Excitement, expertise, insights, advice and updates – World Tour 2022 was small but mighty. Here are the highlights.
Fast forward to top insights from the day
The Main Show: Dylan Alcott, Mecca, Xero and more
The main stage was packed with everything from laughs to nitty-gritty product details. But the overarching theme was building a better future for everyone – and the necessity of understanding the ‘how’ behind the ‘wow’.
Following a warm Welcome to Country led by Gadigal Elder Uncle Allen Madden, Pip Marlow – CEO & EVP, ANZ/ASEAN at Salesforce – continued the keynote, explaining new pushes towards sustainability and making the digital economy more inclusive. We also heard from Australian of the Year Dylan Alcott, who stressed the importance of authenticity and vulnerability in leadership.
With the ‘why’ well and truly covered, we swiftly moved into the ‘how’, with Salesforce CTO and VP of Customer Advisory ANZ Gayan Benedict explaining that we’re in a “new world” where connecting with customers has never been harder or more important.
“It’s apparent that connecting with customers requires more than just new ways of working – we need a new playbook.”
Enter the new Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud. Updates include:
- New voice partnerships to aid call centres
- A multi-level offline briefcase and a visual remote assistant for field service
- New resources for service upskilling
- Advanced identity resolution for stitching together marketing data
- Streaming insights and actions to bring marketing and service together
- Anonymous profiles that preserve data until customers sign in
Stream the Main Show on Salesforce+ to see the ‘how’ behind the ‘wow’ of Simplus NZ customer Xero and Infosys customer Mecca, complete with visionary demos of their entire customer journeys.
Government: Service NSW’s three tips for building small but thinking big
When Salesforce’s VP Global Public Sector Digital Transformation Casey Coleman shared the stage with The Hon. Victor Dominello MP, Minister for Digital and Minister for Customer Service, NSW Department of Customer Service, she started by marvelling at the resilience of Service NSW, citing the ability of team members to help their communities through catastrophic flood events even after the pressure of the past two years of pandemic.
Dominello chalks the resilience of the Service NSW team up to the motivation of material impact, explaining that even in the periods of greatest pressure during the pandemic, vision, mission and seeing that mission come to fruition kept the team focused on the outcomes – delivering digital solutions that would assist the state’s citizens.
Of course, a team culture that thrives under pressure wasn’t built overnight. And nor were the platforms and capabilities within Service NSW that allowed it to respond quickly with digital solutions.
Dominello cited the launch of the digital drivers’ licence as a key turning point in creating capabilities – an example of ‘building small but thinking big’.
“We had a garden-variety app. It wasn’t that great,” Dominello says of the pre-licence version of the Service NSW app. The introduction of the digital drivers licence though built a capacity of licences and the platform for much of the Service NSW pandemic response.
Dominello offered three lessons based on his experience hauling the state’s citizen experience into the 21st century:
- Know your customer.
- Respond quickly.
- Create a culture of innovation.
Get a peek inside government innovation – see how SA Health transformed to increase flexibility and turn a service into a revenue stream.
Retail and consumer goods: Using data to drive digital-first, personalised experiences
“Data is the fundamental thing we rely on,” said Ken Kennedy, Group Head of Digital ANZ at True Alliance in a discussion of the trends that are driving digital growth.
Kennedy and Osmen Co-founder & Brand Director Michelle Lam spoke of the power of digital-first experiences, which provide greater data insights and more opportunities for personalisation, in the shift from bricks and mortar to online retail.
The challenge? Kennedy argues that very few businesses have all their data governance and structures established.
Data, he explained, comes with a reliance on systems and platforms, making the right tech stack non-negotiable in the shift to ecommerce and personalised experiences. True Alliance, then, looked for a best-in-class solution that would enable all its systems to talk to one another. That’s a massive challenge that grows with the amount of data collected.
Kennedy’s team’s solution was to create the tech stack including Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud, enable good data analysis, and go back to basics in decision making, assessing the viability of adopting the new shiny thing – like VR and AR experiences – based on the current structure, capabilities and technology within the business.
The team at Osmen, Lam explained, keeps the customer at the heart of all of its actions – and the shift to digital experiences allows Osmen to use the data to better understand those customers.
Data drives the team’s sales targets, as well as logistics and distribution. For the outdoor furniture retailer, delivery is as important a customer touchpoint as the showroom, so the Osmen team uses Marketing Cloud for surveys to track satisfaction and sentiment across touchpoints.
That data analysis then enables the sales teams to create tailored experiences in store with a more accurate understanding of what customers really want, and to refine the delivery experience to ensure customer experience matches the expectation formed by the showroom.
World Tour highlights with B&D’s Ollie Wynhoven
Find out how you can create personalised digital experiences at scale across the entire customer lifecycle.
Financial services: digital-first journeys and personalisation
Current challenges including the shifts in ways of working and in customers’ digital expectations, and the ever-present regulatory change, create a need to move beyond transactions and build long-term relationships that are built on and further foster trust.
With personalisation embedded in digital-first journeys, two digital lenders Prospa and Nano Home Loans build strong customer connections by ensuring they have a customer-centric lens across all operations.
The panel, including Nano Co-founder and CEO Andrew Walker and Prospa Head of Business Enablement Alison Binskin, shared recent research from Salesforce and Bain & Company showing that 70% of banking and insurance customers prefer end-to-end digital interactions for all but the most emotive experiences. In fact, customers who can complete an experience digitally provide higher net-promoter scores than those who can’t.
The research, then, validates the approach of both Nano and Prospa – a customer-centric view of all operations would prioritise enabling and empowering end-to-end digital execution for the majority of interactions, and a personal human touch for those big ‘moments of truth’.
For small business lender Prospa, those ‘moments of truth’ come at the end of approximately 60-70% of all interactions – that’s how many end up in a conversation with a Prospa team member, and the Salesforce platform supports this experience by keeping relationship-holders within Prospa informed along the entire journey.
Binskin told the audience that for the Prospa team those small moments of valuable human interaction are crucial to building trust – an applicant’s livelihood is on the line when they are applying for a Prospa small business loan or line of credit.
For Nano Home Loans, the balance between digital and personal delivery is led by customer preferences. While the entire process, Walker explained, can be managed through digital channels the team’s created a linear CRM that provides insights at every touchpoint, providing an understanding of preferences and pain points, and empowering Nano’s team members to take action to improve the relationship, or to contact the customer if they drop off.
Your customers demand more from every interaction. Are you ready to find out what’s possible? Speak with Simplus Advisory Services – we can help you to define success, harness the power of Salesforce, and remove the gap between expectations and reality.
Not-for-profit: Stakeholder engagement powering digital transformation
Clare Steele, CEO of Compassion Australia, says her organisation is in the ‘messy middle’ stage of change, on the path to where she wants it to be in five years – not being measured by the money it raises, but by its impact on children’s lives.
Bringing the board on that journey requires creating advocates, and that means mapping the commercial case, and combining the numbers with the bigger picture to help board members become active advocates for change.
Martin Bean, CEO of The Bean Centre and former Vice Chancellor of RMIT University, said that universities are challenging places for change, requiring a clear story about what the organisation and experiences within it will be on the other side of a transformation, and active engagement of the internal and external stakeholders who will set the case for change.
He suggested:
- Investing in a program management office that provides both intelligence and emotional intelligence
- Carrying the conversation at every level of the organisation
- Creating a compelling story of the benefits of change
- Being consistent
- Maintaining one program-wide scorecard.
- Avoiding feigning perfection in reporting up to the board
- Addressing the amber and red areas as part of the journey
- Reminding people about the ‘why’
Bean also offered his ‘laws of change’:
- Don’t start the conversation by speaking about the financial benefit. People will tune out and sharpen their knives.
- Start with the ‘enlightened willing’ – they are key to starting momentum.
- Next, get the ‘fence sitters’ to join the momentum.
- Don’t spend time on the curmudgeons – they will not be won over
World Tour highlights with Baptcare’s Ram Varadachari
See how Ram and his team responded to regulatory change by delivering a transformative solution in just 12 weeks.
