Sonalika Sarna from Salesforce India Experience has emerged as a key differentiator when consumers choose brands and products. Customers expected brands to understand and anticipate their needs and create seamless journeys across multiple touchpoints. They were willing to pay a premium for a great experience.
The brand has consistently worked on curating experiences across physical and digital touchpoints. However, they realized that it is not humanly possible to analyze and act on data at each touchpoint. As a result, we invested in technology to better understand customer preferences and pain points and improve the final experience.
At the recently concluded CX+ Summit 2024, Sonalika Sarna, Senior Manager, Digital Experience, Salesforce India, delved deeper into how data and technology can foster better relationships between brands and customers.
Sarna acknowledged that human experience is irreplaceable, but explored how brands can integrate technology into their organizations to digitally replicate the entire physical experience and personalize it at scale. I pointed out that I was doing it. “In the human world, we struggled to get data. In the digital world, we faced an overabundance of data and touchpoints,” Sarna added.
Almost every brand faced this challenge. For example, when different data sources couldn't communicate with each other, brands struggled to make informed decisions to engage with customers. This situation needed to be addressed, starting with extracting value from the existing data tracked within the organization's systems.
Sarna explained this with an example. When customers entered the store, there was someone there to greet them. But to recreate the same experience for millions of customers on his brand's website, he needed to leverage technology. How can brands achieve personalization at scale? The answer lies in technology and its three key ingredients: data, leveraging the power of AI, and engagement. Brands needed to identify all systems, integrate data, understand the human way of leveraging AI, and connect all systems such as call centers, loyalty systems, dashboards, platforms, etc. .
Next, Sarna implemented Salesforce's technology, the Einstein One platform. It includes a data cloud that acts as a data integration layer, ingesting data from various sources and providing a single layer to users. The goal was to unlock data and make it usable for business. “Data Cloud lets you connect data from anywhere, including data warehouses, data lakes, and models. It takes away the heavy lifting of modeling, mapping, and duplicating data schemes to give organizations a single view of their customers. We did it,” Sarna added.
When data is unified, it becomes easier for teams within your organization to understand your customers. For example, in a financial services organization, a branch advisor can enter a customer's phone number and see the consumer's entire profile, portfolio, offers, and next best actions available. Marketers could easily identify which channels are most effective for their customers, including email, WhatsApp, and SMS.
Before closing the session, Sarna emphasized that trust is one of the core fundamentals in the design of the Einstein One platform. To ensure data security, Salesforce has established partnerships and agreements with partners. “We operated on a zero retention policy, which means that data is never retained by the Open AI network or the models that generate it and feed it back into the Salesforce ecosystem. There are no illusions about the data. ”he added Sarna.
Customer experience has emerged as a key differentiator for brands across all industries. Brands are now focused on engaging customers for life and making them more resilient to competition and economic headwinds. At ET CX+ Summit 2024, Puneet Gupt, his COO at Times Internet, spoke with business leaders about how CX is driving business forward.
