Salesforce: Technological Advancements & The Fourth Industrial Revolution

-- A TrailheaDX Conference Reflection by Cayden Jesse Pereyra

Introduction

According to Keith Block (Vice Chairman, President and COO of Salesforce), we are at the beginning of a fourth industrial revolution. Now before I discuss about what this actually means, I want to give an overview of what Salesforce is. Salesforce is a type of CRM, Customer Relationship Manager, with cloud-based applications for services, sales, and marketing. This means we are able to talk to and understand our customers in a different way, without necessarily being a data scientist or having the right IT expertise. This is one of the things that intrigued me about attending Salesforce TrailheaDX: Data Management + Reporting, easy-to-use UI, and also being accessible via cloud / mobile. 

Now, let’s take a step back: How does this relate to the fourth industrial revolution? Throughout the years we’ve seen changes from the steam-boat engine, electricity, computers to where we are now, artificial intelligence. With all these technological advancements, we’ve seen changes in society. Changes in personal use. Changes in Organizations, Governments. This not only sparked a new period of innovation, but a new generation of customers. 

You’ve probably heard this phrase a lot, "mobile is the new trend". Interestingly enough, 80% of B2B buyers expect the B2C experience. Why? Most people use mobile phones on a day-to-day basis and are expecting a personalized experience. Companies are not leveraging this digital transformation. We should continuously look for new ways to grow, to innovate. How can we begin to create the personalized and connected experiences?

In this article, I'll explain two methods that I've learned to creating a custom-made experience for our customers using Salesforce: Transitioning to using the Lightning Platform and Introduction to the new Pilot, Einstein Analytics.

Lightning Platform

Lightning is a an intelligent interface that allows sales and service teams to work more efficiently. How can we get started today using Lightning? Here are three steps on how your company can begin to use Lightning today: Discover, Rollout and Optimize + Iterate.

In the first stage, Discover, you begin to learn, evaluate and align what feature of lightning can be incorporated into your business. For example, in the Path feature, you can follow along the steps of a process, such as working from opportunity of a fresh lead to successfully closing a deal. In the reports and dashboard feature, you are able to see interactive charts that can bring data to life. During the Discovery stage, the business and IT align on their technical strategy. 

Then, you figure out a rollout plan. This is where you identify use cases and processes, pilot groups, and update customization (as needed). From here you figure out how you will roll out to multiple groups and orgs. Because Lightning is made to serve SMB’s to Enterprise, you was have a consistent UX throughout and the opportunity for shared learning. By using Lightning, we are able to spend less time managing our data and more time reporting, collaborating, and developing, thus improving operations. There are multiple resources in Lightning that will make is easier to use, such as the Lightning Experience Migration Assistant or Check Readiness.

The third and final stage is optimizing and iterating. In this stage, you monitor your success metrics followed with a feedback cycle. Here, we are able to use some tools such as Optimizer (Do users sign in? Health Check). Within this feedback loop, it is critical that you set some time understanding your users and what can be done differently.

Einstein Analytics: Developer Experience

Today’s customers want smart apps, and what we think of as “smart” is changing. Businesses are now looking towards data to give us insights.

What has happened. What is happening. & what will happen.

We want these insights to allow us to take action. Think of “smart” like a car, low on gas and able to instantly give you directions to the closest gas station. This next level of “smart” is not easy to develop.

With Einstein Analytics, you have the capability to use a family of services that allow you to gain this next level of “smart”. You can infuse your lightning components with data and surface insights within any custom app. You’ll be able to create interactive and contextual experiences. Multiple lightning components can be powered by Einstein’s capability of one billion predictions per day. Einstein gives you the ability to hover and drill down into your data, while building interactive components.

One of the features that I thought was helpful/useful was bringing in external data into Salesforce. Using Einstein Analytics, you are able to upload external data though the UI or through the External Data API to create your own dataset. If you upload a .csv file into Einstein Analytics, it automatically generates the metadata, which describes the data structure of the external data file.

Key Takeaways

This conference was an opportunity I'll never forget and I give my eternal gratefulness to my manager, Nana, for allowing me to attend this event. I would also like to give a huge thanks to one of my mentors, Ime, for really pushing me to continue working hard and step out of my comfort zone. I would also like to thank my teammate, Sonalika, for attending workshops with me and really understanding the limitations/possibilities of Salesforce. There are an infinite amount of technological advancements that are happening every single day and being at this conference really put this into perspective. Every day devices are becoming “smart”, such as smart phones, smart watches, and smart cars, all without human interference. The Internet of Things (IoT), which powers many of these smart devices, is only going to continue growing. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) allows computers to do more and more human tasks. Many businesses and industries have yet to take advantage of these advancements and if they were able to implement them, there is the potential for a boost in productivity in the business.

"We are in the fourth industrial revolution. The advancement of technology will shape the way we live/work for the time being and for many years to come."