Salesforce has announced Foundations, a free upgrade that gives Enterprise Sales and Service Cloud customers access to cross-CRM features.
These capabilities come from the Salesforce Commerce, Data, and Marketing Clouds.
Meanwhile, Sales Cloud users may also gain access to features from Service Cloud and vice versa.
Some of the new capabilities available on Sales and Service Cloud, with the Foundations upgrade, include case management, opportunity management, email campaigns with targeted segmentation, and secure payment links.
All these features will funnel into a new UI, as shown below.
From this UI, the CRM giant claims users can build a unified view of the customer and more connected customer experiences.
Salesforce stressed the significance of connected experiences in its 2023 State of the Connected Customer Report.
The study found that 79 percent of customers expect consistent interactions across departments. However, 55 percent suggest that it generally still feels like they are interacting with separate departments instead of one organization.
Tricky data integrations and costs play a significant role in this. Yet, with the additional functionality from Foundations, Salesforce promises to simplify building that all-important unified customer view.
Furthermore, Foundations customers may leverage thousands of integrations and third-party extensions from the Salesforce AppExchange.
Those include extended free trials for 25 integrations from “leading” Salesforce partners. They include Docusign, RingCentral, and ZoomInfo.
Such tech suppliers can bring features like document generation, video conferencing, surveys, and more into the Salesforce environment.
David Schmaier, President & Chief Product Officer at Salesforce, pinpoints additional CX automation opportunities through leveraging these integrations and new features. He said:
With Salesforce Foundations, businesses of all sizes and industries can now automate sales, service, marketing, and commerce with unified customer data on a single platform, empowering them to integrate their entire front office and deliver real-time, personalized customer experiences to drive revenue, answer service issues, create marketing campaigns, set up payments, and more.
Yet, perhaps most crucially, Salesforce Foundations will help sales, service, and marketing teams to share insight and collaborate.
For instance, Service users can add customers to marketing onboarding journeys to acquaint them with new products. They may also easily upsell, with newfound access to sales quotes and commerce payment links.
Meanwhile, Sales users can keep renewals on track with insights from service cases. They can also add relevant customers to marketing campaigns and convert deals quicker with commerce tools.
Before Foundations, these use cases – and all the possible others – would have required separate access to different systems.
A final benefit is in the updated UI, which features new customizable spaces for content (or “cards” as they’re known in UI design) to snapshot critical tasks for the user. Those may include recommended tasks, open cases, and opportunities.
Sales Cloud and/or Service Cloud Enterprise Edition or high customers can experience such benefits for themselves when Salesforce Foundations becomes available later this fall.
However, there are some limitations. Indeed, Salesforce has restricted email campaigns to 2,000 sends a month and capped Data Cloud Segmentation and Activation credits at 10,000.
Expect Much More from Salesforce This September
With Dreamforce 2024 imminent, Salesforce Foundations promises to be one of several big announcements from the CRM giant this month.
Already this week, the company announced the acquisition of Tenyx, a voice AI agent provider for customer service use cases. That followed its recent roll-up of PredictSpring, the point-of-sale (POS) solution provider for retailers.
However, the big news will be the unveiling of its new Agentforce platform.
Agentforce will allow customers to develop AI agents that perform tasks autonomously across the Salesforce ecosystem.
As CX Today has previously reported, this signals a significant step for Salesforce from “human in the loop” copilots to “human at the helm” bots.
Expect Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff to take this concept and run with it at Dreamforce, which seems set to be the biggest CX event of 2024.
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