This year, Salesforce celebrated 20 years of Dreamforce, an event that brings together Trailblazers from across the globe to learn, innovate, network, and give back to the community.
Salesforce’s co-CEOs Marc and Brett welcomed the Ohana by introducing “Shoshin,” a Japanese concept of approaching situations with “a beginner’s mind” so as to encourage innovative ideas that come from having a beginner’s enthusiasm and an open mind. Salesforce adopting this concept as a part of its culture represents a new day for business with a renewed sense of enthusiasm toward upholding the vision of connecting customers in a whole new way. Salesforce remains dedicated to its core values of trust, customer success, innovation, equality, and sustainability with new capabilities to support customers and partners.
Salesforce has been recognized as the world’s largest enterprise apps company, a leader in philanthropy under the category of “Top 100 Companies that Care” by People for the 6th year in a row, a leader in innovation under the category of “#1 Most Innovative Companies” by Forbes, and a leader in culture under the category of “#1 Best Workplaces”.
Dreamforce ‘22 represented a great post-pandemic reunion, to meet customers, partners, and friends, in person after two years, while attending interesting keynotes, keeping up with important announcements, and participating in hands-on workshops. The Trailblazer community that makes Salesforce the world’s number one CRM, has grown considerably!
Salesforce+
There were 150K+ Dreamforce attendees this year spread across 40K+ on-site and 110K+ on Salesforce+. Although the number of in-person attendees was conservative as compared to previous years, the family spirit of the Ohana with a focus on enhancing customer experience and strengthening partnerships is as strong as ever.
Salesforce+ created an opportunity for people around the world to experience Dreamforce anytime and anywhere. Members of Extentia’s Salesforce Practice who were not able to make it to San Francisco were thrilled to have access to a plethora of interesting sessions from inspiring keynotes to well-organized workshops, available on demand via Salesforce’s user-friendly streaming platform!
Strategic Partnerships
As always, there were several exciting partnership announcements that are likely to have a significant impact on the future of business operations and customer engagement. One of the most significant of these was Salesforce partnering with WhatsApp to integrate new instant messaging capabilities into Salesforce applications via the Customer 360 platform. The new partnership will facilitate a more convenient and personalized experience to encourage further conversational interactions between businesses and their customers in the pursuit of enhancing customer service and engagement. This added touchpoint for communication can be achieved with WhatsApp messaging integrated into Salesforce applications through Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Commerce Cloud.
Salesforce Genie
The big announcement at Dreamforce ’22 was the introduction of Salesforce Genie, a platform that stores, collects, and unifies real-time customer data across channels to provide insights for customer magic!
Genie provides an opportunity for organizations to connect, harmonize, and engage with data in real time to take action across sales, service, marketing, commerce, Tableau (CRM Analytics), MuleSoft, Slack, and much more! It elevates the Customer 360 platform with powerful automation capabilities, personalized experiences across channels, and trusted infrastructure to drive growth efficiently.
Genie helps you to connect customer data at scale using out-of-the-box connectors, and automatically harmonize data into a single view with access to real-time data provided to any department and industry. As a hyper-scale data platform, Genie is able to store large quantities of actionable real-time data and runs on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s public cloud platform to ensure security privacy and compliance thereby increasing customer trust. Genie is also able to tap into Einstein for real-time data insights and increases data input efficiency to increase the speed of Flow.
All the new features under Salesforce Genie are sure to transform and cater to the growing demands of personalized and delightful customer experiences!
Hyperforce
Hyperforce is an infrastructure architecture that facilitates flexibility, scalability, compatibility with Salesforce solutions, and global compliance for data residency and storage as well as data security on public clouds such as AWS, Google, and Azure.
Hyperforce is expected to be available across 17 countries by the end of 2023 and is supported by cryptography, which provides customers with control over their data and allows for easier expansion in regions where compliance regulations are getting more controlled and stringent.
Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform (CDP)
CDP enables marketers to act on real-time data and insights in a scalable, consistent, cost-efficient manner, and in an automated fashion across media channels to create a network of trusted partnerships. New enhancements have been introduced for Marketing Cloud with Customer Data Platform (CDP) powered by Salesforce Genie. There are now better capabilities for personalization through automated engagement supported by Einstein (CRM Analytics). This allows marketers to redirect their attention towards captivating customers in real-time across Salesforce as well as via native connectors, MuleSoft, and Salesforce AppExchange among others, at the right time.
Slack Canvases & Huddles Coworking
Slack, under the umbrella of Salesforce, has announced two major additions to its platform — Slack Canvases, and Huddles Coworking.
Slack Canvas is an interactive interface that allows sharing of information and actionable data within Slack. Easy access to relevant data allows for quicker decision-making and reduces turnaround time for different tasks. Huddles Coworking on the other hand is an enhanced feature that promotes collaboration by facilitating quick conversations from multiple channels. This includes features such as video and screen sharing, reactions, threads following huddles, and more.
Slack’s new capabilities encourage organizations to increase productivity and efficiency in their digital HQs and make it easier to engage with customers in the flow of work, as well as build trusted relationships from anywhere.
NetZero Marketplace
With the intention of paving the way for organizations to achieve net zero emissions, Salesforce has announced the opening of a carbon credits marketplace. The new Net Zero Marketplace is a climate action hub that connects customers with pre-screened carbon credit providers whose projects have been verified by independent rating organizations. The initiative is intended to make the process of buying carbon credits easier and more transparent while supporting current goals of reducing emissions.
Net Zero Cloud allows for forecasting and reducing risk, automation of supplier emission tracking, and efficient management of sustainability data, as aligned with Salesforce’s core value of Sustainability.
About Extentia
Extentia, a Merkle Company, will continue to leverage the Salesforce Platform, industry clouds, and new Salesforce technology and platform releases, while constantly striving to develop compelling Salesforce solutions across Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, and Industry-specific clouds, in alignment with Salesforce’s values of inclusivity and sustainability.
Extentia has over a decade of experience across various clouds, including Sales, Service, Marketing, Commerce, and Experience Cloud, with a strong focus on Health Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, and Salesforce Industries Health implementations. As Salesforce certified PDO Experts, Extentia has proven expertise in Salesforce's security review processes and works with ISVs across the globe to define, wireframe, develop, package, and list products on the Salesforce AppExchange.
Extentia's team strives to deliver value to customers consistently with experience-centric transformation, design-led solutions, and Customer 360 implementations, with a particularly impressive track record in building Salesforce solutions with Lightning Web Components (LWC), CRM Analytics, Heroku, and third-party integrations.
To learn more about Extentia's Salesforce Practice, write to us at salesforce.consulting@extentia.com
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