If you have been wondering what Salesforce has been up to, they have unveiled their next generation social studio, which is now fully integrated into the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It’s got an interesting twist in that it includes next generation social listening, social customer service for service teams and new social lead engagement for sales teams. It seems that the world is finally getting that from the customer’s point of view, that they are not talking to Sales, or Marketing or Customer Service — the customer is talking or interacting or engaging with a company. And to have all of that contained in one application or platform and make the customer information available for all of the various functional departments seems like the best way to make customers feel hear and listened to.
Social media is ubiquitous with customers, yet many companies are still struggling with how social can improve business decisions and processes. Customers and Consumers are adopting social and digital very fast, where as companies are dragging their feet, some kicking and screaming or others even turning a blind eye to it. As a result, many companies are falling into the digital transformation / customer experience gap.
Social Studio including a simple user interface that empowers any employee to benefit from social listening and engagement on desktop and mobile devices. Innovations include social customer service for service teams and new social lead engagement for sales teams. Leading global brands like Activision, McDonald’s, and ADP leverage Social Studio and the Salesforce Customer Success Platform to connect with customers in a whole new way.
What Functional Departments Want and Need
Marketers want to run social campaigns, engage with customers, and use social insights to drive marketing decisions. Service teams need to surprise and delight their customers with social customer care. Sales teams need to find and connect to new customers faster with social lead generation. However, social is still isolated from key customer interactions. This means that many companies will fall into the customer experience / digital transformation chasm. However, with the right strategy, leadership, people, process and technology can prevent a company from not crossing the chasm and catch up to customers and consumers.
How Is Salesforce Tackling The Digital Transformation Chasm
What Salesforce has done it build the next generation of Social Studio, using on the best elements of Radian6 and Buddy Media and extending social listening, analysis, content marketing and engagement across the Salesforce Customer Success Platform. It also includes a completely new social listening and sentiment engine monitors more than one billion social data sources from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, news sites and more.
Social Studio is designed to meet the scale of the largest multi-brand, multi-region companies, enabling social media teams to empower other groups throughout an enterprise with a unified, easy-to-use social solution for sales, service and marketing. Social marketing and community management teams can finally get rid of their spreadsheets and manage social content calendars in Social Studio. Integration with Social.com, the Marketing Cloud’s social advertising solution for agencies and advertisers, allows teams to monitor top performing content published from Social Studio directly within Social.com, and amplify the content with sophisticated social advertising campaigns to reach more current and potential customers.
Social Studio in the Service Cloud
Leveraging Social Studio, customer service teams can easily monitor social channels for customer support issues, create a customer case to be managed in the Service Cloud and route these social cases to right person or team to ensure timely resolution of customer issues. With the combined power of Social Studio and the Service Cloud, any company can surprise and delight customers with social customer care on the world’s leading social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Sina Weibo. For the first time, every Service Cloud customer can now get started with social customer service for no additional charge, managing up to two Facebook or Twitter accounts directly from the Service Cloud. Social customer service drives business results, as customers spend 20-40 % more with a company when the company responds to customer service requests over social media.
Social Studio in the Sales Cloud
Two-thirds of marketers see lead generation benefits with social media1. Now sales reps can use Social Studio to find and connect to new customers faster with social lead generation. By listening to conversations across more than one billion social data sources sales reps can identify new leads and engage with them in real-time directly from the Sales Cloud. In addition, using Social Studio, Sales Cloud can automatically make Pardot marketing automation and lead scoring more efficient by adding social data, such as sentiment or influencer status, to campaigns and leads.
Social Studio Partner Program
Social Studio is an open platform where any developer, ISV, customer or partner can directly build and deploy applications. Social Studio launches today with a select partner program that brings together seven of the industry’s leading vendors for visual content and compliance and rights management, content discovery and performance marketing. Partners include Getty Images, Nexgate, a division of Proofpoint, Pressly, Rallyverse, Shutterstock, and Trendpottr.
And that’s one of the ways brands are solving the issue of not following into the customer experience conference and the digital transformation chasm. But it’s not just technology, its got to be a people, process and technology combination. And it has to lead by senior executives, the Board of Directors and become pervasive throughout a culture. And that is a big initiative to accomplish and needs organizational change management. And while people have been talking about organizational change management for years, perhaps it’s time has found its time and place and will finally be taken seriously.
@drnatalie
VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Covering Marketing, Sales and Customer Service by Delivering Customer Experiences.
