Salesforce

Salesforce, founded in 1999, is a cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Salesforce's main platform is Sales Cloud, a customer relationship management software-as-a-service product. It offers users a customer community, partner community, developer community, and an app exchange marketplace. The company provides its products and services to various industries, including healthcare, finance, life sciences, automotive, media, retail, manufacturing, and communications.

Salesforce customers have included AGI, Skip the Dishes, Loopio, American Express, Toyota, e.l.f. Cosmetics, Amazon Web Services, OpenTable, Philips, Citrix, YETI, ADP, T-Mobile, TOMS, Activision, Bombardier, Delta, Esri Canada, Intuit, Rosetta Stone, Vodafone, Spotify, Virgin Media, and Western Union.

Announced in December 2020, Salesforce acquired Slack for $27.7 billion. As a result of the deal, Salesforce has integrated Slack into the Salesforce Customer 360 platform. Under the terms of the acquisition deal, Slack continued to operate under the Slack brand and under the guidance of cofounder and CEO Stewart Butterfield until Butterfield left the CEO role in 2023. As part of the acquisition, Salesforce has developed multiple applications for the Slack platform to integrate Salesforce tools and applications on the platform.

Customer360 is Salesforce's customer relationship management (CRM) platform that includes applications for different phases of a customer's journey, from lead to loyalty. The platform allows users to integrate data and add analytics. It gives users a single, shared view of customers and their history, interests, and frustrations, and users can tailor their experience to customer needs.

The Customer360 platform has different features, such as Customer360 Identity, which gives customers a single identity across digital properties. This feature allows users to use common social applications like Google and Facebook to make sign-on easy, simplifying their customer experience. It also gives IT visibility into customer service—including providing secure and seamless registration, enabling single sign-on across digital properties, and building a single unified view of a customer.

The Customer360 Data Manager enables users to connect, match, and resolve customer data through a single profile and across applications and provide that identity in all digital platforms. Salesforce CDP captures and unifies audience data to help users build specific custom audience segments and get accurate population counts for target audiences. To help protect customer data, the Customer360 Privacy Center gives users tools to manage how data is retained, deleted, anonymized, and transferred, helping users stay compliant and keep data secure.

Salesforce's Appexchange is an application marketplace for users to extend Salesforce and install solutions into the platform, including different messaging and video calling solutions.

The Sales Cloud is a Salesforce product and part of the company's Customer360 platform. The Sales Cloud includes features to help users grow customer relationships and increase revenue, including contact management; opportunity management, which can track sales and opportunities; sales forecasting, to help users know where revenue growth stands and to offer sales insights; process automation, to automate daily tasks such as activity tracking, email alerts, and workflows; a mobile CRM; and revenue intelligence, which measures pipeline accuracy in real time to optimize the complete revenue lifecycle.

Service Cloud is a Salesforce service that gives customers an all-digital, end-to-end experience. Service Cloud enables users to support customer interactions through any channel; automate business processes; better the quality of call center management with smart productivity tools; get shared, actionable insight into customer interactions; and drive revenue and upsell opportunities using artificial intelligence. Further, through the Service Cloud, users are able to engage with customers in their favorite digital channels while allowing the user to put all of those digital interactions in a single place.

Salesforce's Marketing Cloud offers users a tool to automate marketing to send customers their messaging at the best possible time. The platform uses artificial intelligence to automate marketing and to provide that marketing with personalization for customers. As well, the platform allows users to optimize impact and budgeting around marketing and business analytics.

Salesforce's Commerce Cloud is a service to help users build online businesses and customer relationships. The Commerce Cloud can connect customer experiences and data across an integrated platform with artificial intelligence to help users develop insights into their customer interactions. The use of data and AI can also allow users to provide customers with a personalized shopping experience and provide better insights into customers with connected sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT solutions.

Salesforce has a partnership and integration with Tableau to provide users with data visualization tools and help those users gain some insights into their data through those visualizations. This acts as an integration into the Customer360 service, offering analytics apps, dashboard templates, and product integrations. The service offers users governance for security and compliance while using the data.

Work.com is a Salesforce service that provides users with the products and guidance they may need to meet their expectations. This includes tools intended to safeguard employee health and wellness, build trust with customers and employees, give employees self-service tools capable of being used from anywhere, and boost healthcare and community responsiveness. Furthermore, especially as employees have increasingly begun working remotely, Work.com allows companies to treat their employees like customers, including tools to help keep those employees engaged and productive with Employee Concierge services. These services include an employee workspace that brings information and collaboration into a single pane, an employee help desk that allows users to find answers, and an IT service center that helps remote workers resolve problems and keep devices secure and compliant regardless of location.

myTrailhead is a Salesforce learning platform that enables users to create a platform for knowledge and learning in their organization. This includes a place to create, publish, and launch custom learning modules using prebuilt templates from myTrailhead content kits. It also offers a chance to deliver quick, gamified learning during a workflow. Users can track learning progress and performance and iterate to meet business needs.

Salesforce Einstein is the artificial intelligence engine that powers the Customer360 and other cloud services provided by Salesforce. The AI enables users to automate processes, gain insights from customers based on past interactions, and use the data to strengthen relationships and prioritize leads, cases, and campaigns. Salesforce Einstein's smart assistant helps employees get more done with case classification, next best actions, and recommendations and provides those users with answers and information needed to keep working while automating the best action to take.

Einstein is developed to give users the ability to build, train, and deploy custom bots on digital channels connected to an organization's CRM data to enhance the customer experience and business process, which includes natural language processing to help classify underlying intent and sentiment in a body of text, in any language. Einstein can be trained to see beyond a text-based conversation, using image recognition through deep learning models to recognize an organization's brand and product to better understand a given context.

As of 2023, Salesforce has claimed that their Einstein AI has delivered over 200 billion predictions across Salesforce's Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and Customer360. Salesforce's AI is data-ready, which means it works to eliminate the need for data preparation or model management and enables an organization to receive insights and predictive recommendations from Einstein faster. The Einstein AI is developed to be deployed and used where users need it, including the following:

• Sales, where predictive and generative AI for sales offers auto-generated personal and data-informed emails for sales conversions, summaries, and action items to move deals and save time on sales preparation.
• Customer service—AI can interface with the customer, give personalized responses, create work summaries based on CRM data, and give recommendations to the customer and customer representative.
• Marketing—AI can guide customers through personalized marketing journeys, including identifying engaged customers; optimizing send time, frequency, and content; and generating and scaling relevant content.
• Commerce—AI can resolve complex issues to increase customer satisfaction in an in-app experience, can be integrated into custom plugins to capture and convert search traffic, and create and localize product descriptions with AI-generated descriptions.

In March 2023, Salesforce launched Einstein GPT, generative AI CRM technology that delivers AI-created content across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and IT interactions at scale. With the upgrade, the Einstein Copilot is able to retrieve information from unstructured data, including from PDFs and emails, and can help users with their workflow by accessing and organizing these data sources. Further, the Copilot is intended to use generative AI and these data sources to answer complex prompts and provide smart suggestions.

Einstein GPT combines public and private data models, which are developed for users to ask natural-language prompts through the Salesforce CRM and provide answers to those questions using generative AI and organizational data with results and responses adapted to changing customer information and needs.

Following the acquisition completed in 2021, Salesforce includes Slack as part of the Salesforce Customer 360 platform. It is intended to integrate and allow users of Salesforce to take advantage of Slack's communication abilities, including messaging, organized channels, voice and video calls, file sharing, and workspaces. Some of the developments Salesforce has made for the Slack platform include Salesforce Flow in Slack, which enables developers to build Slack-First automation with Salesforce data and low-code capabilities. And Apex SDK allows developers to build for Slack in Apex code and automatically generates Block Kit, a UI framework for Slack apps.

Another integration developed for the Slack platform is ChatGPT for Slack. Built by OpenAI and Salesforce, the app integrates ChatGPT's AI technology to deliver conversation summaries, research tools, and writing assistance in the communication platform. The app combines public data sources with private data sources (from a company's Salesforce and Slack platforms) to help users with intelligence.