Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Tag: salesforce

  • Connecting people to spaces

    Connecting people to spaces

    Beacon technologies are one of the hottest items in the Internet of Things with retailers, sports stadiums and hotels looking at how they  can use these devices to improve their operations and customer experiences.

    At Dreamforce 2014 Proximity Insight’s Steve Orell spoke on the event’s wearable panel about how their service plugs into beacon technology and customer service.

    Proximity Insight was born out of the 2013 Dreamforce Hackathon where Orell and his team were finalists. From that, the company set up operations in New York with a focus on customer relationship management in the retail industry.

    Retail isn’t the only the field that Orell sees for Proximity Insight with the hotel and casino industries as being other targets.

    “With the hotel, why check-in? Why not walk in and let your smartphone do it for you?” Orell asks.

    “It’s all about making live so much more seamless and slick,” Orell adds. “There’s opportunities in every sector.”

    For businesses looking at rolling out beacon technologies the key is to be adding value to enhance the customer experience, Orell believes.

    “You have to be delivering something to the customer beyond tracking them, it’s about making the whole retail or hospitality experience better. It has to benefit the customer.”

    With beacon technologies now becoming common and the supporting hardware being built into all smartphones, we can expect to see more applications coming onto the market. It’s worth considering how your business can use them to enhance the customer experience.

    Paul travelled to Dreamforce 2014 as a guest of Salesforce

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  • Salesforce faces the end of the database era

    Salesforce faces the end of the database era

    Last week we looked at the way we organise information is changing in the face of exploding data volumes.

    One of the consequences of the data explosion is that structured databases are beginning to struggle as information sources and business needs are becoming more diverse.

    Yesterday, cloud Customer Relationship Management company Salesforce announced their Wave analytics product which the company says “with its schema-free architecture, data no longer has to be pre-sorted or organized in some narrowly defined manner before it can be analyzed.”

    The end of the database era

    Salesforce’s move is interesting for a company whose success has been based upon structured databases to run its CRM and other services.

    What the company’s move could be interpreted that the age of the database is over; that organising data is a fool’s errand as it becomes harder to sort and categorise the information pouring into businesses.

    This was the theme at the previous week’s Splunk conference in Las Vegas where the company’s CTO, Todd Papaioannou, told Decoding The New Economy how the world is moving away from structured databases.

    “We’re going through a sea change in the analytics space,” Papaioannou said. “What characterised the last thirty years was what I call the ‘schema write’ era; big databases that have a schema where you have to load the data into that schema then transform before you can ask questions of it.”

    Breaking the structure

    The key with programs like Salesforce and other database driven products like SAP and Oracle is that both the data structures — the schema — and the questions are largely pre-configured. With the unstructured model it’s Google-like queries on the stored data that matters.

    For companies like Salesforce this means a fundamental change to their underlying product and possibly their business models as well.

    It may well be that Salesforce, a company that defined itself by the ‘No Software’ slogan is now being challenged by the No Database era.

    Paul travelled to San Francisco and Las Vegas as a guest of Salesforce and Splunk respectively

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  • Knocking at Silicon Valley’s door

    Knocking at Silicon Valley’s door

    In opening Salesforce’s new London office yesterday, former BT CEO Lord Livingston described the city as “knocking at the door of Silicon Valley.”

    Judging from the Computing UK article that description hasn’t impressed the rest of the British tech community as it confirms in their minds there is, as usual, too much focus on the capital and Livingston’s view also raises the question of whether London really wants to be another Silicon Valley.

    Like all global industrial hubs Silicon Valley the result of a series of happy coincidences; massive defense spending, determined educators, clever inventors and savvy entrepreneurs all finding themselves in the same place at the same time.

    Trying to replicate the factors that turned the region into the late Twentieth Century’s centre of technology is almost impossible – even the United States couldn’t afford the massive defense spending over the fifty years from 1941 that underpinned the Valley’s development.

    Apart from the spending; the culture, economy, geography, markets and workforce of Silicon Valley are very different to that of London’s.

    This not to say London doesn’t have advantages over Silicon Valley; access to Europe and relatively easy immigration policies make Britain a very attractive location for tech businesses. If the local startup community can tap The City’s banking resources then London could well be the next global hub.

    If London is the next global tech centre – history will tell – it will almost certainly be very different to Silicon Valley.

    Strangely, the event Lord Livingston was speaking at reflects how the Californian tech sector is evolving; Salesforce is a San Francisco company and represents a shift in the last five years from the suburbia of San Jose and Palo Alto to the quirky city life of SoMa and the Tenderloin.

    At the same time Silicon Valley itself is evolving into something different, just as it did in the 1990s with the switch from microprocessor manufacturing to software development.

    That shift illustrates the risks of trying to imitate one industrial hub; by the time you’ve build your replica, the original has moved on.

    If you spent your life trying to knock on the door of heroes you want to imitate, it would be shame to finally make it only to find they’ve moved.

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  • Evangelism and the makers’ movement

    Evangelism and the makers’ movement

    The latest Decoding the New Economy interview is with Salesforce’s Reid Carlberg.

    During the interview with Reid we cover how the Internet of Things and big data is changing business and society along with the journey to becoming a software company’s evangelist.

    Reid has a fascinating story to tell about how the makers’ movement is evolving as big data and the internet of things develops.

    The interview is an insight into a winding career path and how Big Data and the Internet of Things is changing business and society.

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  • Customer service is no longer a department

    Customer service is no longer a department

    When it comes to customer service businesses, Alex Bard calls himself a ‘career entrepreneur’, having founded four startups in the field since the mid 1990s.

    In 2011 he sold his most recent business, Assist.ly, to Salesforce and became the company’s Vice President for Service Cloud and the Desk.com customer service offerings.

    Bard tolds Decoding the New Economy last week how social media and Big Data are radically changing how organisations respond to the needs of their clients.

    “I’ve been in the industry for twenty years and I’ve never been excited as I am now,” Bard says. “The real transformational things that’s happening now are these revolutions – the social revolution, the mobile revolution, the connected revolution.”

    The philosophy of customer service

    “What they’re really driving is this idea that customer service is no longer a department, it’s a philosophy.”

    “It’s a philosophy that has to permeate throughout the organisation. Everybody in the company has a role in support. It’s not just about a call centre or a contact centre or even an engagement center which is what these things are called today.”

    “I really don’t like the word ‘centre’ because I really fundamentally believe that everbody in that company has to interact with customers, has to engage and has to the information – no matter they are – about that customer to provide context.”

    Abolishing the service visit

    With the Internet of Things, Bard sees GE’s social media connected jet engine as illustrating the future of customer service where smart machines improve customer service.

    “They’re going to capture more data in one year than in their entire 96 year history prior,” says Bard. “With that data they’ll be able to analyse and do things on behalf of that product or service that’ll reduce the number of issues.”

    “Because the best service of all is one that doesn’t have to happen.”

    In this respect, Bard is endorsing the views of his college Peter Coffee who told Decoding the New Economy last year that the internet of machines may well abolish the service visit.

    “Connecting devices is an extraordinary thing,” says Coffee. “It takes things that we used to think we understood and turns them inside out.”

    “If you are working with connected products you can identify behaviours across the entire population of those products long before they become gross enough to bother the customer.”

    For Alex Bard, the customer service evolution has followed his own entrepreneurial career having evolved from being personal computer based in the 1990s to today’s industry that relies on cloud computing, big data and social media technologies.

    As these technologies roll out across industry, businesses who adopt the customer service philosophy Bard describes are much more likely to adapt to the disruptions we’re seeing across the economy. Changing corporate cultures is one of the great tasks ahead for modern executives.

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