Salesforce Marketing, Service Clouds add, rename features
Salesforce partners with Genesys, Google for telephony; adds AWS Contact Lens natively, among a raft of new features. Some are available now; some are coming in Summer '22 release.
Salesforce today released a long list of features for Marketing Cloud available now, and also previewed Service Cloud tools and integrations to come in the Summer '22 release. Furthermore, several products were renamed as part of an ongoing realignment that has taken place in the past few years.
Salesforce Service Cloud Voice will add telephony integrations with Genesys and Google to integrate phone and customer data, automate call transcriptions and notes, and enable agent-assist tools during customer calls.
This adds to Amazon Connect, previously the sole telephony built natively into Service Cloud. AWS Contact Lens, which enables real-time transcriptions and sentiment analysis for contact centers, will be natively supported in Service Cloud Voice for Salesforce users who also use Amazon Connect sometime this fall.
The broadening of these contact center technologies inside Service Cloud represents Salesforce giving customers what they've asked for, said Brenda Bown, Salesforce Service Cloud CMO and senior vice president. It also represents a product that has grown in its appeal and is getting noticed by larger prospective customers, said Liz Miller, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research.
"Prospects are demanding it as Salesforce gets into larger RFPs," Miller said. "They're getting into mid- to large-sized enterprises that are not looking at Amazon Connect, quite frankly. I think it's about the deals that they want to be part of, and likely the deals that they're very close to winning."
Salesforce added several features to Field Service, including Multi-Level Offline Briefcase, which enables technicians to access account records and technical materials offline, when connections might be severed at customer sites. Visual Remote Assistant will add augmented-reality and computer-vision features that connect a Salesforce user's customers in the field with remote technicians in hopes of solving mechanical or technological problems before dispatching a technician to the site.
Technicians will not only be able to better see what is going on in the customer's environment, but also be able to make onscreen notes that they and the customer can view. Customers will be able to schedule one-on-one appointments with technicians.
"We want to streamline interactions across all those channels, build loyalty and drive that personalized experience," Bown said.
Preview of AWS Contact Lens built natively in Salesforce Service Cloud
Salesforce also released Advanced Identity Resolution, a customer data platform (CDP) tool that connects multiple identities that may belong to the same customer visiting a Salesforce user's site. This happens when users don't log in, are approaching the site from different devices, or for other reasons -- such as calling themselves by their proper name in one session and a nickname in the other.
Another CDP feature, Anonymous Profiles, keeps track of a customer's data for the Salesforce user when he or she hasn't yet identified themselves and connects it to a profile when the customer does. Salesforce marketing senior vice president Bobby Jania was careful to distinguish such customer-led identity resolution from graph ID-style resolution that other vendors use to determine identities of customers, called "converting unknown to known."
Miller said many martech vendors are redeploying features from data management platforms (DMP) -- adware driven by third-party browser cookie technology now in the process of deprecation -- into their first-party CDPs, and it's a messy convergence. But there is value in deploying former DMP features for users who have shifted their emphasis to their own first-party data, she said.
Anyone that had both a CDP and a DMP are trying to figure out how to take the DMP algorithms and the capacity to normalize anonymous data and bring that into the functionality of the CDP without having to re-initiate a conversation about cookies.
Liz MillerAnalyst, Constellation Research
"Anyone that had both a CDP and a DMP are trying to figure out how to take the DMP algorithms and the capacity to normalize anonymous data and bring that into the functionality of the CDP without having to re-initiate a conversation about cookies," Miller said.
Other new Salesforce Marketing Cloud features include Intelligence Reports for Engagement, which measure email effectiveness, breaking down campaign performance by device, client, operating system and browser. It enables new metrics for conversions, clicks by link, bounce types, unsubscribes and complaints.
Also added are features that enable marketers to explore trends across marketing, business and advertising data sets. New interactive visualization tools can compare data across currencies, channels, campaigns, time periods and business units in one customizable view.
Datorama, CDP renamed
Features formerly known as Datorama -- because they came with the 2018 acquisition of the analytics company of the same name -- will be called Salesforce Intelligence moving forward. The company also renamed the Salesforce CDP simply Customer Data Platform. That product has been known by several names over the years.
Jania said the renaming comes as part of a longer-tail project in which Salesforce will continue to align product names according to what customers do with them. Salesforce users have already seen some products drop verbiage such as "Customer 360" from names, as well as other changes.
Overall, the Salesforce product renaming project -- which has mostly taken place since Sarah Franklin took over as chief marketing officer in January 2021 -- has helped reduce redundancy across the sprawling cloud platform, Miller said. Decluttering the product names and disambiguating them from the brand names of the companies Salesforce acquired makes things clearer for users, especially new ones who might not have known Datorama before Salesforce acquired it.
The renaming project will, however, raise some interesting questions, such as how will Salesforce will rename products that overlap, features-wise, in the future. Another Salesforce acquisition, the data-visualization platform Tableau, is an example, Miller said. Like Datorama, Tableau has some analytics "intelligence" capabilities, albeit not as targeted or familiar to the marketing user.
"If you're going to call Datorama 'Salesforce Intelligence,' then Tableau is a visualization of that intelligence -- and you should call it 'Salesforce Viz' or 'Visualization,'" Miller said. "Are we going to call MuleSoft 'Salesforce Integrations?' I hope that they do, because it's confusing to explain to clients why you would want to have MuleSoft, Tableau and Datorama."
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud features and integrations were released in conjunction with the Salesforce World Tour Sydney virtual event. The Summer '22 release rolls out to different groups of Salesforce users from June 4 to June 22.
Don Fluckinger covers enterprise content management, CRM, marketing automation, e-commerce, customer service and enabling technologies for TechTarget.
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