Elevating the enterprise with AI, data and DevOps
Key takeaways from Dreamforce 2019
Jan. 9, 2020 | Contributions by Jeff Pigatto, Chris Bellamy, Shawn McCormick
Every year Salesforce brings together clients, partners and users for a week to inform, inspire and motivate. And Dreamforce 2019 did not disappoint. From key product announcements like Customer 360 Truth and Einstein Voice Skills, to expanding partnerships with Apple, AWS and Microsoft, to user-focused enhancements like Trailhead GO, a lot of new information was shared—and that can be a little overwhelming taking back to the office. What do I need to act on now? What should I keep in the periphery? Here, we break down a few potential ground-breaking announcements and potential impact, and what you should focus on in the near term to position yourself for success now and in the future.
Einstein AI enters the conversation
There was a lot of buzz around Einstein Voice and how Salesforce is using artificial intelligence to predict business processes. Voice processing and voice recognition will be key additions to Salesforce Service Cloud using Amazon Connect. Service Cloud Voice will be able to help live service agents when on the phone with a customer, while Einstein will be able to process and understand that customer’s question or issue by using voice recognition and AI to recommend knowledge articles to the live service agent in real time. This will help live service agents resolve issues faster by reducing time spent searching knowledge bases or creating records. Embedding Einstein into the business process could have positive impacts on customer satisfaction and service resolution rates.
Powerful, purposeful data
The importance and power of data was apparent in the keynotes and across many of the presentations. Another key announcement was on Customer 360 Data Manager, which will help companies better manage data across sales, marketing and commerce using the core Salesforce platform. Bringing together advanced management, reporting and analysis, Salesforce will help unify customer information across platforms and channels to produce a single source of truth for your customer. This will further improve features like Einstein Discovery and Einstein Next Best Action, to help make specific recommendations.
DevOps for Salesforce
Customers are very interested in how to bring DevOps into their Salesforce operation, and we’ve been working with them all year to help them learn what DevOps tools and processes work best for their Salesforce implementation. Salesforce is quickly becoming an enterprise platform. Companies are moving so fast and implementing Salesforce across multiple business units that it’s become a challenge for enterprises to keep up.
And since Salesforce is configuration-based, as well as code-based, some of the more traditional DevOps tools that work on code-only environments don’t really work with Salesforce. We’ve been leading our customers through an assessment, strategy and tool evaluation process to incorporate DevOps into their Salesforce environment.
What to do now: Dig deeper into your data
Data is the center of everything. The more you can mine data to create actionable insights to be used by Einstein, the better. Customers should be thinking about their data strategy. What is your corporate strategy to unifying data / creating master data? You need a plan to tie in all the disparate pieces of data that are scattered around various systems. That will help Salesforce surface actionable insights to help guide your work.
Jeff Pigatto is the managing director of the TEKsystems Global Services Salesforce practice. He has over 20 years of business and IT transformation experience, is a certified Salesforce professional, has managed multiple large-enterprise engagements and held global leadership roles at multiple Salesforce global system integrators.
Chris Bellamy is a solution architect within the TEKsystems Global Services Salesforce practice. He’s worked in a variety of roles within the IT consulting industry over the last 20 years and has worked with the Salesforce suite of products since 2009. Prior to joining TEKsystems, Chris ran a small Salesforce consulting practice at Experis.
Shawn McCormick is the director of expert services for the TEKsystems Global Services Salesforce practice, where he provides client support, delivery oversight, and strategic and thought leadership. He has over 20 years of experience managing process and technology transformations, including enterprise Salesforce engagements for Salesforce global system integrators. Prior to joining TEKsystems, Shawn worked at Tata Consultancy Services.