The Internet of Things has been labelled as the “Next Industrial Revolution” because it is going to flip the way people think, interpret and behave. It will take a toss on how government and businesses will be interacting with the world. With this revolution CRM systems are acquiring an additional lifeline from IoT.
IoT Cloud will connect “billions of events” from n number of devices, applications, sensors, and from Internet of Things draw better insights and analyze deeper and to higher degree of perfection. The current CRM systems look forward to capturing such data logged from IoT devices and integrate the same with existing customer data from CRM apps. Really?
Salesforce venture into IoT cloud:
Salesforce’s invasion into the IoT Cloud is another sting in its strategy to create personalized CRM experiences.
“Salesforce is turning the Internet of Things to Internet of customers.” — CEO Marc Benioff.
Over the last ten years Salesforce has always managed to succeed in redefining the ways of developing, selling and delivering with the SaaS model. It has also redefined the concept of personalized CRM by making the application – the system of record rather we can put forward in a simpler fashion stating the source of truth in an ecosystem of majorly inconsistent data for every individual customer interaction. Salesforce has also used CRM in concert with back-office functions to deploy a more integrated and crisp customer experience. Now it looks forward to create a similar integration with IoT and make CRM a ‘conduit of tracking things’.
The cornerstone being IoT is a huge paradigm shift that is not only redefining the standard of people interacting with objects and things but also the manner in which customers are interacting with the brands.
Evolution of Salesforce IoT Cloud:
The IoT Cloud will act as a mucilage between all clouds including Sales, Marketing, and Services. A holistic view of a customer has two hemispheres. One the contextual data which is slow moving and reveals the buying preferences of a customer and the other half involves how are customers engaging with devices in real time i.e. what are they doing in your app? In simple words, Salesforce IoT cloud looks forward to blending these two hemispheres of real-time streaming data flowing from the internet of customers, with the contextual information i.e. what we already know about them at the background to give a flawless IoT CRM world. When they merge as a single world, companies can really engage the customers based on what they are scanning in real time and give them a far more relevant, smooth and rich experience.
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Impact of IoT on How Enterprise Use Mobility
The fresh edge of Salesforce IoT cloud is bound to unleash myriad opportunities for dealing with customers. To list a few amongst them will be…
1. Efficient and enriched quality of customer service:
IoT is going to dig deeper into our lives in the coming years. For example, your air conditioner will probably send you a reminder that it’s high time you need to change the filter, and you’ll be able to set parameters for service. And in a similar fashion companies will be able to proactively advise their customers when their product needs servicing? And at the same time recommend new products and upgrades based on their usage. Companies can also draw insight from the data trapped, analyze your bill and propose a more efficient plan based on your monthly pattern of usage, taking customer service to another level of perfection. CRMs will help you determine predictive maintenance, which will head off upcoming issues, save customers’ money, and in turn make the company look like a customer service superhero.
2. Sales and Marketing benefits:
The sales and marketing departments will benefit as well. If there is a tight integration between their CRM systems and IoT they’ll be able to draw a crystal clear insight about their customer’s buying pattern. They will have a better rapport building and pitch highly targeted offers based not only on what the customers purchase but on how they use the goods that they have purchased. Proper data analysis derived from the data sucked from the IoT will help to feed a proper insight in the CRM system and an established pattern of behavior will allow sales and marketing staff to drive customers to the goods and service that best fits their actual use. So it definitely assures in achieving a more loyal set of customers.
3. Real time promotions:
Yet another powerful channel these days is the mobile. It provides various brands opportunity to accomplish location and context for customers. It provides a great opportunity to send real time promotions to customers. Insights are drawn from a customer’s buying history, usual preferences and present context and your CRM system will do the rest for you. They can even send promotions based on the current location and credit card activities of the customer. So real time marketing promotions will definitely take a big leap in near future.
4. On-demand pricing:
Once your system is capable enough to shoot on the fly promotions, it will be able to draw proper and perfect insights from live data streaming. Thus, these inferences drawn can be used to pitch right pricing at the right timing. It will discard the dependency of the price optimization models on traditional techniques of statistical assumptions. Instead, it will be based on real-time behavior and events, so pricing of products and services can be sized down to a micro level i.e. individual level.
5. Preparing for the next:
Preparing for the future involves training your people to fully invest in CRM. It includes sales, marketing, and other customer services. While a few tasks can be automated using the features of your CRM and its various integrations now will help you prepare your staff to foresee what’s coming in the future.
Salesforce IoT Cloud, powered by Thunder connects all your data from the Internet of Things to the rest of Salesforce for better insights and real-time customer actions. It is definite that the Salesforce IoT cloud will ensure the businesses to create real time 1:1 proactive actions for sales and marketing or any other business aspect delivering a new height of customer success.
References: Internet of Things Agenda, Salesforce News, CMSwire
Ajeet Singh
