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Salesforce: A Different Approach to Customer Relationship Management

When San Francisco-based Salesforce launched 17 years ago, the company didn’t just want to start a new, cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) technology service, it also came up with a new, integrated corporate philanthropy model.

Dubbed the 1-1-1 model, Salesforce donates 1% of its equity, 1% of its employee time, and 1% of its product to improve communities worldwide.

“This vision has fueled our incredible growth, made us the global leader in CRM, defined the era of enterprise cloud computing and inspired a new philanthropic model for all companies to follow,” a company spokesman said.

For the media and entertainment industry, Salesforce’s Customer Success Platform covers cloud services for most everything one can think of: sales, service, marketing, community, analytics, apps and the Internet of Things (IoT). Electronic Arts, NBC Universal, Pandora, Spotify and Fox are among those in the M&E space who’ve called on Salesforce’s offerings.

The company approaches it M&E this way: Changing customer expectations has combined with digitization to revolutionize the industry. Individuals want a media experience that’s personalized to their styles and preferences, and want content that aligns to their likes and lifestyles, available at the tap of a screen, anytime on demand. And advertisers want the ability to personalize content and target consumers.

That transition has resulted in an explosion of content choice that jeopardizes the position of long-time industry leaders, and successful companies aren’t running from the revolution, but instead, embracing the disruption, with collaboration and innovation.

Salesforce’s Customer Success Platform for M&E embraces the revolution, enabling industry leaders to channel the disruption, connection and innovation for market success. Salesforce’s aim is to help companies simplify operations, deliver effortless, one-on-one customer journeys and services, and engage consumers with more-relevant content. The technology enables companies to make the shift from providing “mass media” to “my media,” media that’s personalized to the individual.

The foundation of Salesforce’s Customer Success Platform for M&E starts helping companies to obtain a 360-degree view of its customers, so interactions are effortless and meaningful. Companies use it to acquire and retain customers by creating personalized engagement across channels: unlike legacy, siloed systems of record, and rigid, tough-to-scale IT deployments, Salesforce aims to help companies move faster with greater agility, improving consumer engagement by 300% and increasing digital subscription revenues by 25%.

“From broadcasters and studios to new media and newspaper companies, each media segment is striving to develop next-generation business models to drive new levels of innovation and customer engagement,” Salesforce said. “With the Salesforce Customer Success Platform for media and entertainment, leading brands reach new levels of engagement, transforming service into an effortless journey and connecting with customers in a whole new way.”

Salesforce currently counts itself as one of the fastest growing software companies in the world, and has been ranked as one of the world’s most innovative companies by Forbes for five years running.