Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a mechanism for a machine to “think like humans” — i.e., the machine can perform tasks with the planning, reasoning, learning, and understanding language. While no one is being equal to human intelligence nowadays or in future. The concept behind artificial intelligence is called machine learning, which is used to make our jobs easier, efficient and more productive. Advantage of Artificial Intelligence:-

• Data processing will improve at an amazing rate — Data processing performance will increase. The cost of data processing will become more affordable.
• There are more data that needs to be analysed because businesses are getting more data from customer conversation.
• AI will be improved consumer apps — now customers expect to provide same improvements across all their experiences

Most of us using AI who has a computer, smartphone, or other smart devices. We are already using Artificial Intelligence to make their life easier:-

• Siri (an integral part of iOS) and Cortana (Operating system-oriented voice assistant) act as your personal assistants using read your emails, track your location, voice processing and support more third-party integration.
• In Facebook, we use photo tag using image recognition.
• Amazon uses products using machine learning concept or algorithms.
• Traffic and navigation app like Waze uses optimal driving routes using a combination of forecasting, predictive models, and optimisation techniques.

AI is already increasing your customers’ expectations. When your customer comes to you like in Uber, Google, and Amazon you can think your customer’s expectations. If he comes into a store to buy a suit, you could suggest him according to his details of size, growth and previous choice?

The seller should know his customer size and preferences based on the basis of his purchase history. And Seller should be able to suggest the perfect pair of products to go with which will suit his customer.

The same concept applies to every business. Customers know that you have their details. They know that everything you can do with their details. And customers expect you to use your details to provide faster, smarter, personalised engagement during each visit.

AI supports data scientists and engineers for large amounts of data, data extraction and preparation of all data, and technology infrastructure.

It takes some specialised team of data scientists and developers who will access the correct data, prepare the same data, build the correct models, and then they will integrate the predictions back to the end-user experience such as CRM.

Salesforce has designed Salesforce Einstein so that all those challenges will be at Salesforce end instead of end users. i.e. everyone can use easily and more effectively to work with AI in a smarter way in their CRM.

After getting an AI project, it can be a long and painful experience. First of all, you have to analyze the business problem. Then you need to figure out the data that will be available to solve the problem. Then you need to assign appropriate resources or developer and infrastructure to gear it.

The use of Einstein is that all the Artificial Intelligence technology, which you need is built into your CRM apps. You will get the same result which you will get with your AI team, but without any challenges.

There are three type of most-used outcomes you would get from the AI as below:-

Predictive-scoring:-
When Einstein analyzes and gives you a score, it will also give you the reason that how it was arrived at. For instance, prediction of lead scoring represents sales lead a score representing that will convert into an opportunity. You can also get the reasons for the lead score — for instance, the lead industry, the source, or some other factors are a strong indicator that the same lead will or won’t convert.

Forecasting:-
AI hasn’t only limitation to scoring; they can also be used for prediction of the future value of something, like a stock or a real estate investment. If your profile is a sales manager, AI can predict your quarterly sale and let you know that your team can meet their target.

Recommendations:- If anyone who will shop online and AI makes suggestions for product purchases, but it can also be a smarter way for recommendations for any other product or services from business software. And AI can also recommend some other products.

Before now, AI was so complex and cost-effective that only a select few things to use it in a meaningful way. Salesforce Einstein changes the complexity of AI. Now everyone or organisation can easily use AI nowadays to analyse their data, predict and plan for next steps, and automate their tasks with Einstein’s AI for CRM:

• Sales can get the idea for next opportunities and fulfil customer expectations by knowing what a customer needs before the customer explanation.
• Service can deliver effective service by foretasting cases and resolve issues before they converted in a problem.
• Marketing can also create journeys with some prediction and effective customer experiences like never before.
• IT can embed AI everywhere and create smarter apps for employees and customers.

If you have data scientists, Einstein gives them AI technology that can help them even more productive. If you don’t have any data scientists, then no issue. Einstein has AI technology which makes it easy for everyone to use in their CRM. Salesforce has world’s leading data scientists working with them — and that means they’re working for you.

Machine learning is working with structured data in the specific patterns that provide insight. In the financial company, machine learning predicts finds risky for the applicants with the bad loan and generates credit scores. Sales — Sales team can analyse some information from email, calendars, and CRM data to effectively actions like the best email response to move a deal forward.

Service — Service team can automatically split cases and intelligently suggest them to the right service agent.

Marketing — Marketing team can intelligently score of a customer to subscribe to a newsletter, open an email, or make a purchase. While there are lots of experimentation happening with machine deep learning, most applications you’re familiar with are based on the image analysis. With the image analysis, a computer learns to split random images by analysing multiple images and their data points. For instance, clients apps like Google Photos and Facebook use machine deep learning for face recognition in photos.

Sales — Sales team can analyse product pictures or images and use the same information to suggest or analyse the best upsell and cross-sell opportunities.

Service — Service team can analyse pictures or images of a product to a service case and use the same information to split the case and assign it to the right agent.

Marketing — Marketing team can analyse pictures or images on Twitter or Facebook to suggest or analyze the best visuals for an upcoming advertising or campaign. It can also identify brands in the images that are mentioned in the text or not.

You can get lots of benefits of Record Types in Salesforce but if you do not implement it correctly, then they can create some complexities for users and admins. In short, Record Type enables admins to display specific custom & standard fields, and picklist values for end-users based on the type of record to be created. You can control all Record Related Lists which should be displayed for every type of record. For instance, if you have two different types of Forms/Applications that your students applied, like an Application1 and an Application2 and each Application has to display different data requirements or fields, you should create two Record Types (Application1, Application2) – where you only show Questions that apply to the Application1 on the Application1 Record Type.
When you create a Record Type, you can assign the same Record Type in a Page Layout and display your desired fields. Then you can apply the page Layout to the Profiles of Users that will be accessing it.

When should we create a Record Type?

• We should create Record Types when they need to be easily distinguished by an end-user. For example, creating a Record Type on an Account called Real Estate that displays many fields related to Real Estate company, and another Record Type called IT Industry that displays many fields related to IT company, are good to distinguish. In this scenario, users can easily identify that what Record Type to select while creating an Account.
• We can create Record Types when there is a need to create different Page Layouts, Buttons, Custom Links etc. (on any Objects) based on different requirements. For instance, if any user needs access to only some required fields based on the Record Type, then the user can access different layouts for different Record Type.
• You can use Record Types and Page Layouts combinations to display different Page Layout and Record Type to different sets of profile users. For Example, you can assign two separate page layouts to two different Record Types – one for Real Estate and another for IT Industry if you don’t need to display Developer related fields to your Real Estate.

Note:- Just remember that you not having a field on Page Layout does not prevent it from being available in Reports.

When should we not create a Record Type?

• If a user is creating the record without understanding what Record Type to select. For example, if you have a Record Type called Partner and another called Customer. What Record Type should a user select when they need to add a Partner who is also a Customer?
• I have seen many scenarios where the Record Type is used as Type field. There was no need for a Record Type. For a user, this is an unnecessary step that they could avoid.
• When you are only creating a Record Type to display different page layouts to different sets of users. This can easily be done by creating different Page Layouts and assigning them to different Profiles. There is no need to create a Record Type for this.

To maintain long-term business relations with customers, suppliers and partners, in particular, a company should organize an efficient contract management process. As business relationship and legal regulations become more complex, it becomes hard to handle contracts with high precision without dedicated software.

Still, according to PayStream Advisors, the vast majority (75%) of companies don’t automate contract lifecycle management (CLM). However, the same report says that no or poor automation of contract management causes a bunch of troubles, including:

• Inconsistency among contracts (in 64% of companies).
• Contract duplication (39%)
• Supply chain problems resulting from slowing business processes (35%)
• High risks of erroneous contracts (31%)
• Legal compliance burdens (24%)

CLM software solves these problems as it:

• Speeds up contracts movement across their lifecycle.
• Supports team collaboration on them.
• Brings more visibility into the changes in contract statuses.

To do this, a CLM tool should allow for internal authoring and collaboration, external negotiation, legal review, e-signing, as well as contract storage and tracking.

Not designed as a CLM system, Salesforce still provides a basic contract management module with the Sales Cloud license. Overall, the platform is used to solve three mentioned problems. Below, we test its capabilities around the contract lifecycle – request and drafting, internal approval, negotiation and signing, execution, compliance, and renewal – and share our best practices.

Step 1. Contract request and drafting
A sales rep requests a new contract from the legal department. Without automation, this can cause a lengthy and disorganized exchange of calls and emails between the sales and legal teams. An efficient solution to the problem is to let sales reps easily access and configure the latest contract templates approved by the legal team and automate the flow of contracts that do not need legal review. The legal team, in their turn, will be able to focus on non-standard agreements that require negotiation.

Salesforce Contract Management module, aka Contracts, is available in Sales Cloud OOTB and allows sales reps to create contracts without templates by filling in necessary fields. A Salesforce contract takes the form of an object, not a document. So a sales rep rather creates a detailed request to the legal team (contract object) than a contract draft per se (contract document). Your processes may require creating of a contract document already at this step. Then sales reps or attorneys have to use Salesforce document management tools as well. For more information on them, check out our recent article.

Our Salesforce consulting practice shows that some tweaks can improve contract requesting and drafting in Salesforce.

• Tip 1:- Provide sales reps with a contract builder to speed up contract document generation and minimize the risk of errors and inconsistencies. Drafting a contract will take just a few clicks with the templates approved by your legal team, automatic filling of account information and intuitive configuration of contract parameters.
• Tip 2:- Use custom workflows to initiate contract drafting upon winning an opportunity and automate contract sending for internal approval.
• Tip 3:- Let sales reps browse for and compare contract versions to simplify drafting. Some necessary tweaks can enable Salesforce to show changes in the preview of the contract later version.

Step 2. Internal approval
Internal contract review and approval should be both quick and precise – which is hard to achieve. In practice this means that, while critical contracts get more legal attention, standard ones should follow the shortest path not to affect customer experience with delays.

Salesforce Contracts allows tracking contract approval status, as well as keeping the history of changes (date, time, maker and the nature of the change). Also, users can exchange quick messages in the Сhatter feed to clarify details.

• Tip 4:- OOTB Salesforce Contract objects don’t have a Content section. This means users can’t attach documents to or associate them with contract objects. This can break a smooth contract flow. To solve this problem, consider using Salesforce custom objects to show related content on the Contract screen.
• Tip 5:- To make the review process transparent, enable document redlining tools, version comparisons and in-document comments. Also, consider extending the history of document changes to track edits done by different users.
• Tip 6:- Create custom Salesforce workflows to automate the movement of contract documents from one approval stage to another. Use different workflows for different contract types to minimize the approval time of low-risk contracts.

Step 3. External approval
As OOTB Salesforce Contracts are objects, after approval, sales people have to send related contract documents to accounts themselves. They can either upload new files from their computers or use Salesforce documents, CRM Content or Files if the contract is stored in the CRM. To send the doc for signing, sales reps can go to Chatter, Contacts or Opportunities and then fill in a form. You can also use workflows to notify a sales rep about an approved contract status and set automatic emails to remind the customer to sign the document.

• Tip 7:- Integrate Salesforce with electronic signing tools, like EchoSign or DocuSign, to make external approval quick for the customer and automatically deliver signed contracts to your sales team.

Step 4. Contract execution
A company needs a centralized repository to store and monitor the state of enforced contracts. Contract objects can be easily found in Salesforce by clicking the Contracts tab or associating a contract with an account.

• Tip 8:- Bringing related content to the Contract object (Tip 4) will also make working with multiple long-term customers more convenient. This way, users will be able to quickly access signed contract documents, both current and archived ones, to clarify needed details.
• Tip 9:- Create a dedicated folder for contract documents to store them in an organized way. This way, legal team will instantly find them if a customer complains.

Step 5. Tracking compliance
Contracts seal mutual obligations: yours – to deliver services and goods and the customer’s – to pay in time. As an enhancement (Tip 10) at this step, consider Salesforce integration with the ERP and accounting systems to always be alert to any upcoming (or missed) deadlines and payments. Salesforce can be configured to allow searching in the document body. This feature makes it easier for the legal team to quickly check contract compliance with changing regulations and standards.

Step 6. Contract renewal
Salesforce Contract allows using workflow alerts to notify sales reps up about upcoming contract renewals. Such alerts won’t let attorneys and sales reps miss a contract expire by accident or run a last-minute contract renewal race.

• Tip 10:- You can create custom Salesforce workflows to auto-renew certain contracts in line with the company policies, as well as to start new cycles of amendment and approval for the contracts that require changes.
• Tip 11:- Also, consider using Salesforce analytical and reporting capabilities to make contract performance and lifecycle processes transparent (for example, to get reports on contracts by value, expiry, or legal queue). Custom dashboards will deliver insights to different groups of users (legal, sales, and financials).

Salesforce or CLM for contract management?
As Salesforce is not a CLM platform, it obviously has limited contract management capabilities. But zooming out, apart from the Contracts tab alone, a company can customize the platform to cover many day-to-day needs in this regard. As an alternative to Salesforce consulting and development, a company can take a look at Salesforce contract management apps on AppExchange or integrate their CRM with a full-fledged CLM system.

Salesforce Product : Commerce Cloud

Commerce Cloud is one of the product among other products of Salesforce also plays a key role for making Salesforce customers so successful. Commerce cloud launched in July’2016 when Salesforce acquired Demandware, an industry that leads into retail and eCommerce software company.

Commerce Cloud is leading a revolution in retail technology. It helps retailers to connect with their shoppers, and it’s giving shoppers the unified and seamless experience they want from their favorite brands.

Commerce Cloud make the bridge open for customers to do shopping with full of fun and on every digital channel like web, mobile and so on. Also, retailers and brands can cater their customer’s individual needs whether online or in person and utilize that data for sales benefits.

Let’s have a quick overview about a Commerce Cloud 

Commerce Cloud have four feature capabilities that helps our customers for designing and implementation about the commerce strategies:

• Commerce Cloud Digital : Commerce Cloud Digital an open platform in between the retailers and shoppers with online experience and transactions across digital channels and devices. Retailers can coordinate shoppers online through mobile and web world by launching responsive eCommerce websites with full of storefronts, shopping cart and checkout functionalities.

• Commerce Cloud Store : Commerce Cloud Store a platform where both standard point-of-sale and mobile point-of-sale (POS) functionalities are going on. By the help of this retailer can engage with customer to display variety of products and put efforts to complete the transaction after sell the product.

• Commerce Cloud Einstein : Commerce Cloud Einstein product of Salesforce Einstein helps on product recommendation with their intelligence which are most likely to attract customer attention and also raise number of sales. Commerce Insights part of digital helps merchandiser for production and promotions of product through any platform.

• Commerce Cloud Order Management :   Commerce Cloud Order Management overview about the product orders and inventory details about their existence and also empowers the purchase of product from anywhere at anytime by using an online platform.

eCommerce Industry is keep on booming day to day but retailers facing lots of challenges to achieve best, the most likely demand of industry is to provide exactly what a customer see which also about the price difference among various outlets or different eCommerce sites which raise a good competition in market among retailers. Instead of many challenges this industry is maintaining their record heights by bypassing all challenges.

Thanks For Reading Commerce Cloud

Happy Salesforce!!

Salesforce Product: Community Cloud

Community Cloud can determine either a portal, a help forum, a support site, HR central, or something else, an online community is a great place to connect with the important folks in a new and different way. At the most basic level, we can say that a community is a group of people who can share a common mission or goal. The community can be useful to generate ideas for new products.

Data from your community existing in your Salesforce org, and data in your Salesforce org can be shared externally through your community. In short, a community built using the Community Cloud provides a window into your Salesforce world.

Let’s have a quick demo of what can we do with community.

Common Use Cases Of Community

• Customer Service and Account Portals: By accessing the knowledge base, service agents, and peer-to-peer support community empowers your customers to find a solution to their related issues on their own.
• Partner Relationship Management and Channel Sales: Increase your revenue by collaborating on opportunities and deals. Onboard partners quickly by sharing content and training materials.
• Employee Relationships: Retain happier employees by providing a space for them to easily complete their on-boarding, learn about benefits, and resolve HR issues.

Community Engagement With Your Customers

Community cloud for customers let :

• Customers share experiences and expertise with other customers.
• Support customers as they make purchasing decisions.
• Customers a one-stop-shop for finding information about your company and products.

We can further divide the community into two different segments for individual and business clients etc as requirements.

Community Engagement With Your Partners

As like customers, an organisation also stand with their channel partners which can either outsource or help the organisation in parallel in terms of sales and service etc. Through community cloud, we can create a separate community for organisation partners by which key people can provide resources or fulfil any further requirements of their partners.

Community Engagement With Your Employees

Community cloud enables a separate community for the employees of an organisation where every employee of either sales, customer service, and engineers each see a different homepage while login. And at the same time, every employee has the same information that’s been published by the organisation for employees. This whole can make HR to easily approach to employees and also the employees can easily get a faster solution for their requirements.

Thanks for Reading Community Cloud

Happy Salesforce!!

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Products

Marketing Cloud is a family of seven primary products which are further categorized into three different buckets. Every product and various combinations of these helps to meet specific digital marketing need.

Marketing Cloud Product : Email Studio

Email Studio enables a feature to send personalized email either to thousands or millions of customers as per business need. You can target customers based on the data collects from them even also you can easily track the performance of emails that what exactly they are performing.

By Email Studio, you can

• Automate and scale all interactions with your customers
• Create dynamic email content with drag-and-drop tools.
• Use mobile-optimized email templates.

Email Studio Common Use Cases:

• Create and send “Happy birthday” message to all subscribers and offers a discount on that day.
• For mass communication to employees about any events.

Marketing Cloud Product: Mobile Studio

Nowadays, carrying mobile is must have so it’s the best option to choose by an organization to have an immediate engagement of their customers by sending SMS alerts to their phones about any events, offers or any organizational changes. The best way is to integrate your CRM data and marketing analytics with your mobile campaigns to have real-time interactions with your customers. It may give huge benefits to the growth of any organization.

By Mobile Studio you can,

• Track and send text messages with SMS.
• Create and automate custom solutions with mobile APIs.
• Track when customers open your app, how much time they spend interacting with it, and details about their location.

Mobile Studio Common Use Cases :

• Send your customers mobile tickets and coupons to complete customer services updates and surveys.
• Send the latest deal to the customer who walks into one of the physical outlets.

Marketing Cloud Product: Journey Builder

Journey Builder can create the sequence of flow that how and when emails or push notifications are sent to your subscribers. Whatever the process is going, in either email alerts, messaging etc will be lined up in journey builder and then the process moves on automatically.

Marketing Cloud Product: Advertising Studio

Through Advertising Studio you can easily customize and manage campaigns so that based on customers profile the relevant content is presented in-front of customers.

By Advertising Studio you can,

• Advertise relevant content on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
• Visualize data using analytics.
• Use Salesforce CRM data to target your advertising content.

Advertising Studio Common Use Case :

First, fetch customer details who haven’t clicked your email for 180 days and by using CRM data identify the subscribers and target them for advertising and make inactive customers active.

Marketing Cloud Product: Salesforce DMP

Data Management Platform (DMP), it captures and analyze the consumer data and provides instructions based on insights generated by the platform. DMP is interacting with more than 3 billion browsers and devices support more than 200 billion data collection events and orchestrate more than 200 billion personalized consumer experiences.

Salesforce DMP Common Use Case :

It’s been helpful to get target audience according to their interest to improve results.

Marketing Cloud Product: Salesforce Data Studio

A Data Sharing Platform that allows marketers, brands, and publishers to expand their reach, discover new audiences.

Salesforce Data Studio Common Use Case :

Publishers and Data Owners have been reluctant to share their data because they are unable to control what was shared and with whom. Data Studio, a solution and is fully controlled by data owners, so data buyers and data sellers can transact with confidence.

Marketing Cloud Product: Social Studio

Through Social Studio you can listen, publish, engage, and analyze your customer’s conversations on social media.

By Social Studio you can,

• Plan and publish social marketing campaigns.
• Listen to and analyze social media conversations to monitor your social media presence.

Social Studio Common Use Case :

When customer complaint on any social media platform (i.e Twitter, Facebook etc) about any wrong product that delivered, process trigger and intimate customer service team and provides the best solution they have also this process increase customer satisfaction rates.

Thanks For Reading

Happy Salesforce!!