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PyTorch is an open source ML library used for developing and training deep learning models. The primary contributor to PyTorch is Facebook’s AI research group. PyTorch can be used with Python and C++. As one would expect, the Python interface is more sophisticated. PyTorch, backed by Facebook and supported by Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, is quite popular amongst developers and researchers. Unlike other more popular neural network based deep learning frameworks such as TensorFlow, which use static computation graphs, PyTorch uses dynamic computation, which allows for greater flexibility when one wants to build complex architectures. PyTorch works very well with Python, and uses its core concepts like classes, structures and loops, and is therefore more intuitive to understand. When compared with TensorFlow, which has its own programming style, PyTorch is simpler to work with. Why do we need PyTorch? The PyTorch framework can be viewed as the future of deep learning. There are many deep learning frameworks accessible to developers today, with the more preferred frameworks being TensorFlow and PyTorch. PyTorch however offers more flexibility and computing power. For machine learning and AI developers, PyTorch is easier to learn and work with. Here are some advantages of PyTorch: 1. Easy to Learn PyTorch has the same structure as traditional programming which makes it more accessible to developers and enthusiasts. It has been documented very well and the developer community is continuously improving the documentation and support. Thereby making it easy to learn for programmers and non-programmers alike. 2. Developer Productivity It works seamlessly with python, and with many powerful APIs can be easily deployed on Windows or Linux. Most of the tasks in PyTorch can be automated. Which means with just some basic programming skills, developers can easily boost their productivity. 3. Easy to Debug PyTorch can use debugging tools of python. Since PyTorch creates a computational graph at runtime, developers can use PyCharm, the IDE from Python, for debugging. 4. Data Parallelism PyTorch can assign computational tasks amongst multiple CPUs or GPUs. This is made possible with its data parallelism feature, which wraps around any module and allows parallel processing. 5. Useful Libraries PyTorch is supported by a large community of developers and researchers who have built tools and libraries to extend the accessibility of PyTorch. This developer community contributes actively in developing computer vision, reinforcement learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP) for research and production. GPyTorch, BoTorch, and Allen NLP are some of the libraries used by PyTorch. This provides access to a powerful set of APIs that further extends the PyTorch framework. Benefits of using PyTorch 1. Python-friendly. PyTorch was created keeping Python in mind (that’s why the prefix), as against other deep learning frameworks that were ported over to Python. PyTorch provides a hybrid front end enabling programmers to easily move most of the code from research to prototyping to execution for production. 2. Optimized for GPUs. PyTorch is optimized for GPUs to accelerate training cycles. PyTorch is supported by the largest cloud service providers: AWS currently supports the latest version of PyTorch. AWS includes its Deep Learning AMI (Amazon Machine Image) and is optimized for GPU.  Microsoft also has plans to support PyTorch in Azure – their cloud service platform. PyTorch has a built-in feature of data parallelism, that allows developers to leverage multiple GPUs on leading cloud platforms. 3. Plethora of tools and libraries. PyTorch comes with a rich ecosystem of tools and libraries for extending its availability and potential. For instance, Torchvision, PyTorch’s built-in set of tools allows developers to work on large and complex image datasets. The PyTorch community of researchers across academia and industry, programmer and ML developers have created a rich ecosystem that provides tools, models, and libraries to extend PyTorch. The objective of this community is to support programmers, engineers and data scientists to further the application of deep learning with PyTorch. 5 ways in which AI apps can use PyTorch With PyTorch, engineering teams can create deep learning predictive algorithms from data sets. For instance, developers can leverage historical housing data to predict future housing prices or use a manufacturing unit’s past production data to predict success rates of new parts. Other common uses of PyTorch include: Image classification: PyTorch can be used to build complex neural network architectures called Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). These multilayer CNNs are fed thousands of images of a specific object, say a tree, and much like how our brains works, once the CNN is fed a data set of tree images, it can identify a new image of a tree it has never seen before. This application can be particularly useful in healthcare to detect illnesses or spot patterns, much faster than what the human eye can do. Recently a CNN was used in a study to detect skin cancer. Handwriting recognition: Human handwriting has its inconsistencies as one moves across people and regions.  Handwriting recognition involves interpreting the inconsistencies in human handwriting across people and languages. Forecast time sequences: Another type of neural network is Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). They are designed for sequence modelling and are particularly useful for training an algorithm on past data. It can make predictions based on historical data, allowing it to make decisions based on the past. For instance, an airline operator can forecast the number of passengers it will have 3 months from now, based on the data from previous months.  Text generation: RNNs and PyTorch are also used for text generation. In text generation an AI model can be trained on a specific text to create its own output on its learning (for eg interpretation of poetry). Style transfer: One of the most exciting and popular applications of PyTorch is a style transfer. It uses a set of deep learning algorithms to manipulate images and use the visual style of that image on another image to create a new set of images, combining the data of one with the style of another. For example, you can use your vacation album images, apply a style transfer app and make it look like a painting by a famous artist. And as you would expect, it can do the reverse as well. Convert paintings to look like contemporary photos. AI is going to reshape many enterprise functions and how their respective teams work. And one of those areas is CRM. Salesforce, the world’s leading CRM platform is leading the way in embedding trusted AI into all their product offerings. As a Gold Salesforce Partner, Girikon is the preferred choice for many Salesforce customers across the globe. To know more about how AI can work for your business, contact us today.

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.

  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.

At Dreamforce 2022, Salesforce and WhatsApp announced a game changing strategic partnership that would allow Salesforce customers to connect with their customers seamlessly and empower them to deliver new messaging experiences on WhatsApp. With 2 billion users, WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app on the planet. And Salesforce is the world’s No 1 CRM platform. And when these two come together, the benefits of both will be amplified. WhatsApp integration with Salesforce boosts customer satisfaction and increases your brand loyalty. The Salesforce-WhatsApp integration is a solution from Salesforce that lays emphasis on delivering an integrated, connected omnichannel experience to its users. WhatsApp business messaging from Salesforce will bring Salesforce’s best-in-class CRM capabilities to deliver convenient, fresh, and personalized experiences to customers worldwide. This seamless integration will transform how brands engage with their customers across marketing, sales, and service interactions. The new integration will empower businesses to customize their experience effortlessly and connect with their customers in a fast, engaging and personal way to promote and sell products and provide support. This would in turn improve brand engagement and loyalty, improve convenience, boost interaction, and augment customer service.   How WhatsApp with Salesforce boosts customer engagement, loyalty and revenue Salesforce’s key Cloud offerings namely Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Service Cloud apps will integrate with WhatsApp to drive promotional and customer service messaging, and sometime soon into the future, integrate conversation based transactional commerce capabilities. This will allow businesses to transform their relationships with their customers across millions of conversations by personalizing the messaging experience for every customer, at scale. This will allow Salesforce customers to engage audiences on WhatsApp, fast track sales, and drive a far more effective and efficient customer service experience. Features of this integration include: Create an end-to-end customer journey: Using Journey Builder and WhatsApp, Salesforce customers can create, exchange, and manage interactions with customers throughout their journey to deliver a seamless customer experience. For instance, customers may receive a reminder message on WhatsApp about an upcoming order delivery in the coming week. As an upsell promo, the message could include a discount coupon of 25% for a related product. The user could then confirm in a single click if they wish to add this new product to their next order. Personalize every interaction with the Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform (CDP): With Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform, Salesforce customers will be able to personalize real time marketing interactions on WhatsApp with first-party customer data. Salesforce based Whatsapp messaging will leverage AI driven insights from across Salesforce and other sources to personalize customer engagement with smart promotions, and recommendations, across every interaction, at scale. Brands can also easily activate audiences directly through the Marketing Cloud CDP, to target high-value segments or new audiences with Click-to-WhatsApp ads on social media to drive customers to a one-to-one messaging experience. Enhance selling and service conversations with automation and AI: With the partnership between Salesforce and WhatsApp, businesses can significantly reduce support wait times and improve overall efficiency with automated personal interactions through messaging on WhatsApp. Salesforce customers using tools like automation and AI-powered chatbots have seen a significant increase in customer satisfaction, agent productivity, customer retention, and case resolution. Enrich customer conversations: Salesforce customers will be able to use customizable templates for messages that include brand media such as product videos and images, or display products and services with interactive textual content that allow consumers to view and buy products through WhatsApp. Customizable buttons allow users to take action with a single tap. Default Privacy and security: Privacy and security is at the heart of WhatsApp. Every WhatsApp message sent between businesses and their customers is protected by the best in class Signal encryption protocol that secures messages before they leave your device How to connect WhatsApp to Salesforce Before your customers can send you messages from WhatsApp, and you can reply from the Salesforce console, you need to have a Salesforce account and a verified Facebook Business Manager account. Along with that, there are some other requirements that you need to fulfill: Have Salesforce Classic or Lightning Experience. Have a Digital Engagement license Have a Service Cloud license Have a Chat user license. Have an approved WhatsApp Business account. To set up your WhatsApp account on Facebook Business Manager, send an email to WhatsAppEnablement@salesforce.com with the subject “WhatsApp Number Setup.” Include the information listed below in the body of your email: Salesforce Org ID. Facebook Business Manager ID. The name associated with your Facebook Business Manager ID. The WhatsApp number The Name and email address associated with the number The company name you want to display on WhatsApp Company description, logo, and website URL (optional) Going to your WhatsApp channel in Lightning Experience Go to Lightning Experience settings. Write “Messaging” in the search bar and select “Messaging Settings.” Go to “Channels,”  and you should automatically see WhatsApp. Automating Customer support with Einstein Bots With this new partnership between Salesforce and WhatsApp, WhatsApp will have access to Einstein Bots. Business teams can program or automate messages on WhatsApp just like on Facebook Messenger or with standard SMS messages.  Einstein Bots is an AI tool from Salesforce designed to create bots to assist customer service teams to manage customer queries and issues. Einstein bots allow you to answer questions on routine cases, while freeing up agents o that they can work on more complex customer issues. In Salesforce, you will need to install your company’s WhatsApp within Einstein Bots. Once you complete that setup, go to the main Bot Builder page and complete the following steps: In the Channel Menu click on “Add” Select WhatsApp in the channel options In the Deployment field select the channel name This functionality will make automating specific answers very straightforward to try to help customers before they even speak to an agent. Customers can make queries over WhatsApp while receiving automated responses in real-time, all leading to significant time saved for the customer support staff. Today customers spend more time than ever on their devices, and they want to interact with brands on the world’s most popular messaging app. Most self-employed professionals are already doing that. And it’s a matter of time before medium-sized and large corporations follow suit. Now brands and enterprises can communicate with their customers over WhatsApp with the following benefits: Implement in real-time. Implement in an organized way. Get access to official support from WhatsApp. Get real time AI driven performance analytics. Get the entire history of customer interactions. Easily map contact center agent traceability. Drive case resolution efficiency and boost productivity. Significantly improve SLAs Automate responses, alerts, and notifications with Einstein Bots. This partnership between Salesforce and WhatsApp is transforming how businesses and brands communicate with their customers to enhance the customer experience through personalization delivering a seamless experience privately and securely. Girikon is a Gold Certified Salesforce Consulting Partner and can help you transform your sales, marketing and customer service activities by integrating the World’s No1 CRM platform with the world’s most powerful messaging platform. Contact us to day to know more.

What is a subscription-based business model? Subscription business models are those where customers pay recurringly for continuous access to a product or service. Subscription business models can accelerate growth by virtue of creating recurring revenue. This means as a business owner you get revenue again and again over predictable intervals such as monthly or annually as and when your customers renew their subscriptions. What are the benefits of subscription-based business models? Subscription business models protect you during circumstances created by economic uncertainties. They create a stream of predictable revenue from a stable base of returning customers allowing you to plan for longer into the future. Here is some further detailing of the benefits. Fast Tracked revenue. As your business attracts more customers, recurring revenue from subscriptions grow exponentially. It’s always more convenient to manage existing customer than to attract and retain new ones. Subscription results in better retention drives revenue growth more efficiently and easily. Predictable revenue. You don’t need to plan quarter to quarter. Businesses who offer subscriptions, more often than not, start each quarter with a predictable expected revenue closer to the preceding quarter and then build on top of that. Business agility. Once you establish long-term relationships with your customers, you get access to valuable continuous data that will help you to get a better understanding of your customers, and consequently empower you to server them better as you go. Armed with aggregated customer data of their past interactions with you, you can learn about them faster and respond with new appropriate offerings. And the more this happens, the more efficient and unique your offerings will become. What are the different kinds of subscription business models? There are several kinds of subscription business models, but essentially, they all mean the same thing which is, you charge for access to products instead of charging for the products themselves. Here’s a look at three of the most popular ones: Subscription model: Revenue is set for each subscription cycle which could be weekly, monthly or annual. The charges payable are predetermined and based on a fixed date cycle. For example: a fixed monthly subscription fee for a music or video service. Consumption model: In this case, revenue is variable. The amount that is chargeable and when it is due is based on usage. For example, a cab service. Hybrid model: In this model, customers are offered a mix of subscription and usage. In this case revenue has both fixed as well as variable components. For example: over usage data fees on your internet usage on top of a fixed monthly service fee for a fixed data usage cap. How can I implement a subscription-based model for my business? To implement a subscription model, you need to adopt tools and processes that allow you to create a consistent buying journey, while knowing that customers move through different channels and make modifications to their subscriptions with each of them over time. Once you create a consistent journey, track new metrics to ensure you are on the right path. Here’s how you can get there: 1. Empower customers to subscribe and pay over any channel With a subscription-based revenue model, you are constantly interacting with your customers, and they are not always available for a conversation. And in today’s pandemic reality, they increasingly want to engage on their own term. In fact, recent research suggests that they now prefer digital self-service and remote customer service rather than face-to-face interactions. Businesses need to make it possible for customers to renew and/or upgrade their subscriptions and pay instantly on the channels of their choice. This could translate to having a website or a mobile app, to enable that service. It’s a known fact in today’s digital business context, customers don’t just want to choose digital channels for interaction. They want to be able to cross them.   As a business, you want to know how you can deliver a seamless and consistent journey across channels. For instance, a customer might initiate a purchase on your online store, but then being routed to a sales rep when they stall or hesitate at checkout. A good subscription management mechanism can help. It combines customer relationship management tools, and along with the power of self-service, provides access to the same data to all teams. Once they have that, they can pick up customer conversations from where they left off. As a business, you want every touchpoint with the customer to be amazing. And in order to deliver an exceptional journey, you need to integrate all customer data for a compete view of your customer. Subscription management provides a mechanism way to connect customer data that delivers a seamless journey and provides a great customer experience at every touchpoint. 2. Deliver value to customers Subscriptions don’t mean much if they are delivering value to your customers at every step. You’re consistently asking them to renew and pay for their subscriptions. IF there is no value in the offering, customer won’t renew their subscriptions. Consequently, they’ll fall through the cracks and your growth will hit a roadblock. There needs to be a paradigm shift in your thinking from delivering products to delivering value. How can you consistently deliver value-as-a-service to your customers? For instance, Spotify doesn’t sell music. They offer entertainment-as-a-service. Likewise, an e-retailer doesn’t just deliver great products. They deliver an exceptional buying and customer service experience-as-a-service. Value is unlocked as customer’s access and use the product. This brings customer service teams into focus, who will need to ensure sure adoption and customer satisfaction is high to the point of being delightful. A customer relationship management system that provides complete visibility of data and a certain level of automation is vital. Visibility helps you keep an eye on and act on adoption and usage patterns. And you can jump is to support and assist a customer to fix an issue early before it becomes a nuisance. For instance, with automation you can make it easy and fast for customers to start using new products or services they’ve purchased. 3. Understand recurring revenue with new metrics Customer acquisition is a thing of the past. It doesn’t hold the key anymore. Customer value, which leads to customer retention, which eventually drives recurring revenue, are the key metrics now. How will you improve customer retention without measuring it? Let us first look at customer value metrics. You can measure customer value by tracking exactly how much your customers are using your subscription offering. One of the key metrics is to track is average revenue per user, which is as simple as it sounds. Gross revenue divided by number of users. As your business evolves, with more processes and automation in place, you will become more and more effective at targeting customers with the appropriate offerings, all while retaining them and getting them to renew their subscriptions. And once that happens you will see an improvement in the average revenue per customer. To measure growth in top-line revenue, you need to monitor monthly and annual recurring revenue. These are significant since increasing them translates to your revenue streams becoming more and more predictable and that allows you to plan ahead. Ready to open new paths to revenue growth? A subscription-based business model is today’s new reality of a digital-first approach for business. However, it can only succeed if its authentic. Customers are smart. And you can’t fake value to them.  They will renew only when they get real, consistent value for their money. It’s both a challenge and an opportunity to get close to your customers, not just know them better but understand them better, and offer what they want in the way they want it. Girikon is a Certified Salesforce Consulting Partner and can help you to re-imagine your offerings and envision a whole new customer journey. Contact us today to learn how a subscription-based revenue model can deliver value to your customers and drive revenue and agility for your business.

Customers are always connected. They are always adapting to the latest technology, quickly. The Salesforce platform is a set of unified platform services that easily adapts to your ever-changing business needs. Powering and connecting all your business processes to unify the customer experience. So, sales can sell smarter and faster the way they want landing their next big customer from anywhere. Service can then tailor their process quickly creating aps specific to the customer needs like setting up custom intelligent alerts to help find smart solutions even before they know there is an issue. Which keeps the customer happy. Marketing can take them of personalised journeys recommending helpful products along the way and IT can integrate third party apps and IoT device data quickly adapting to the latest advancements to better advance the customer relationship. A trusted secure platform that lets you tailor any app or process for anyone in any department using low code solutions with lightning that are instantly mobile. Increasing productivity for employees and connectivity with customers and you are easily able to innovate, building more complex apps with intelligence working with emerging intelligent technologies like Artificial Intelligence making you more intelligent about your customers. You can even plug in thousands of pre-built apps and components from the Salesforce AppExchange and empower everyone from serious coders to the not serious ones. With help of thousands of developers and administrators through trailhead on the worlds No1 enterprise platform letting you easily innovate around each and every customer. Create, automate, deploy and secure apps with the world’s leading low code platform. Build scalable apps without any code development tools. Connect your employees, processes, and systems seamlessly to automate workflows and deliver a personalised customer experience, all with best in class security and governance practices. No need to code any more. Fast track work with clicks to build integrated flows in Slack, your digital HQ. Have them execute complex processes on the Salesforce Platform. Deliver experiences. Drive productivity. Automate processes, build smarter, robust apps, and secure data across the customer lifecycle. Improve efficiency and trim IT spends with the Salesforce Platform. Automate easily. Automate tasks with low-code tools and seamlessly connect your entire organisation. Build apps. Build and test apps easily with the latest tools in change and release management. Scale securely. Safeguard your data and conform to compliances with an enterprise grade security and privacy framework. CLICK TO BUILD Go to market fast with powerful tools to build apps and workflows. Build and deliver intelligent, engaging customer experiences that respond to changing business with clicks not code. Use the power of AI to deliver insights from apps that are connected to your Salesforce data. Drive actions such as intelligent recommendations to enhance growth and productivity with AI-powered automation. What is a Low Code approach? It's a modern approach to building apps and software that necessitates little to no coding. It’s more than a buzzword. It's coding re-imagined. It’s an alternative approach to orthodox software development that is visual. With a low-code development platform, teams can use intuitive graphical user interfaces (GUIs), and use “drag and drop” and “point and click” functionality to customize software. Since one doesn’t need specialised coding skills, business users can utilise drag and drop functionality to assist programmers to create custom apps and workflows for customers, partners and employees. By bringing app development closer to business users, low code plugs the gap between business and IT. Sales, service and marketing teams can play a more involved role in software development. Consequently, IT teams have more bandwidth at hand for more pressing technical tasks. The spread of app development from tech to business can lay the foundation for a digital transformation across the enterprise. SHIP WITH CONFIDENCE Build on a trusted platform with in-built security and performance. Deliver engaging digital experiences with intrinsic security and trust. The Salesforce Platform lets you seamlessly integrate disconnected systems and data siloes with API-driven services and event-based interactions. Deploy apps faster with simplified open technologies on a fully managed scalable platform. Here are the platform services that come with Salesforce Mobile   Make every app mobile friendly.   Blockchain   Build trusted partnerships.   Artificial Intelligence (AI)   Personalise every experience.   Vision   Visualise your business with AI.   Voice   Deliver a conversational experience.   Security   Deliver trust across every touchpoint.   Privacy & Identity   Manage customer and consent.   Community   Bring your customers closer.   Builder   Build and innovate faster than ever.   Flow   Automate every experience. EMPOWER EVERYONE Empower your entire enterprise to respond to change and upgrade skills on the go. Enable teams to create engaging digital experiences in a code-less framework using customisable components and services. Nurture collaboration across any device with a unified model and tools that work better together. And empower team members to upgrade their skills to drive the growth of your business. What exactly is Low Code? It's a modern approach to app development that necessitates little to no coding. Low code is not just buzzword. It's an alternative approach to orthodox app development that is more visual than manual. With a low-code development framework, teams can utilise easy to use graphical user interfaces (GUIs) such as drag and drop functionality to customize apps. Since you don’t need specialised technical or coding knowledge any more, business users easily assist coding teams to create custom apps and workflows for your customers, partners and employees. By bringing app development to business users, the low code approach reduces the gap between IT and business teams. Sales, service, and marketing teams can play a more involved role in app development. This allows IT teams more bandwidth to prioritise pressing technical tasks. The evolution of app development from IT to business can lay the foundation for a digital transformation across the enterprise. TURBO CHARGE SCALE AND INNOVATION WITH HYPER FORCE Grow your business on a trusted, scalable, robust platform. Hyperforce is the next-generation infrastructure architecture of Salesforce. delivers Salesforce products and services reliably and securely on all major public clouds allowing you to augment your customers’ success by rapidly scaling your drag-and-drop driven low code apps to new markets. HYPERCOMPLIANT Store data in one place while staying globally compliant. Enjoy the flexibility of the location of your data to comply with local regulations even in the public sector. HYPERSCALABLE Implement faster with an infrastructure with limitless flexibility. Scale your infrastructure easily. Hyperforce allows resources to be deployed quickly while you have the flexibility of system elasticity. HYPERSECURE Safeguard sensitive data with built-in trust. Hyperforce allows you to prioritise customer data security with the built-in trust that is the cornerstone of the world’s most trusted cloud platform. It works behind the curtain to ensure the security and privacy of your data, so you have the necessary bandwidth to focus on innovation. HYPERCOMPATIBLE Build future-ready apps with backward compatibility. All existing Salesforce apps, customisations, and integrations (whether they are on the cloud or not) will run without disruption on Hyperforce. Summary Salesforce is the world’s leading Enterprise App Development Platform that streamlines your business reach and functionality. You do not need to deal with developers any more to create apps with the Salesforce Platform. With the simplicity of drag-and-drop functionality, just about anyone can build and deploy apps that automate processes that augment the customer experience. And for coders, the Salesforce Platform is language agnostic, which means you can build customs apps using any language. The apps you build can be deployed on any device or on the web, whether simple or complex, and integrate with almost any data source. With Salesforce, you can find new ways to enrich the customer experiences and streamline business processes. Your imagination is perhaps the only thing that may limit you. Girikon is a Certified Salesforce Consulting Partner and can help you start building apps in a code less framework. Girikon is a Certified Salesforce Development Partner and can help you start building apps in a code-less framework. Contact us today learn how you can get started now.

With Salesforce, retailers can deliver intelligent customer experience at each stage of the shopping journey. From awareness to purchase to service to loving your brand, one to one advertising helps you extend your reach using artificial intelligence to find new shoppers with characteristics that match your existing ones. And once you reach them, you can personalise their shopping journey with relevant content on the right channel at the right time. When a customer engages with your brand, they receive recommendations of products they powered by artificial intelligence. Shoppers have a personalised experience, faster payment, and fulfilment options. After making a payment, shoppers can get help on any channel including text and video chat. Service agents can see a complete view of the customer and even help with additional purchases during the interaction. Shoppers can also visit customer communities to get their questions answered. In the store associates can personalise shopper experience with recommendations based on a 360 degree view of the shopper. They have product availability, tasks and communications from headquarters all on their mobile device. So, they can spend more time on the floor giving shoppers a faster personal and connected experience at every touchpoint. Connect every aspect of your business with a unified intelligent platform. INTELLIGENT ADVERTISING Drive awareness and acquisition with smarter targeting. Execute all your advertising such as display, search, and social from a one integrated platform. Discover new customers and manage multiple campaigns across advertising ecosystems with Advertising Studio from Marketing Cloud. Visualise and get reports on ad performance with just a few clicks, empowering you to reach out to shoppers with the right offerings at the right time. Advertising Studio form Salesforce Marketing Cloud connects advertising with your marketing and CRM data to create personalised one to one customer journeys. Now all your data securely stored inside Salesforce including sales, service, marketing, and commerce interaction can be used to power your digital advertising. From customer acquisition and re engagement, to media optimization allowing you to directly advertise on Facebook, Google search Instagram, witter and YouTube. even use Salesforce DMP to reach the entire display advertising eco system. Easily find and reach out to new prospects, lookalikes of your best customers and use these high qualified audiences to drive successful Facebook campaigns. immediately capturing quality leads for your business right inside both sales and marketing clouds. And with journey builder you can coordinate advertising with other channels including email sales and service, to increase RoI and customer satisfaction while excluding your existing unqualified customers. 1-TO-1 JOURNEYS Personalise every customer journey with Marketing Cloud. Make marketing smarter. Deliver personalised journeys to customers that are scalable and push the right offer at the right time on the right channel across mobile, social, email, mobile, and more. Marketing Cloud Email Studio is the enterprise email marketing solution built on the worlds no 1 CRM. It allows marketers to drive smart personalised messaging at scale while seamlessly connecting commerce, sales, and service for a coherent customer journey. With Email Studio each message can be tailored using at user friendly user interface, with drag and drop functionality, allowing you to easily customise content for your prospects. Now you can personalise unique content for each customer. Einstein AI is fully integrated into the retail solution from Salesforce, which means email marketers can intelligently predict the customer needs, enabling them to recommend the right product at exactly the right time.  With automated triggers, retailers can touch literally millions of customers, by sending them personalised messages even during peak times. Email studio allows you to easily switch between using prebuilt templates or code when creating the right look of your message. You can review each email once it’s ready, to ensure the right content is created for every member. After sending emails, marketers can target and attract new prospects by advertising across the internet or on their mobile. Real time analytics tracks and monitors campaign performance throughout the whole customer journey so that you can optimise campaigns to consistently engage customers. Email Studio allows you to approve content, monitor performance, and manage users from anywhere. UNIFIED COMMERCE With Commerce Cloud, convert shoppers into buyers, faster. Reinvent the store with unified digital commerce. Deliver a seamless buying experience seamless across the mobile, web, social, and physical stores. Enable multi-channel order management functionality that allows customers to buy from anywhere and merchants to sell and fulfil anywhere. Commerce Cloud digital is a platform that empowers you to scale your business across all channels -mobile, social, web social and physical stores. You can easily and quickly deploy sites and augment sales fast with a huge library of pre-built features, managing multiple sales channels from one single console. With a robust development platform built on the world’s most powerful CRM, open APIs and a large, certified partner network, you have the power to deliver an engaging online store delivering an exceptional customer experience of your brand in virtually any language from anywhere. Brands, retailers, and marketers can drive their business with a scalable platform that meets your business objectives with tools that augment productivity for the commerce team, creating campaigns, adding content and promotions, and previewing the online store experience for the targeted customer group. You can create unique categories of merchandize for a campaign, a place of your choice, with the products you want and the sequence in which you want them. And use the power of AI improve that sequence. With all this and more, your customers can locate what they want, faster than ever. With every interaction that your customers have with your store, Einstein learns more about them, and gets smarter and more predictive as they interact, throwing up products based on their past behaviour. Making customers feel like you know them because, in reality, you do.  With Commerce Cloud Digital, you have the right partner invested in your success, and you have access to team of experts who will make available to you benchmarks and best practices across the retail eco system, empowering you to innovate and grow your business faster than ever. ANY CHANNEL SERVICE Deliver intelligent service with Service Cloud. Drive real conversations at scale. Drive real conversations with customer on the channel of their choice. Personalise every interaction and empower service reps with the information they need to respond faster to customers and turn into customers for life. Live message feature from Salesforce delivers conversational service to your customers exactly where they need it. On the channel of their choice. And on their preferred messaging app. Leverage bots to power conversations and automate service capability or allow customers to directly connect with a support rep to deliver instant help. With the Service Cloud lightning console, service reps can reply with the help of complete customer information from CRM data to interaction history, so they can smartly give the right answers quickly. Service agents can now be more productive, by managing multiple conversations concurrently. And because customers can use whichever messaging app they prefer, they can easily engage in service conversations, effortlessly. Live message feature allows you to connect with your customers in completely new way. Retail CRM from Salesforce. Today, the shopping experience begins online irrespective of whether it ends in a store or with a package delivered to them. Which is why brands and merchants are taking advantage of Salesforce Retail Cloud to deliver personalised customer experiences across multiple channels. Salesforce CRM for retail allows retailers to make customers’ needs their top priority, absorbing what they want, and responding in real time. Girikon is a certified Salesforce Implementation Partner and we can help you connect sales reps, partners and associated staff with the information they need to deliver the best fit products and best in class service that drives customer loyalty with Salesforce retail CRM.