This week’s update on how Salesforce customers are tackling COVID-19 includes inspiring examples of new ways to do business, to support each other through this pandemic, to shift to a remote workforce, and to effectively onboard new employees while keeping them safe. No two companies are doing it the same way, but all are finding ways to move their businesses forward:
- On April 23rd, telehealth company Fruit Street Health launched CovidMD – a risk assessment, triage, and telemedicine platform built on Service Cloud. CovidMD’s risk assessment tool generates a health risk score for each patient based on their exposure and pre-existing medical conditions. Based on that score, patients are then given personalized health recommendations and the option to connect with a healthcare provider via live video chat.
- VillageMD, headquartered in Chicago, needed to quickly educate and screen its high-risk patient population for COVID-19. With Salesforce Care, VillageMD established a COVID response instance in hours, and leveraged its Salesforce-based care management app that already maximizes patient engagement through Health Cloud. Within 48 hours, VillageMD was capturing data for patients experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, promoting early detection and essential education.
- Clover Health is a Medicare Advantage plan with the large majority of its members residing in New Jersey, a state that has been hard-hit by the pandemic. Leveraging Health Cloud, Clover launched multiple channels of communication and created outreach workflows to keep members and clinicians connected. This included providing a resource website that includes FAQs and 24/7 support. Clover Health also proactively communicated with high-risk members to support adherence to medication plans.
- Common offers co-living and traditional apartment spaces and has had to pivot its operations, including making all of its apartment tours virtual, as a result of COVID-19. Sales Cloud helps manage its new payment plan offerings for customers displaced by COVID-19 while move in/move out correspondence is managed through customer portals powered by Community Cloud. Common saw a 66% increase in virtual tours (around 50 tours a day) and 1 in 3 people who tour apartments send in a digital application that same day.
- Online sports retailer Fanatics launched the #ALLInChallege — a new initiative to provide food to children, the elderly, and frontline heroes — that has raised more than $23M. Fanatics is using Marketing Cloud to power transactional emails whenever donations are made.
An update on the product front
We now have more than 7,000 sign-ups for Salesforce Care, and small businesses have been particularly active with over 4,000 sign-ups for our free Essentials offering.
The AppExchange COVID-19 Resources for Businesses page continues to expand its offerings, solutions and consulting services. This dedicated resource page now hosts close to 100 listings designed to help customers navigate this challenging time. Listings can be found across categories including business continuity, healthcare and life sciences, team collaboration, customer support and crisis communications, in addition to two new categories added this week:
- Manufacturing Solutions: The solutions in this category enable manufacturing customers to address mission-critical operations and digitize their business while enabling a new remote workforce.
- Healthcare & Life Sciences (HLS) Consultants: The consulting partner listings recently added to the HLS category help customers implement and accelerate the integration of Salesforce HLS solutions. Partners include Coastal Cloud, Traction on Demand, Pacific Point, Paladin and PwC.
We will continue to provide updates on the Salesforce Newsroom and also encourage you to also follow us @salesforcenews.
This post is the latest in a series of weekly updates that we are providing. See the previous post below:
Innovation and Giving Back Through COVID-19
April 23,2020
Companies around the world and across every industry are tackling new challenges brought about by COVID-19. And while we are still in the thick of the pandemic, we continue to see glimmers of hope as they pivot to a remote workforce, double-down on digital, and find new ways to give back to the people who need it most.
Here are some of my favorite examples from this week of companies re-imagining their businesses:
- RG Barry used Commerce Cloud to quickly spin up a “Buy one, Give one” initiative, whereby for every customer who bought a pair of their ‘Dearfoams’ slippers, a pair was donated to healthcare workers. Two channels were launched – one for shoppers to enable donations, and another to capture information from healthcare workers in order to connect them to donations. The company has also switched over part of its business to making masks, and is donating 100,000 masks to healthcare workers. More details here.
- Within 72 hours, MIMIT Health leveraged Salesforce to deploy telehealth capabilities, allowing it to continue to provide crucial healthcare services to patients while keeping them and their employees safe. Einstein Analytics helped with intake patient inquiries, and Care Plans in Health Cloud empowered the team to collaborate with care coordinators as they meet with patients via teleconference.
- Using a combination of Sales Cloud, CPQ, and a selection of AppExchange apps, TuffShed (manufacturer of backyard storage units including garages and sheds) transitioned 185 US salespeople to work from home in 24 hours, while also using Marketing Cloud to keep customers notified on order status. Now, TuffShed’s sales team has increased weekly sales by 30% year-over-year and is quickly digitally transforming.
- Clinical research firm Syneos Health is supporting those on the frontlines by launching an educational program for doctors on alternatives to ventilators. Using Salesforce Care solutions and Health Cloud they are able to rapidly spread the word about their BiPAP machines, which help stabilize intubated patients and can help alleviate the need for ventilators. And with the self-service portal, doctors can get answers directly and quickly, reserving agent bandwidth for more complex cases. Learn more here.
- AAA Carolinas is over 2.1 million members strong, and after it was forced to temporarily close retail branches due to COVID-19, 228 employees pivoted from their existing roles to focus on a new member outreach program using Service Cloud to create cases and conduct personalized outreach to customers. The program was spun up in just five days, and one week after kicking off the team completed over 25,000 member calls, with over 80% of customers who were reached expressing appreciation for the call. Taking this further, personalized campaigns segmented members using Marketing Cloud then provided them with supplemental details based on their initial agent contact experience.
- In the UK, Everton Football Club is using Marketing Cloud to help the club’s soccer players stay connected to its fans during the pandemic by sending personalized messages of support. The club has identified all season ticket holders over the age of seventy and are calling them directly to offer the support of grocery shopping, prescription pickups and other essential daily necessities.
Salesforce Care allows companies to rapidly respond to customers, employees, partners, and communities
More than 6,000 companies have signed-up for our Salesforce Care solutions and this week we announced Salesforce Care for Manufacturing, a new solution that helps manufacturers who are pivoting their operations and reallocating resources to the production of COVID-19 relief and response supplies. As manufacturers begin producing new products such as personal protective equipment, we’ll be offering this solution free for 90 days to help them forecast demand and collaborate with suppliers and distributors as they produce vital relief supplies.
Trailhead supports Trailblazers navigating the new norm
In March we saw a 30% increase in Trailhead sign-ups, and a 307% increase in traffic to Trailhead LIVE content. More than ever Trailblazers are looking to reskill from home, and to offer them continued support as they navigate this new norm we have published content on topics like telecommuting and how to set up a home office. We have also made available new live and on-demand Trailhead LIVE content on relevant topics such as staying active and healthy at home, and mindfulness and meditation through self-awareness.
Salesforce and our ecosystem support small businesses
Small businesses need our help now more than ever before. In anticipation of the next round of U.S. government funding under the Payment Protection Program (PPP) and the CARES Act, lenders need easy to use solutions they can stand up quickly to process the high volume of loan applications, while having the agility to address new requirements as the PPP evolves. With this in mind, Salesforce launched a solution guide that acts as a template for lenders to help jumpstart loan applications for small businesses The guide includes sample applications, workflows, and data models powered by Financial Services Cloud (FSC), Community Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Einstein Analytics, and Tableau.
With access to cash being one of the biggest issues facing small businesses today, the Salesforce Care Small Business Grants program is offering $10,000 grants to US small businesses to help offset the effects of COVID-19. The grant eligibility criteria and application timing have been announced, and all details can be found here. Better together, Salesforce has also joined forces with GoDaddy’s #OpenWeStand and American Express’ #StandforSmall to share resources to support small businesses.
We will continue to provide updates on the Salesforce Newsroom and also encourage you to also follow us @salesforcenews.
An Update on How Our Customers Are Pivoting to Address COVID-19
April 16, 2020
We continue to see companies adopt our Salesforce Care solutions (now activated in more than 5,000 companies), and extend their existing Salesforce deployments to address the massive impact COVID-19 has had on their businesses. These last few months have made it crystal clear that every company needs to have a digital presence. While we remain in the midst of the crisis and figure out how to respond to the pandemic, we see encouraging signs that companies are effectively adapting and beginning to plan for the future.
Here are a few examples I find particularly encouraging:
- As restaurants are forced to make layoffs in response to COVID-19, meal delivery service Sun Basket is opening its doors to these industry experts and growing its warehouse operations organization. Additionally, with an influx in customers and subsequent service volumes, Sun Basket is supercharging its service teams with Service Cloud, enabling new agents to ramp quickly for an immediate business impact. With Einstein Bots, the business is leveraging automation and self-service to provide customers answers quickly and manage rising service volumes, all while providing a smooth transition to work from home for agents.
- The Innovative Genomics Institute at UC Berkeley is transforming its lab to support free COVID-19 testing for the community with Salesforce Platform, Shield, and Community Cloud. Salesforce implementation partner Third Wave Analytics is helping with the implementation efforts. Check out this link to make a donation.
- Wunderman Thompson quickly leveraged Heroku and Marketing Cloud for its Sofa Sets campaign that featured a virtual concert promoting sheltering in place. The data-driven virtual music festival used viewers’ location data to create a real-time visualization map illustrating the number of hospital stays prevented, ventilators freed up and lives saved by staying home.
- In need of a triage process to handle a drastic increase in inbound calls, Piedmont Health partnered with Slalom Consulting to implement a solution for tracking and management of COVID-19 patients. This enabled nurses and agents to guide patients through a series of questions that focused on risk, exposures, and active symptoms to appropriately triage patients to the right level of care. Slalom created a dashboard to track call volume, patient source (new or existing), call source, COVID-19 travel destinations, symptoms, and outcomes. The final product included quickly standing up a COVID-19 hotline and training more than 40 triage nurses and 40 contact center agents, all first time users of Salesforce Health Cloud.
- Digital health coaching company Pack Health had been helping relieve the capacity burden from healthcare for years. In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, they knew they had a duty and responsibility to further support healthcare professionals who were struggling to engage existing patients while incoming COVID-19 cases took over hospitals. Keeping their in-house Health Advisors healthy and disease-free was a necessity to be able to continue to support patients and keep them healthy at home. With Salesforce Service Cloud, Pack Health adapted and went completely virtual within days. As of March 9, all of their existing Health Advisors worked from home, they accelerated hiring of new Health Advisors to fulfill the higher demand from hospitals, and made all trainings virtual – even sending Chromebooks preloaded with company information and Salesforce details. Salesforce provided scalable functionality for Pack Health to be able to manage large numbers of new patients enrolling as members of their program. Additionally, Pack Health designed specific COVID-19 education modules to support patients with mild symptoms.
- Roots, a Canadian favorite for comfortable sweats, is offering 20% off purchases for a limited time. Alternately, customers are presented with the opportunity to donate 10% of that to support COVID-19 frontline workers, while still enjoying a 10% discount on their purchase. Roots is connecting customers to this opportunity through email campaigns and social content driven by Marketing Cloud, while enabling a promo code on Roots.com and tracking all promotional sales and donations through Commerce Cloud. Learn more about the campaign here.
On the product front, we rolled out Salesforce Care for Commerce Communications, a new template that empowers retailers to quickly launch crisis response sites to keep customers, suppliers and partners informed and engaged with the most up-to-date information and resources. These are powered by Community Cloud and integrated with Service Cloud. We also made Einstein Analytics available in our Salesforce Care offering, which gives customers five Einstein Analytics licenses that include more than 50 out-of-the-box analytics templates. These templates help organizations analyze customer trends, case response times, service efficiencies and any activities they are managing through Salesforce Care.
We will continue to provide updates on the Salesforce Newsroom and also encourage you to also follow us @salesforcenews.
Resourcefulness and Resiliency: How Our Customers Are Tackling COVID-19 Head-on
April 9, 2020
I continue to be amazed by the resiliency our customers are displaying in the face of this pandemic. Across industries and regions, companies are adapting to an ever-changing situation, mobilizing their resources, figuring out new ways to stay connected to their employees and keep them safe, and ensuring they continue to deliver mission-critical services for customers. Here are some examples that I am particularly inspired by:
- Using Salesforce Care, Envision Healthcare established a telehealth solution to aid physicians when triaging patients potentially infected with the coronavirus. From concept to deployment this entire solution was built in three days and is now being scaled to users, with additional functionality continually being added.
- Salesforce technology partner Traction on Demand launched a COVID-19 Supply Hub. Built on Salesforce, the hub will coordinate, source, and expedite medical supplies and personal protective equipment for provincial health authorities to support front-line health workers fighting COVID-19 across the Province of British Columbia.
- Arizona tech consulting company MST built a solution on Salesforce to connect its employees with vulnerable community members, enabling them to deliver much-needed groceries and supplies to households in need.
- The State of Rhode Island announced their health department has developed a new app for contact tracing of people who test positive for COVID-19 that is built on Salesforce. In a news conference yesterday, Governor Gina M. Raimondo said, “We are partnering with [Salesforce] to make our contact tracing process more efficient, more scalable, more reliable….it should give you great confidence that our systems are getting so much better and we’re that much closer to getting back to work, because this is essential in getting everybody back to work.”
These are just a few of many examples, and our free Salesforce Care solutions for COVID-19 response continue to gain momentum. More than 3,500 companies across the globe are now deploying them, and more than 1,600 of those are small businesses. Also on the small business front, we just announced Salesforce will be offering Salesforce Care Small Business Grants of $10,000 to US small businesses to provide capital to help them stay afloat and and build resilience for the future. International grants will be added soon, for a total global donation of $5 million.
Through all of this, our platform remains strong and stable as we scale to meet customer demand. Einstein Bot usage increased more than 70% in March as customers utilized them to help agents manage the massive influx of inquiries. And with Chatter usage jumping, we’re making it possible for an unlimited number of users to stay connected while working from home, regardless of a customer’s current license cap. You can always track the service availability and performance for Salesforce products in real time at trust.salesforce.com.
Finally, we are always striving to be a trusted digital partner to our customers. To that end, we have partnered with Deloitte on a new whitepaper to explore different ways the crisis may play out and what its effects will be on business and society.
We will continue to provide updates on the Salesforce Newsroom and encourage you to also follow us @salesforcenews.
