The global COVID-19 pandemic and resulting rapid changes that businesses continue to struggle with just to stay in business, has created the need for new technology to support a distributed workforce and virtual customer interaction.
Earlier in the year, leading CRM and cloud platform vendor Salesforce launched work.com, a set of new solutions to help businesses reopen successfully. Work.com includes tools like contract tracing, wellness assessments, shift management, emergency response management and grants, and volunteer management, all consolidated in a command center application. Continuing in this theme of providing tools to enable businesses to thrive through the crisis, last week, Salesforce at its TrailheaDX virtual summit, announced a new app called Salesforce Anywhere.
Many people believe that the current accelerated digital transformation of businesses driven out of necessity is creating lasting changes in the way businesses get work done and interact with customers. Salesforce Anywhere is designed to support work in the “new normal” of distributed workforces and virtual interaction of employees and customers. You could think of it as the next step beyond what was offered in work.com. Salesforce Anywhere is made up of Salesforce native applications, acquired technology from MuleSoft, Tableau, and Vlocity, and several partner integrations including Zoom, Amazon Chime, Tanium, and Siemens. The features are focused on helping companies sell, service, and market from anywhere, work and collaborate from anywhere, consolidate data from anywhere, and learn new skills to support these work changes, all in the context of the Salesforce environment.
Leveraging the Salesforce platform and Salesforce 360 allows the Anywhere app to take advantage of all the current (and future) platform services and the various “clouds” including sales cloud, marketing cloud, and service cloud, partner apps, and work.com capabilities. That means that distributed customer service agents can have access to Service Cloud Voice, or sales managers can use Einstein Call Coaching to improve sales performance. Salesforce Anywhere is planned to release in beta including an iOS app in July, and with a few in-app exceptions, is free to all current Salesforce customers. Pricing for those exceptions is yet to be declared.
by Emily Malis Greathouse
by Dominick Duda