What is a Customer Company? Is it definable? Or more importantly, is it fully achievable? Salesforce.com’s vision, much like that of Bluewolf, is that the customer should be in the heart of every decision your organization makes. They should receive an excellent customer experience from the first touch point to the last, and anywhere in between. Being a Customer Company, or what we like to call customer obsessed, involves not only a culture of customer appreciation, but also an investment in the right technologies. Innovative solutions are pulling customer data from a multitude of sources, providing a detailed single view of the customer. This  enables businesses to own each customer moment, irrespective of department or role. In the Customer Company Keynote, Vivek Kundra, EVP of Industries at salesforce.com laid out a roadmap of how to market, sell, service, and build as a Customer Company. 

Marketing: creating a sophisticated customer journey

If you are not integrating your marketing automation solution with your CRM, then you might already be behind. Today’s customer demands a personalized experience that provides a 1:1 feel and delivers relevant content at the right time. When 66% of companies lack an in-depth understand of their customers, this level of personalization can be differentiation between a successful organization and a slew of competitors. Dynamic marketing automation technologies are combining social, mobile, and traditional CRM data to build complex and predictive portraits of their customers. In a competitive landscape, knowing what your customers want, before the customers know themselves, is an incredible advantage.

Selling like a Customer Company

Marketing is only step one. By constructing a detailed and live view of the customer, the sales team has a frictionless path to effective up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, as well as improved customer retention. During the selling portion of the keynote, Vivek Kundra invited Trunk Club onto the stage. Trunk Club, a personalized shopping service for men, has gone all-in with their Salesforce solution. They’ve discovered and exploited an unsaturated market in personalized men’s fashion, delivering an unparalleled customer experience and winning big. Watch this video to see the full Trunk Club story. 

Not your ordinary Service solution

Marketing builds the customer profile, Sales executes the deal, but how does an organization manage ongoing Service enquiries? Service agents can make or break your brand. Everyone can think of a poor interaction with a call center that completely transformed their opinion of that company. Service centers are growing in importance due to increased customer expectations—59% of customers will switch brands to get better service. Customer-obsessed organizations are providing their service agents with the tools and information to effectively process cases and provide a great customer experience. See how the Obama for America campaign leveraged Salesforce Service Cloud to transform enquires into engagement. 

If you build it, they will come

Salesforce.com is doing just that, building it. Over the last decade Salesforce has evolved from a CRM to fully-fledged platform. This transformation has resulted in a new ecosystem where developers are now creating apps native to the Salesforce Platform, Force.com. While the Salesforce AppExchange experiences a surge in growth, the platform is continually focused on smoothing the integration of new apps to its flagship products. Building and integrating third-party apps has never been easier. 

Stay tuned for the next live blog coming tomorrow morning, covering Mark Benioff's keynote.