What is so unique about IoT technology? With IoT, there is neither a need for human-to-computer nor human-to-human interaction. In other words, everything is connected yet independent. 

If we bring Salesforce to the picture, we have an intelligent solution, i.e., Salesforce IoT Cloud, that can get all your data in a single place. Sounds interesting, right? So, what is Salesforce IoT cloud, and how does it benefit businesses? It makes sense to partner with a reliable Salesforce consultant to know more about this robust solution. 

What is Salesforce IoT cloud?

Salesforce IoT Cloud allows organizations to create and enrich customer profiles and enter data irrespective of location, channel, time, or device. The robust solution helps implement interaction IoT laws, personalizes outcomes, or allows for simple integration with the Salesforce mobile app. The platform supports organizations to handle enormous volumes of data gathered from different processes, network devices, and locations.

Its practical approach helps develop excellent customer relationships, improving client retention and engagement. By assisting organizations to monetize their IoT investment, Salesforce IoT cloud allows organizations to provide a competitive edge over any connected device. The Salesforce IoT Cloud platform can be integrated with other Salesforce services such as Salesforce sales cloud, service cloud, community cloud, and marketing cloud.

Top Benefits of Salesforce IoT cloud?

Data Analysis with Einstein Analytics: Salesforce IoT cloud utilizes the Einstein Analytics platform to process data gathered from different sources and analyze it. This helps users better understand consumer behavior and preferences while undertaking the necessary steps to attract and retain them.

Augments Customer Experience: All the historical data regarding customer interaction gets stored on the Salesforce IoT cloud platform, which considers their location, service background, and more to provide organizations with a complete view of customer behavior. In the long run, organizations will become more proactive by anticipating customer demands, thereby providing a superior customer experience.

Low or No Code Approach: Due to its low code approach, the Salesforce IoT Cloud allows business executives to carry out their IoT processes without bothering the IT department. The orchestration rules can be set up in a way like that of a Salesforce marketing cloud feature, i.e., 'customer journey.' IoT will automate your business operations by placing triggers and responses in place.

Customer Context: This feature entails the machine learning aspect of Salesforce IoT cloud records and analyses past actions and behaviors of customers to make real-time decisions. The feature considers Customer History, location, and Service History and pools it with IoT device data to provide you with a complete picture of what's occurring.

More Visibility: The process involved in implementing a Salesforce IoT system is a primary consideration in choosing it. Businesses, too, could get a bird's eye view of the process in progress from the traffic view, which is a visual representation of an organization's ROI in different aspects. The visual panel allows organizations to see how IoT products perform in a constantly evolving consumer landscape.  

Increases Client Referrals: Clients expect hassle-free connectivity with businesses. Implementing the Salesforce IoT cloud platform makes it possible to build strong customer relationships by being accessible to them all the while.

Enhances R&D Activities: Businesses can make necessary changes to suit customer needs and requirements by tracking consumer behavior and preferences. Besides this, it is also possible to predict the taste of future customers from a pre-emptive perspective. Businesses can make quick decisions or fix the problems by getting a brief understanding of what's operative and what isn't. This improves service delivery.

Increases Lead Generation Process: Besides B2B transactions, the Salesforce IoT cloud can help the sales department gain information about the products linked with the Salesforce IoT cloud. With this information, the Sales team will be able to identify expired items, whose warranty expiration is approaching, and more. They can leverage this data to upgrade their sales processes and reach targeted customers. Businesses can create personalized deals or pitch a new product to the customers if their existing product isn't working well. Most of the data gathered can be used to forecast customer needs in several ways.

Provide Complete Perspective of Customers: By leveraging the personalized reports, Salesforce IoT provides businesses with a 360-degree view of their customers. Based on an organization's requirements, it is possible to modify the advantages.

Seamless Integration with Other Systems: Besides empowering organizations to provide services independently by gathering and processing data, Salesforce IoT cloud is capable of expanding its functionality, permitting third-party integration. Consequently, businesses get to access data from multiple sources, enabling them to explore other aspects of a business.

Final Words:

The Salesforce IoT cloud provides a complete and exact picture of how customers utilize the goods and services by integrating data gathered by their apps, irrespective of their position. The data collected can be leveraged by businesses to create personalized sales and marketing strategies while influencing customer opinion. So, implementing Salesforce IoT cloud will take the client management of every company to a new level. The innovative cloud solution offers infinite potential, which businesses can leverage to make informed business decisions. So, companies now need to integrate the Salesforce IoT cloud into their operations. However, if you wish to integrate the Salesforce IoT cloud within your business ecosystem, ensure you get in touch with a certified Salesforce Consulting Partner. 

In today’s digital era, people, objects and devices are connected via the internet. Consequently, a humongous amount of data is generated daily, which when processed and analyzed can provide valuable insights, which in turn can be leveraged for informed decision making. Today, ground-breaking technologies like IoT (Internet of things) has completely transformed the way people think, behave and work. IoT, which is simply an ecosystem of interconnected devices that communicate with each other while operating independently helps in performing various operations such as identifying, analysis and control mechanisms. In fact, real-time insights gained through IoT can prove to be beneficial for businesses in several ways.   

Since customer satisfaction is a prominent factor that influences the growth of an evolving business, businesses are trying to make the most of this innovative technology by integrating their CRM platforms with it. While IoT helps in driving meaningful insights across various departments including marketing, sales and customer service, the combined power of IoT and CRM can augment efficiency and visibility, which in turn will help the business respond to customer needs in real-time. 

To provide customers with improved customer service, businesses are leveraging the IoT Cloud platform for providing businesses with a complete and integrated view of customer behavior by helping connect a large number of sensors, applications, devices, etc. with billions of events. This is where you might need the support of a Salesforce consultant.  

How does the Salesforce IOT cloud Work?  

The Salesforce IoT cloud platform, which is powered by Thunder is designed to provide personalized CRM experiences to customers. This immensely scalable platform binds data from sales, service and marketing clouds and processes it to provide businesses with insights regarding customer behavior so that they can engage with them in a more relevant way. In other words, businesses can now provide their customers with the services and features they have been looking for.  

Let’s take a quick look as to how the integration of Salesforce IoT cloud with your company’s CRM can take your business to new heights:  

Informed Sales & Marketing Efforts: The two departments which benefit most by the integration of IoT and CRM are the sales and marketing department. While salespeople can cultivate a better rapport with their prospects by gaining insights from data gathered by IoT devices, marketing professionals will have the necessary information regarding customer preferences and needs to create ground-breaking strategies for brand promotion.  

Enhanced Customer Services: The amalgamation of IoT with CRM paves way for businesses to provide superior customer service, which leaves your customers happy and satisfied. By pre-determining the real-time issues of their customers, businesses can create efficient plans to prevent their customers from suffering any type of hassles, their reputation, as well as public relations.  

Updated Pricing Models: By integrating IoT with a CRM system, businesses can position their brand in the market with a competitive pricing model. This becomes possible due to insights gained from live data streaming.  

To Sum Up:  

With Customer expectations constantly evolving, it becomes mandatory to take steps that can provide your business an edge over your competitors. By integrating IoT with your business CRM, you will be able to gain significant insights regarding customer needs and preferences, which in turn can be leveraged to satisfy your customers and maneuver you from the competition. To make the most of your CRM, it makes sense to integrate your CRM with the IoT system for which you may get in touch with a reputed Salesforce consulting company.   

Last week Tom Davenport, a Distinguished Professor at Babson College, wrote about “GE’s Digital Big Swing” in the Wall Street Journal. As he cites in his latest piece, there are many others taking big swings in digital and IoT overall. (BTW - If you’re not following Tom, you really should do so now. His thoughts are a perfect mix of research and practice covering big data, analytics and changes in the digital landscape.)

During my time at Pivotal, I was witness to the digital big swing that GE took and saw the energy, effort and resources they were committing to make sure that whatever they made that could be connected to the Internet - jet engines, power plants, surgical image machines - would capture all data to improve products and the customer experience. I don’t think GE watchers - investors, competitors, partners - fully understand yet the enormity of this bet.

They keep making moves. This week the company announced the creation of GE Digital, a transformative move that brings together all of the digital capabilities from across the company into one organization.

Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman and CEO of GE, said, “As GE transforms itself to become the world’s premier digital industrial company, this will provide GE’s customers with the best industrial solutions and the software needed to solve real world problems. It will make GE a digital show site and grow our software and analytics enterprise from $6B in 2015 to a top 10 software company by 2020.”

GE, the industrial giant, a Top 10 software company? That’s taking GE’s slogan “Imagination at Work” and making it real.

Much like the cloud trend before it, the IoT trend is something where all major vendors are investing.

Yesterday at Salesforce’s behemoth customer conference Dreamforce, the company announced the Salesforce Internet of Things Cloud. Based on a home-grown data processing technology called Thunder, Salesforce touts their IoT Cloud as empowering businesses to connect data from the Internet of Things, as well as any digital content, with customer information, giving context to data and making it actionable—all in real-time.

With perhaps a nod of guilt to marketing hype, other notable big swings include:

• IBM - The company has created an Internet of Things business unit and plans to spend $3 billion to grow its analytics capabilities so that organizations can benefit from the intelligence that connected devices can provide. According to IBM, as much as 90 percent of data that is generated by connected devices is never acted on or analyzed.

• Cisco - Its approach focuses on six pillars for an IoT System - network connectivity, fog computing, security, data analytics, management and automation and an application enablement platform. You can buy all the pieces of the system from Cisco, of course.

• Samsung - They are betting on openness and industry collaboration. By 2017, all Samsung televisions will be IoT devices, and in five years all Samsung hardware will be IoT-ready. They also recently open sourced IoT.js, a platform for IoT applications written in JavaScript, and JerryScript, a JavaScript engine for small, embedded devices.

• Monsanto - Their near billion dollar purchase of The Climate Corporation is combining The Climate Corporation’s expertise in agriculture analytics and risk-management with Monsanto’s R&D capabilities, and will provide farmers access to more information about the many factors that affect the success of their crops.

In the wake of these giant big swings will be new and exciting startups - sensor companies, chip players, software, analytics and device makers. If you know of a compelling start-up in the industrial IOT space, drop me a line at david@iotcentral.io. We would love to hear from you.