Following summer’s successful World Tour event, an intrepid team of BrightGeners arrived at Salesforce Live with high hopes. And we were not disappointed! Find out our best bits of Salesforce Live 2022 in this blog post – and why you need to book it in the diary for 2023.
Sustainability from the start
Arriving into the huge event space, Salesforce Live already stood out from other events at London’s Excel Centre. The living plants and recycling bins dotted around reminded the audience of Salesforce’s newest value, sustainability. As a top partner for Net Zero Cloud, the BrightGen team took a particular interest in this aspect of the event.
BrightGen’s Business Success MarTech Architect, Anjali Mittal, watched the session, A New Day for the Environment. She was interested to learn that 99% of CEOs said sustainability is important to them, and 77% said that their business is underprepared for climate change.
Kevin Vranes of Salesforce outlined the main benefits of implementing Net Zero Cloud:
- Efficiently manage sustainability data
- Automate supplier emissions tracking
- Forecast and reduce risks
Anjali noted that you can also now purchase carbon credits via the Net Zero Marketplace. Governments can only do so much to enforce Net Zero targets, and carbon offsetting is one way to get to Net Zero faster. The Net Zero Marketplace is a huge step forward for this upcoming necessity.
Customer questions
The most important people at Salesforce Live are Salesforce’s customers. At the BrightGen expo booth, we met around 50 people from a diverse range of sectors: airlines, charities, manufacturing, financial services and many more. It felt good to talk to them in person about how we’d helped their sectors. We heard from different types of job roles too, from those using Salesforce day-to-day, to directors responsible for driving large-scale digital transformation.
One Salesforce Admin told us they were worried that a company like BrightGen would step on their toes. “That’s what I do!” they said, in response to an overview of the business. However, a quick clarification helped them understand that a company like BrightGen in fact enhances the Salesforce Admin role. By making recommendations and supporting the way forward for the Salesforce Admin, BrightGen becomes a true business partner for the role.
Another IT director told us that their organisation had outgrown its original implementation of Salesforce. We recommended they speak to a partner like BrightGen to understand the next steps in their digital transformation journey and set up a new support model for a larger team.
Customer success stories
Our favourite sessions of the day were those led by our customers. Starting with NHS Professionals, we heard from their Director of Client Solutions on their journey to digitally transform their organisation. Later, Heathrow Airport gave an overview of their innovative experience with Salesforce Genie (a.k.a. CDP).
BrightGen’s Digital Marketing Specialist, Elena Devnina, summarised the two talks:
NHS Professionals – Building the NHS as a Great Place to Work
“It’s all about making things simpler, smarter and faster for our business and for all of our customers”.
Nicola McQueen, CEO, NHS Professionals
NHS Professionals (NHSP) runs and operates the largest NHS staff bank, placing skilled flexible workers into NHS Trusts.
In this insightful session, Jon Waters, Director of Client Solutions at NHSP, gave a clear and open overview of the challenges that the organisation faces, where they currently are in their journey and what digital and transformational changes they’re planning to undergo. All this whilst looking to drive efficiencies and reduce hiring costs.
Jon described three of the biggest NHS challenges that NHSP is looking to address through digital transformation:
- The employment market has more vacancies than workers
- Candidates are pulling out of the hiring process
- NHS shifts are going unfulfilled
With the implementation of NHS Professional 360, they are aiming to significantly improve member engagement and retention, ensure growth within the NHS Trusts, and provide true omnichannel experiences to every user.
It is of utmost importance to define what success looks like before you embark on this kind of journey. NHSP has defined success as:
- Single source of truth through the platform
- Increase in shift bookings
- Decrease in service / support costs
- Increase in overall marketing ROI
- Increase in insights-driven decision-making
We at BrightGen are proud to work with NHSP on their journey to attract, recruit, retain and support an engaged workforce, using the power of Salesforce.
Heathrow Airport – Deliver Marketing Moments That Count
This panel discussion was a fantastic opportunity to get an insight into how real-time engagement, powered by Salesforce Genie (aka CDP), is helping Heathrow create personalised experiences for every passenger.
In the current market, with rising customer expectations and tightening budgets, creating a truly connected experience becomes a necessity for every consumer marketing department.
It’s all about data! Heathrow Airport has first-party information on no more than 10% of people travelling through its doors, with most of the information being owned (and kept) by the airlines. Therefore, the biggest sources of customer data for them are:
- Customer purchases while inside the airport
- Reservations
- Communications with the support department
- Wi-Fi registrations
With the power of Salesforce, Heathrow can automate collection of that data, creating a unified 360 view of every customer. This helps to maximise customer engagement, considering all their past transactions. It allows them to collect customer preferences, and any other digital signal collected by the system.
With Salesforce Genie & Marketing Cloud, Heathrow increased overall marketing ROI by 28%, by making every moment count, and building trusted relationships at scale.
Here’s how Heathrow made their marketing spend go further for increased ROI:
- Automate every customer engagement across all channels – resulting in 31% increase in customer engagement
- Optimise marketing performance and spend with AI – resulting in 28% increase in overall marketing ROI
- Personalise every customer moment with real-time data – resulting in 27% increase in customer lifetime value
A bit of fun
Towards the end of the day, we were lucky enough to hear from the superstar Nile Rodgers. He told us how he came up with the riff to Let’s Dance by David Bowie and gave us a lesson or two on learning to fail. If you’re the sort of person who has lots of ideas, have the patience to sift through them to find the really good ones. Don’t give up!
Thanks to Salesforce, their events team and partners for a great day. We’ll be back next year!
If you’d like our support to realise the potential of Salesforce, get in touch today.