Salesforce

What is generative CRM? Generative CRM combines the power of generative AI with CRM data to boost productivity and efficiency of teams. It has the power to execute limitless functions such as responding to queries, generating conversational text, suggesting next steps, drafting emails and more. The beauty of Generative AI is that the more people use it, the smarter and faster it will become. In the coming months and years, Generative CRM will effortlessly perform tedious everyday tasks, freeing up time of your teams so they can focus on more important tasks. With the ability to comb the internet for relevant data in a matter of seconds, it can help draft more meaningful responses thereby significantly boosting the efficiency of teams. How generative CRM can boost productivity, efficiency, and customer relationships People spend hours executing ordinary day to day tasks. They sift through data and information, wrack their brains to come up with new social media ad campaigns, iterate multiple times to create a perfect email pitch for a prospective customer, and engage in a fire fight to resolve issues of dissatisfied customers. What if they had a tool to streamline all of that, irrespective of the industry or department they work in?   Generative AI is on the brink of redefining CRM across companies in the coming years. Let us dive deeper to understand how this new age tech, when combined with your CRM, can help teams become more productive and deliver stunning customer experiences. The employee view If you are a new sales rep, and you have just been assigned a new account, it would take you many hours, perhaps even days to get an overview of the company, catch up on the latest company activities, discover the right contacts, and prepare an introductory email. With Generative AI, all this can be done in a matter of seconds by your CRM. So you can refine that email and connect with the right person sooner than ever. This is the potential of generative CRM. When the power of generative AI combines with your CRM data, it unlocks a never seen before power of your CRM. The view across teams Generative AI is poised to reshape how teams work across departments in the years to come. It will empower enterprises to quickly and effortlessly generate AI-driven content across multiple departments -sales, customer service, marketing, commerce, and IT. Service teams would have the power to create automated, smarter, more personalized chatbots that can engage with customers just the way a human rep would, but much faster.  They would have the ability to anticipate, comprehend and respond to customer requests faster than ever. For marketers, generative CRM can help in quickly creating accurate, compelling product descriptions that are optimized for web search. Here are some key benefits that generative CRM would deliver going forward. Reduce time to value AI has already been around for a while with Salesforce Einstein delivering over 200 billion predictions every day. Today, AI products like ChatGPT and Dall-E are empowering millions of people across industries to work more effectively. Generative AI is a deep tech that will filter out the noise that we encounter on the web. If you can ask the right questions contextually, generative CRM will be smart enough to know what to look for and how to present it to you. Free up humans for high-value work If you are a sales rep, imagine trying to acquire a potentially big new customer. You will have to spend hours sifting through data to strengthen your sales pitch, and by the time you do so, it may end up being archaic. You then comb your network and the prospect website and social media handles to find that perfect person to connect with, only to find that they moved on to another company recently. These repetitive, cyclical and routine tasks to acquire a new customer often waste precious time.  Generative AI can speed up these routine activities to make you far more productive. It will allow you to spend more time to do the real thing, which is building relationships with prospects and customers. AI that you can trust Security and privacy will be a critical aspect of generative CRM. Governed by guidelines that specifically address security and privacy concerns, generative AI will build on long standing principles for trusted AI. While publicly available generative AI tools depend only on publicly available data and information, generative CRM will be grounded on private and secure customer data, while also drawing on publicly available data and information such as social media and corporate websites. The ability to fuse public and private data is what makes generative AI driven CRM a trusted, and impactful experience for customers. Generative AI at Salesforce AI is already an integral part of the Salesforce Customer 360 platform, and its potential is limitless. Salesforce Einstein AI technology delivers over 200 billion predictions on a daily basis across multiple Salesforce’s business apps. This includes: Sales, which utilises AI powered insights, to establish the best next steps so reps can close deals faster. Service, which utilises AI to have bot-based natural conversations and provide the best fit answers, freeing up reps to work on more complex and important tasks. Marketing, which uses AI to better understand customer behaviour and personalize marketing campaigns to boost their efficacy.   Commerce, which utilises AI to deliver personalized buying experiences and smarter ecommerce. With generative AI, businesses can connect with their audiences in completely new, more engaging ways across every interaction. Guidelines for Trusted Generative AI Like they do with all their technology innovations, Salesforce is rooting ethical guidelines across all their products to assist businesses innovate rapidly and responsibly.  With the tremendous potential and challenges emerging in generative AI, Salesforce is building further on their Trusted AI Principles with a new set of guidelines to push for responsible development and deployment of generative AI. Here are 5 such guidelines. Accuracy: Use models to deliver verifiable results allowing customers to train models on their own data. Communicate when authenticity of the AI’s response cannot be established with certainty and enable users to ratify these responses. This can be achieved by citing sources, explaining why the AI gave those responses, underscoring areas to double-check such as stats, dates, and creating checks and balances that prevent certain tasks from being fully automated (like code review before deployment) Safety: Effort should be made to mitigate any bias or harmful output by conducting robustness assessments. The privacy of any personal private information should also be protected by creating guardrails. Honesty: When aggregating data to train and evaluate AI models, the source of data should be respected by ensuring their consent for use. Transparency in communication should be maintained by clearly stating that autonomously generated AI content has been delivered. Empowerment: While in some cases, a fully automated AI driven process may be the best option especially for non-critical, publicly available data, there are cases where AI should augment a human role, especially where human judgment is necessary. One needs to establish the right balance to turbo charge human capabilities and make generative AI solutions accessible to all. Sustainability: In our endeavour to establish more and more accuracy in our models, we should develop most appropriate-sized models wherever possible to reduce our carbon footprint. Summary If you are a Salesforce Consultant, this is an exciting time for you. Generative AI has the power to take CRM to the next level. By following the above guidelines, you can deliver never before seen value to your customers with the power of AI. Girikon is a Certified Salesforce Development Partner delivering value to customers across the globe. To know more about how Generative CRM can work for you, contact us today.

In March 2023, Salesforce launched Einstein GPT, the World’s First Generative AI for CRM. Einstein GPT uses the power of generative AI to deliver personalized content across every Salesforce product, thereby making teams more productive and delivering a better customer experience. Einstein GPT is open and scalable, and supports public and private AI models built specifically for CRM. Einstein GPT is trained on trusted, real-time data and seamlessly integrates the with the OpenAI framework to deliver out-of-the-box generative AI capabilities to Salesforce users. The new ChatGPT app for Slack integrates seamlessly with OpenAI’s deep AI technology to power instant conversations, and provide research and writing assistance. Whether it be sales, service, marketing or commerce, Einstein GPT for Salesforce will transform every customer experience at never seen before scale. In a sense, it opens a new door to the AI future for all Salesforce customers. Salesforce has fused its proprietary AI models with generative AI technology in Einstein GPT that unifies and synchronises all of a company’s customer data. Using Einstein GPT, customers can now easily connect that data to OpenAI’s advanced AI models, or use their own model and natural-language prompts directly within their Salesforce CRM to seamlessly generate content that self-adapts continuously to changing customer needs in real time. For instance, Einstein GPT can create personalized email drafts for sales reps, generate automated and tailored responses for service reps to respond to customer queries more quickly, generate appropriate content for marketers to augment campaign efficacy, and developers can get access to auto-generated code allowing them to build and deploy apps much faster. Going Deeper: Einstein GPT in CRM Salesforce Einstein is already delivering over than 200 billion AI-driven predictions everyday.  Einstein GPT is the next generation of Einstein, and by combining proprietary Salesforce AI models with OpenAI, customers can use natural-language prompts on CRM data to trigger powerful, time-saving automations, and create personalized, AI-generated content. Sales: Auto-generate routine tasks like drafting emails, preparing meeting schedules, and prepping for follow ups. Service: Auto generate articles from case note archives. Auto-generate conversational and personalised chat to smartly engage with customers. Fast track service interactions and enhance the customer experience. Marketing: Dynamically generate personalized and engaging content faster than ever to interact with potential and existing customers across channels. Slack : Get AI-driven customer insights in Slack for eg. smart summaries of sales opportunities and self updating knowledge articles. Developers: Developers can auto generate code by utilising Salesforce’s proprietary language model to ask contextual questions for languages like Apex through an AI chat assistant. Einstein GPT is in-built in Salesforce. Which means you can use your private data to tailor everything it generates suited to your unique business. And since Einstein GPT is available across the entire Salesforce platform, it can improve every single customer experience. Salesforce understands that generative AI encompasses more than just ChatGPT. Einstein GPT  has been designed to allow seamless integrations with other language models. This allows developers to bring their preferred model using normalized APIs and an open network of AI partners. Einstein GPT is designed to empower businesses with path breaking AI capabilities, using your own data and models to drive customer experiences. Embedding AI into the Salesforce platform has delivered huge operational efficiencies for partners and customers.  Generative AI technology has the potential to transform the way companies engage with their customers, deliver powerful experiences, and drive customer retention. Generative AI technology will drive the next generation of customer experience. Einstein GPT for Salesforce Developers As technology innovation progresses, so does the way developers write and analyze code. Generative Artificial Intelligence is perhaps the most exciting development in recent years for code generation and analysis.  This technology has the power to make development faster, more efficient and accurate. Let’s look at how Salesforce AI Research is powering Einstein GPT for developers across the globe and how it will change the way apps are deployed on Salesforce. Generative AI for code (Apex) Code generation involves using machine learning algorithms to analyse large amounts of existing code, and then generate new code based on that analysis. This is particularly useful for tedious tasks, such as drafting emails. One obvious and huge benefit of code generation is that it saves a lot of time for developers. Instead of writing every line of code from ground up, developers can use AI-powered tools to generate most of the required code automatically. Not only does this accelerate the entire development process, it also reduces the chances of human error. Code generation has many benefits, including: Code standardization: Automating generation of repetitive code blocks that guarantees consistency and standardization of code. Accelerated prototyping: Generative AI based code generation accelerates the prototyping process by quickly creating run of the mill code. Codebase becomes more scalable because of standardization. Simplified code: Generative AI automates the creation of repetitive code blocks thereby simplifying it. Code becomes easier to maintain and scale. Salesforce Consultants and Developers can now derive the benefits of Einstein GPT within the IDE experience. With inbuilt natural language processing capability, developers can have auto generated code created for them within the Code Builder as per their specific needs. The machine learning algos that drive the generative AI experience in Einstein GPT are based on Salesforce’s proprietary models and enhanced with best-in-class coding guidelines. Static and dynamic Apex analysis Code analysis is another field where AI is making significant progress. As software development become more and more complex, it becomes increasingly challenging for developers to precisely analyse and understand the code. Salesforce is piloting a new capability this year for Apex analysis. With this feature, developers can quickly and precisely analyse large amounts of Apex code, identify potential defects, runtime and other inefficiencies. This will save Salesforce Partners and developers a substantial amount of time and effort. They would no longer have to manually sift through each line of code to find potential problems. One of the key benefits of AI is that it can identify potential problems easily that developers may miss at runtime. AI-driven code analysis and code generation work synchronously. Using AI powered static and dynamic analysis, patterns in your code base will be fed back into the code generation process in run time, and vice versa. Conclusion AI-driven code generation and analysis is changing the entire development paradigm. And this is just the beginning. Going forward, Salesforce has plans to assist with automated test generation, intelligent code clarification, and more. If you are a Salesforce Consultant, this is an exciting time for you. Generative AI has the power to take CRM to the next level. With Einstein GPT you can get multi-dimensional insights of your CRM data and deliver never before seen value to your customers with the power of AI. Girikon is a Certified Salesforce Development Partner delivering value to customers across the globe. To know more about how Einstein GPT can work for you, contact us today.

In today’s competitive era, businesses must consider integrating and synchronizing products, their pricing, inventory, and other business details to fulfill the evolving needs of modern consumers. To meet these demands, businesses require robust tools such as Salesforce Commerce Cloud and MuleSoft. You can seek Salesforce support from a reliable service provider to know more about these platforms. The integration of MuleSoft and Salesforce Commerce Cloud ensures a connected commerce experience and allows organizations to unify commerce data from any system, and quickly launch into new markets while providing enterprise-grade security to ensure the safety and security of corporate data. In other words, MuleSoft and Salesforce Commerce Cloud can provide a connected commerce experience. What is Salesforce Commerce Cloud? Salesforce Commerce Cloud is an e-commerce solution that empowers organizations to sell their products and services across different channels, including social, mobile, and the web. This cloud platform helps retailers provide a superior shopping experience to their customers.     This platform provides brands the agility to remain competitive and ensure the following: Proficiently launch and manage stores across different channels, geographies, and dialects through a cloud-based commerce platform. Test and deliver changes. Modernize while prioritizing actionable insights that drive better business decisions. Salesforce Commerce Cloud Is Only as Powerful as the Data That Lies Behind It With Salesforce Commerce Cloud, businesses can take the online shopping experience a notch higher than that of a traditional e-commerce platform by capturing customer data. In fact, this innovative platform has transformed the way organizations conduct their business by launching into new markets faster while ensuring security from threats. This is possible through API-led connectivity that amalgamates crucial data from legacy systems, CRM, ERP, and partners like delivery logistics providers. However, digital transformation via API-led connectivity depends significantly on the data that backs it. This is where Salesforce Commerce backed up by MuleSoft comes into the picture as it connects all the commerce systems and creates a steady customer view across the organization. MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform allows you to centralize data while creating an omnichannel experience. Since customer data is an asset that can be leveraged by organizations to improve customer service by using digital technologies and integrating data while making it accessible in real-time. Real-time data ensures quicker customer support and increased satisfaction. APIs help in integrating different systems together and creating a data-driven model. This ensures precise decision-making. In addition, such an approach to data provides insights by tracking customer engagement patterns and gathering more data. By integrating customer data with Salesforce Commerce Cloud, you can get a comprehensive view of your customers while furthering your brand loyalty by having all customer data gathered in a single solution. What is MuleSoft? MuleSoft is a reputed provider of Enterprise Integration Platforms. MuleSoft connects all the data, applications, and devices across different business entities. They enable organizations to gather their data in real-time, actionable, and secure information. MuleSoft along with its Anypoint Platform is one of the best integration platforms available and allows businesses to connect with different applications while ensuring system-to-system integrations are easy and cost-effective. Additionally, the platform provides a unified platform to help organizations manage their business process activities to enable efficient connectivity across people, devices, and systems. MuleSoft has put an end to point-to-point legacy integrations that hinder digital transformation. The Influence of MuleSoft and Salesforce Commerce Cloud: If the solutions that you are using currently do not allow you to tap into data from various sources, you're stuck inside one system. If you are willing to venture into new markets then it would consume more time and money. The right solution would be to combine your requirements in a single system, which is possible with Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Mule Soft which allows you to connect with other systems quickly. To Wrap-up: To succeed in today’s competitive era, businesses must create great customer experiences, which is possible by having ready access to customer data. However, brands are likely to stay behind if they fail to centralize their data. Salesforce and MuleSoft together are a perfect match as they both are dedicated to leveraging APIs and connectivity to help organizations succeed through digital transformation. To know more about the benefits of these platforms, it’s essential to get in touch with a certified Salesforce implementation partner.  

In any organization, the sales team plays a pivotal role in business success. The sales department is under tremendous pressure to capture quality leads, create lead pipelines, track opportunities, close deals quickly, and manage customer relationships. However, attaining all these is easier said than done. This is where the need for a robust software system that can effectively achieve the aforesaid effectively arises. Salesforce Sales Cloud Einstein can offer businesses with numerous features that every sales team can wish for while helping businesses stay competitive. The software solution is endowed with out-of-the-box AI capabilities that relieve sales reps of cumbersome and time-consuming tasks, allowing them to focus on core business activities. To make the most of this predictive analytic tool, it’s crucial to get in touch with a certified and experienced Salesforce consulting partner. What is Salesforce Sales Cloud Einstein? Salesforce Einstein Sales Cloud is an AI module that drives precise lead scoring and powerful pipeline management. This sales engagement platform helps identify qualified leads, convert opportunities, and retain customers with ease while improving stakeholder relations. The platform helps in analyzing the data and provides proper insight to close deals. Based on the sales data, Einstein suggests actionable insights to close more deals. The platform offers some unique features that are designed to help sales reps involved in different stages: Lead Scoring: Though the contact details and other sales activities are automated, sales reps have to indulge in managing leads.  To track all the leads efficiently, automation is mandatory. With Einstein lead scoring, it is possible to apply the power of AI to analyze the power of lead conversions and figuring the right patterns in those conversions. Since Sales cloud, Einstein comprehends your opportunity data, it easily analyzes and understands patterns as soon as it is turned Einstein Opportunity Scoring: It becomes convenient to manage, track and follow up with leads and turn them into opportunities after leveraging Einstein Lead Scoring. However, Sales reps have to deal with another challenge i.e. closing deals even with organized lead data. Einstein opportunity takes note of opportunity scoring and other details to create a predictive model to provide a score for each opportunity. Einstein Opportunity Insights: This feature uses sentiment analysis and machine learning to close more deals. It provides quick analysis, anticipation, and follow-ups on various opportunities to help sales reps plan their next steps. Once the sales reps manage to close a deal, you can use Einstein insights and forecasting to manage your customers.  Einstein Activity Capture: Sales reps spend a lot of time categorizing Sales activities and contact data. this task is automated by Einstein, which saves a lot of time. By connecting their calendar and email to Salesforce their activities are added to the concerned Salesforce records automatically. Einstein Activity Capture also empowers your reps to view which activities are added to Salesforce and the people who can see them. They can also update those controls either from Salesforce or inbox at any time. Benefits of Salesforce Sales Einstein: Besides the aforementioned features, the predictive analysis tool allows organizations across the globe to scale besides offering several benefits: Collaborative Selling: Sales reps can easily figure out if an opportunity would match or exceed the size of the deal quota as the platform allows sales reps to analyze opportunities in real-time while sharing insights on the deals that are likely to close. Insight into the Pain Points of Customers: Organizations can leverage this platform to predict the behavior and actions of their customers. This insight can be useful in predicting the number of contacts that might be required for cross-selling. Email Alerts: With Einstein, Sales reps can receive reminders that are tailored based on their priorities. This feature also helps sales reps track pipeline activity and search deals.  Increased Sales Meetings: This tool tracks the research required for every opportunity during the pipeline stage. This would help sales reps to focus more on client meetings and spend less time researching sales data allowing them to close more deals. Improved Sales Performance:  With this feature, organizations can create a culture of competition where high performers will be rewarded and underperformers will be provided with requisite training. Sales reps have access to dashboards for viewing sales reports and the data they need to measure success easily. Quick Wrap-up: Salesforce Sales Cloud Einstein is an AI-powered tool that provides sales reps with necessary guidance, automation, scoring, lead prioritizing, and forecasting for managing your leads, customers, and opportunities. Endowed with multiple features, this tool empowers sales reps to close more deals quickly while augmenting the productivity of your sales team. To know more about this tool, it’s important to partner with one of the best Salesforce consulting companies.

Salesforce Lightning, put simply, is next generation CRM.  With Salesforce Lightning, developers can build stunning apps with unprecedented ROI. Lightning is super-fast, extremely powerful, very intuitive and has an abundance of features. It is a lightweight, component-based framework purpose built for accelerated app development. With Lightning, admins and developers can build and deploy apps faster than ever before, and makes business users more productive in every moment. Let’s look at some of the features of Salesforce Lightning that make it so powerful: Kanban View The Kanban view feature is available exclusively in the Salesforce Lightning experience. As was expected, it has become a natural go-to for most Salesforce users. Regular everyday users of Salesforce regard Kanban as their online workspace, and not just another view within Salesforce where data is presented based on selection of filters. For instance, when sales reps open the opportunity list view in Salesforce, they can view active sales opportunities organised by their respective stages in the timeline on a Kanban board. This view displays the opportunities within the selected filter. With this view, sales reps can get a clear view of the stage they are at in the sales process for each and every opportunity. Email Integration for Lightning Lightning does away with the need for shifting back and forth between your email app and Salesforce. Email can now be seamlessly and easily integrated with Salesforce in a single console, thanks to Lightning. Users can easily integrate Outlook, Gmail or other email services and bring together all connected Salesforce data such as call logs and tasks into the email UI. Lightning significantly improves productivity by allowing users to work directly from their email, with all the associated data they need from Salesforce. Salesforce Experience Cloud Communities Salesforce communities has been renamed Salesforce Experience Cloud. It includes tools used by businesses to connect with their customers and partners through shared portals on the Salesforce platform. With Salesforce Lightning, developers can easily create and manage branded community portals. This feature of Salesforce Lightning comes with an inbuilt powerful drag-and-drop interface. With this feature, users can easily add new functionality and content to the platform. With Salesforce Experience Cloud, it is easier than ever before to create content and feature rich community portals with the help of a library of pre-built templates. Salesforce Lightning Dialer Support reps and communication teams need to manage a high call volume to interact with prospects and customers on a regular basis. To be able to do this, their managers need to have information about the calls. In Salesforce Classic, this information is retrieved in real time. Having said that, managing calls would be far more efficient, if the phone functionality existed within Salesforce. The Lightning Dialer comes in-built in Salesforce Lightning, which reduces clicks and makes the whole process of calling and recording more efficient. This is made possible by integrating the Salesforce UI with calling systems. This allows reps to streamline calls and it automatically records the key performance indicators. Salesforce Lightning Paths When reps are working on complex processes in Salesforce, they often need guidance. Salesforce Lightning Paths is a feature specially built for Salesforce users to offer them that guidance to work with complex tasks or opportunities. With the help of this feature, Salesforce users are able to easily navigate through complex processes with the help of recommended pre-determined steps. An Advanced User Interface The Salesforce Lightning user interface is extremely robust and offers remarkably flexibility when compared to Salesforce Classic. The user interface offers easy interoperable code development across devices. It facilitates user productivity and drives work efficiency with much lesser code. Intelligent home pages built from template libraries allow users to track performance to goal, and get real time updates on key accounts. Reports & Dashboards The Salesforce Lightning Experience comes with a complete overhaul of reports and dashboards. They are now much more interactive, easier to navigate through and customise. Sales reps can get more insightful information from interactive charts without having to dive deep into reports. With the Lightning dashboard editor, dashboards can be fully customised with prebuilt components. Reports quality can be augmented and made more insightful without the need of the report builder. With the new Lightning UI, it’s much easier to find reports & dashboards via fully customisable home pages. Activity Timeline In Salesforce Classic, users have the option to view Open Activities which allows them to create tasks & record event. And with Activity History, users can log calls or send emails. In Lightning however, Salesforce has added a functionality that allows users to create the tasks and along with it, it gives you an activity timeline which shows the activities you have already created. With the activity timeline functionality users can view open tasks, scheduled meetings, and more in the activity timeline. Salesforce Einstein Salesforce users are familiar with Salesforce Einstein. This is one of the standout features of Lightning. Salesforce Einstein, an AI based digital data scientist, empowers businesses with the tools and resources to become more predictive about future trends and customer behaviour. Einstein significantly boosts the productivity of sales, service, marketing teams. Live Feeds This is another unique feature in the Salesforce Lightning Experience. When in a group in the Lightning Experience, the Chatter feed is on. Live feeds delivers posts and comments from other users in the group as and when they are posted, keeping you updated in real time about discussions within the group. Lightning App Builder The Lightning App Builder is a drag and drop tool using which you can easily create custom pages within the Lightning experience, giving you all that you need all in one place. With Lightning app builder, you can configure and customize lightning components in create business-specific apps. Lightning Snap-Ins Lightning snap-ins is a key component for Service Cloud users. Snap-ins allows businesses to quickly manage client support directly within their Lightning pages. With Lightning snap-ins service reps can reach out to customers in real time on any device, and deliver personalized service across every touchpoint in the customer journey. Steelbrick Feature Steelbrick is another unique feature built entirely on the Lightning infrastructure. With its  CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) functionality, sales reps can easily create offers and contracts for brands. Also, they can easily get approvals and signatures without ever leaving Salesforce. AppExchange There are a plethora of Lightning-ready third-party apps on the AppExchange. And this number is growing by the day.  All these apps are vetted by Salesforce and are pre-integrated to work seamlessly with the Salesforce platform. With the help of these Lightning-ready apps, you can deliver consistent, personalised experiences to your customers, boost internal productivity and drive RoI. All you need to do is look for ‘Lightning Ready’ apps on AppExchange. The intelligent, intuitive, and future-ready design of Lightning is enabling businesses to improve efficiency and productivity significantly. The stunning UI, intelligent views, integrated reports and dashboards, pick-and-drop functionality, limitless customizability, backed by the power of AI, makes Lightning a compelling choice. As a Salesforce Gold Certified Salesforce Partner, Girikon has helped multiple businesses leverage the Lightning experience to achieve business success. Contact one of our experts today to know more about how we can help you get the most out of Lightning. 

Those who have been using Salesforce are likely to understand its intrinsic value of helping organizations manage their customer relationships. One of the most essential components of this process is managing customer communication. However, an important aspect of this process is managing customer communication. While Salesforce empowers you to connect with their customers, recognizing the best SMS App is crucial as text messaging is one of the most effective ways of communicating with existing and prospective customers. A communication strategy is required when using Salesforce as it helps inform how organizations can connect with their customers. SMS messaging can play a significant role in that communication strategy as it’s a communication tactic that can help organizations in numerous ways, including: Follow-Up with Leads: Text messaging (SMS) can go a long way in developing a long-term relationship with prospects by initiating a conversation with prospects, and customers, and promising leads who have yet to make a purchase while resolving their queries. A Touchpoint for Feedback: It’s important to solicit customer feedback once you have served your customers. Positive customer feedback will enable you to display those traits to potential customers by using them as testimonials. SMS is a perfect way to reach out to your contacts and gather customer feedback. You can ask open-ended questions to probe your customers about their experience and the next steps to be undertaken. Appointment Reminders for Re-scheduling and Cancellation: When you’re in a service business, it’s likely that you’ll require setting up appointments with your customer. It’s important to remind them about these appointments as they might forget about these appointments due to their busy schedule time and again. This can be problematic as missed meetings might leave your employees in the lurch. With SMS, it’s possible to keep customers with appointments on track. This increases the likelihood of customers making an appointment, making your business more effective. To make it simple for recipients, you can use a link in your text message so that they can reschedule or cancel the appointment as per their requirements. Reminders for Deals and Discounts: SMS is a quick and convenient way of creating awareness among your target audiences when you are offering deals and discounts. These messages should be helpful to individuals if proper research has been done. Features of an Ideal SMS App for Salesforce Integration of Marketing Software: A robust App is required to align your text message campaign with your marketing campaigns if you are using different marketing software. Ability to Send Bulk or Individual Messages: An ideal Salesforce SMS App has the ability to send messages in bulk to multiple recipients, as well as messages to an individual recipient with a personalized approach. Storing Conversations: Storing conversations will allow everyone within a company to pick up right from the point conversation was left off. This makes it clear where a customer is w.r.t their interaction with your business. This allows organizations to serve their customers in a better way.  Quick and Easy to Set up: The SMS platform in question should be intuitive, easy to set up, and customizable. In case the platform is difficult to set up, it might cost your business time and money. Quick Wrap-up: A modern approach is required to connect with customers in this era. SMS allows you to effectively interact with your clients in a personalized way. By integrating SMS APP with Salesforce, it’s possible to reach the right audience while your marketing, sales, and support teams can interact from within a single platform.

  A summary of Unified Higher Education Marketing Higher Education marketing and communications takes place in a landscape where approximately 75% of campus staff associated with marketing and communications do not report centrally, but typically through a reporting head such as a college dean or department leader. Consequently, this can lead to cascading operational inefficiencies, brand misperception, and an incoherent experience for students, faculty, staff, and supporters. While colleges and universities can adopt several different marketing and communications strategies for various campus functions, one of the critical ones is to unify and centralize specific aspects of marketing and communications. Unfortunately, this approach comes with its inherent challenges and necessitates a high degree of collaboration. Some of those challenges include: Resistance to change: The common perception that the current state is adequate as is, can stall a more unified way of working. Siloed nature of departments: A legacy culture of decentralization makes collaboration and unification more difficult. Shadow technology: Marketing technology tools and solutions implemented without guidance from marketing or IT. Discounting central marketing and communications: When the central department isn’t viewed as a key partner in marketing and communications, departments depend on outside agencies. Moving too quickly: Trying to get too many departments aligned at once can complicate things rather than simplifying. The Benefits of Unified Marketing and Communications There are several benefits associated with a unified approach to higher education marketing and communications that go beyond just a connected experience for students, faculty and staff. These include some key operational efficiencies that save time, augment knowledge and absorption, and distributed costs among departments. As budgets change, marketing teams should be able to show the evident benefits of alignment. Shared Cost: Most colleges and universities have marketing and communications teams working with different technologies. This leads to cost redundancies that aren’t always apparent. Shared Knowledge: When using many different technologies, there are limitations in combining and understanding knowledge to drive innovation. Shared Data: Data is critical to understanding how institutions are engaging with stakeholders in a manner that makes sense for them. Shared Messaging: This constitutes messaging with an appropriate level of personalization. 5 Strategies for Higher Education Marketing and Communications The following five strategies should be embraced to achieve operational efficiencies across campus. 1. Consistent Messaging, Voice, and Tone A central messaging platform is vital. While centralised messaging, voice, and tone is important, it needs to be relevant for various departments across campus, for it to be widely adopted. For messages to resonate amongst the audience, it is essential to understand the overlap of audiences. Media: Media rules of engagement should be established clearly, to ensure consistent messaging across print, social media, web, and email. Brand: Most colleges and universities don’t have the bandwidth to support multiple brands.  It is important to adopt a “branded house” strategy and foster sharing of resources. 2. Segment Constituents Since the pandemic hit us, audience segmentation has been a key topic of discussion for higher education marketers and communicators. However, limited access to all data, especially constituent metadata such as descriptive information, makes audience segmentation and targeted personalization of messaging a challenge. Consequently, engagement is at times carried out using batch wise email blasts. The key points to consider are where the data is, its accessibility, can the preferred marketing and communications platform use it, and can it be segmented prior to launching outbound campaigns. Metadata for Constituents: Full name Address Major Last event attended When they last donated Expected graduation  date Research they engage with Forms submitted across the college/university 3. Support Services It is essential for marketers and communicators to be viewed as a strategic partner and not an someone who are meant to take orders for the rest of campus. Unfortunately, establishing this alignment doesn’t happen organically. It needs complete and mature support services that bring staff together from discrete departments. To begin with, best practises should be documented and made accessible online easily. Also, it must include ongoing training so that departments and staff can fully absorb the brand message, voice, tone. And understand how technology can help them to deliver it to the right audience. Higher Education Institutions that have successfully achieved alignment conduct monthly or quarterly meetings amongst all their campus partners where they share experiences and deliberate on ways to further engagement. Suggested Support Services Include: Brand Assets Library: Includes fonts and typesetting, color palette, graphic elements, email guidelines and templates, social media guidelines, and web standards. Training: Includes onboarding and regular training. Training methodology should balance courses for beginners and advanced ones, to keep all partners engaged. Campus Community: Regular meeting for the central department to share strategy with partners and encourage partners to share their perspectives. Governance Model: Establish the rules of engagement that partners need to follow. In an ideal scenario, the central department for marketing and communications is the owner. Center of Excellence (COE): This is a must when you are managing a central technology platform. It allows campus partners to ask questions and receive guidance and support. Innovation Workshops: Campus partners can learn about new features and functionality about the technology being used and understand how they will be used going forward. Best Practices Sharing: Regular feedback sessions to establish what’s working and what’s not. This opens up opportunities for partners to learn from each other’s mistakes and/or successes. 4. Have a Full Stack MarTech A unified, aligned higher education marketing and communications team is one that drives engagement with the right audience with a robust central MarTech strategy. Higher Educational institutions deploy a huge amount of marketing and communications messaging across multiple digital channels, such as email, SMS, web, ads and social media. While it is important to have a rich set of features and functionality for creating and launching campaigns across channels, the ability to have actionable data and deliver personalization is what is most important. This is where a best-in-class CRM platform for higher education becomes critical to aggregate constituent information, and use that information to segment audiences and deliver a personalized and relevant engagement. 5. Plan Big, Start Small Once you’ve identified your brand messaging platform, and established campus-wide technology, along with complete support systems, the next step is to get campus buy-in to set your plans in motion. Most colleges and universities however, operate on a decentralized model. Unless there’s a clear directive from the top leadership, bringing other departments along would require a consensus. If working with your central team is challenging, other departments may not see the value in aligning with them. Big changes don’t happen overnight, so start with small steps, one at a time. Identify and start with partners that are open to innovation. Do a test pilot, and fine-tune a unified approach. The learnings acquired from early partnerships are key since they form the blueprint that other constituents can follow. Steps To Get Started Identify a large, strategic partner who you think is key to success. Get them on board in the planning phase itself. Onboard one or two smaller departments with whom you have a good rapport. These departments should be aware of the value of alignment and are willing to innovate and learn with you. Keep the rest of the campus apprised of these partnerships. Some may be skeptical, but once they see value in what you have undertaken, they will get on board. Unified higher education marketing and communications can be quite a challenge. It requires a significant amount of effort to ensure alignment across many different departments, but it’s totally worth the effort. Higher Education institutions that follow these marketing and communications strategies can attain higher operational efficiency, a better understanding of the campus-wide marketing technology landscape, and higher engagement from their constituents. Behind every great strategy is a partner that you can trust. You need a certified expert. Learn more about how you can partner with Girikon, a Certified Salesforce Partner, to support your institution’s marketing and communications teams.