provide our clients with faster time to value with industry-specific data models and best practice process libraries to drive ROI and digital engagement with a flexible, AI-powered platform with built-in automation and insights.
Salesforce Industries + Customer 360
A year ago at Dreamforce, Salesforce announced its Customer 360 platform. Since that time, we’ve seen firsthand the possibilities to just what the solution is capable of. Take for example, my Health Network. In order to deliver relevant and valuable communications with me, my Health Network would need to aggregate and unify my information across all my health providers’ platforms into a single view of me, as a patient. This may include all my current demographic information and clinical information. With this information, ideally all in Salesforce Health Cloud, my Health Network will have a better understanding of who I am and what I need. However, these direct points of interactions and insights of completing forms, office visits, etc. do not take into account my other indirect engagement and behaviors, such as website searches, etc.
Customer 360 extends data aggregation by also capturing my individual interactions across all channels. For example, I may be searching my Health Network’s website, attending an event, or calling into a call center with an issue. All these points of interactions help make up my complete profile. With this additional insight, my network will be able to deliver even a more relevant experience across all channels in real-time. Email, mobile, web, and call center experiences all benefit by acting on all my data and interactions, including static and behavioral information. The more personalized my experience is, the more likely I will be a satisfied patient, and the more likely I will remain in this network and leverage all its services.
This is where it gets really exciting.
The ability for Salesforce to combine the value of Salesforce Industries and Customer 360 is incredibly powerful. Digital transformation is no longer just about automating manual business processes so that they can run on a computing device. It’s about helping companies improve the experience for their customers during each and every interaction, thereby increasing loyalty and customer success. So in return, these customers not only stay engaged but also refer their friends, family, and acquaintances to share the positive experience. This is beyond anything that the likes Microsoft, Pega, and Adobe are currently capable of on their respective platforms. And for Salesforce to execute this vision across 12 industries at once, is what makes the launch of Salesforce Industries a watershed moment for the Salesforce Ecosystem. Nothing will ever be the same again, and for the better. And as a Salesforce Consulting Partner focused on delivering digital transformation for financial services and healthcare customers, we can’t understate our excitement for the future with Salesforce Industries. We are proud to be a part of the Ohana family.
To learn more about what the power of Salesforce Industries can do for your Org, reach out. We’re always ready to talk next steps.
