What Does Salesforce Do? | Middle East Spotlight

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard of Salesforce.

That might be because you’ve heard how we’re partnering with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring our apps and services to even the most highly regulated UAE businesses through the public cloud.

But knowing about Salesforce and understanding what we do are two different things. We help a lot of businesses in a lot of different ways.

This is a blog all about who we are, what we do, and how we can help UAE businesses like yours.

Let’s go.

Salesforce for beginners

Much like all great enterprise origin stories, Salesforce began at home. Our founder, Marc Benioff, kickstarted his vision to make “a world-class internet company for sales force automation” from a rented one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco.

Things took off, as you can see. We now assist over 150,000 organisations around the world in breaking down silos between departments and gaining a 360-degree perspective of their customers.

It makes no difference if you work in marketing, sales, commerce, customer service, or information technology. Every employee has a single, 360-degree view of the consumer – wherever they interact with your brand. You can achieve all this using one trusted platform: Einstein 1.

But why is it so critical to have a single, 360-degree customer view? Here are a few of the advantages:

• Better customer relationships across all channels
• Faster issue resolution, no matter how complex
• Easier personalisation across customer engagements
• Maximised high-value interactions anywhere, every time

OK, but who can use Salesforce?

Salesforce gives every department in your organisation the tools and insights you need to build stronger, more personalised, and empathetic relationships with your customers.

With access to the latest customer and business insights, you can respond more proactively to changing customer needs, enhance interactions with contextual AI-powered assistance, and much more.

Here’s how each department can benefit from Salesforce:

• Marketing can personalise messaging to target the right people at the best time on the most suitable channels. It helps to improve lead gen, customer acquisition, and upselling opportunities.
• Sales can spend less time on data entry and spend more time engaging customers with precise, data-driven, and repeatable workflows.
• Commerce can build seamless experiences that grow revenue, engage customers, and connect with the rest of the business.
• Service can deliver the connected, personalised interactions customers expect – across any channel – with help from automation and AI-powered chatbots.
• IT can build modern apps to meet employee, partner, and customer needs; increase productivity by automating key processes; and improve scale, transparency, and security with IT solutions.

Regional snapshot: The connected customer in the UAE

We can’t ignore the impact of the pandemic on digital engagement. As brick-and-mortar businesses closed their doors and remote working became an everyday reality, many people went digital to stay connected and productive.

As people spent more time online each day, eCommerce grew in parallel. In the UAE, 73% of consumers say they shop online more than before the pandemic. What’s more, customers and business buyers in the UAE are turning to new channels to interact with brands on their terms:

• 88% are using online self-service portals
• 75% are using online knowledge bases
• 87% are using online chat and support services
• 93% are using dedicated mobile apps

Source: State of the Connected Customer, 4th Edition

What companies use Salesforce?

OK, so that’s the 10,000-foot view. Now let’s zoom in to hear why (and how) one of our UAE customers came to trust Salesforce both as a strategic and technology partner.

Emirates Transport is a leader in the rental and transport sector and a specialist in logistics and technical services. It’s also a Trailblazer responsible for the intuitive mobility-as-an-experience (MaaX) app, ‘OneET’.

Traditionally, Emirates Transport operated as a government agency, catering solely to government bodies. After opening its services to all UAE consumers, the agency managed 32 disparate services from school bus coordination to vehicle registration.

The agency decided to streamline its operations by delivering all its services through a single, consumer-friendly app: OneET. To bring the ambitious project to life, it needed to centralise all its data and simplify its complex, siloed IT estate. It also needed the right partner.

After deliberating its options, Emirates Transport enlisted Salesforce to help unlock the 360-degree visibility of more than two million customers, connect operations across every department, and deliver seamless, omnichannel experiences.

“Building a connected experience doesn’t just make life easier for customers and staff,” says Talal AlNajjar, Head of Digital at Emirates Transport. “It will also help us to establish lifelong relationships with citizens to maximise cross and upsell opportunities.”

Complementing its OneET app, the agency used Experience Cloud to build customer self-service portals, empowering customers with greater control over its services. It also automated routine workflows to help streamline end-to-end service delivery and improve the employee experience.

“We ran change management programmes to help users adjust to the new environment and incentives to use the platform,” says AlNajaar. “Today, if something isn’t logged on Salesforce, then it doesn’t exist.”

Since deploying Salesforce, Emirates Transport has:

• Handled more than 4 million digital vehicle registrations through its portal in the first six months
• Centralised data across 38 companies within the Emirates Transport Group
• Helped its marketing teams send personalised interactions to the right people at the right time
• Created a foundation for data-driven growth and innovation

“Salesforce is more than a technology partner for us. It’s a key part of our vision to transform transport and mobility in the UAE,” says AlNajaar. “We’re adding new functionality and optimising our app and internal processes every day so we can add more value to millions of people and improve fleet management for 35,000 vehicles.”

So why all the customer love?

Since launching over 20 years ago, customer expectations have shifted massively in response to the digital era.

Customer experience is now the key competitive differentiator, and in the UAE, 87% of consumers say experience is just as important as products and services.

To earn customer trust and loyalty, you need to understand what they want from you and when and where they expect it. But without the right tools and insights in the right people’s hands, this is easier said than done.

It’s time to break down your legacy silos and empower everyone with a single view of the customer, enhanced with the latest data analytics and automation technologies.

And that, since you asked, is what Salesforce does.

At Salesforce, we create CRM-based tools and solutions for organisations of all shapes and sizes.