3 Key Takeaways From Dreamforce 2021

The Dreamforce keynote is always an important opportunity to hear directly from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff his thoughts on the forces impacting today’s businesses and his vision for the future of the world’s most popular CRM. With the events of the last couple of years having accelerated the pace of digital transformation and the shift to new ways of working, this year was no different. 

As a Platinum sponsor for this year’s Dreamforce, Natterbox was excited to be part of the excited crowd in San Francisco as we heard about what the next year will bring.

Here’s our key takeaways:

1. The Trusted Enterprise

Though many of the talking points were much the same as we shared last year, such as Salesforce’s Digital HQ and its ongoing importance as an inclusive global virtual hub, the acquisition of Slack and it’s part in remote team building and communication, and the increasing importance of direct customer engagement to counter the absence of in-person relationship building, this year took them a step further to introduce the concept of the trusted enterprise. 

An all-encompassing vision of an organization where customers and employees are at the heart of what they do, the trusted enterprise is one that puts people and relationships first. Salesforce voice technology will be an essential part of building the trusted enterprise, as the voice channel is the digital customer touchpoint where genuine human relationships are forged. 

Salesforce voice technology will be an essential part of building the trusted enterprise.

By empowering businesses to build personalized relationships at scale by leveraging the full value of their Salesforce data, voice technology makes building trusted relationships with customers and prospects possible for businesses of any size. There are many voice tech features that support this. For example, call centers can benefit from features such as easy to optimize call flows to build efficiency, and real time call data to understand call volume and staff accordingly. 

2. Customer-First

The term customer-first isn’t new, but the last two years of the pandemic have brought home the meaning to many businesses. “We’re here for you” has become a common phrase, but in his keynote Marc Benioff took it a step further and made customer-first about brands building direct relationships with their customers as global citizens and as commercial enterprises. 

The role of voice technology in this ‘customer-first’ mindset is all about data. Whether that’s businesses following global data privacy laws and adopting data management best practices, or designing their inbound customer service processes around the needs of their customers with skills based routing to target first call resolution, voice technology has a large part to play. 

3. Digital HQ

From the cold hard necessity of remote working during the height of the pandemic, to a vision of the future of work, the digital HQ is not going anywhere. Marc Benioff talked about the digital HQ as a virtual hub where the whole business is invited, no matter where they live or what their role is, to support work/ life balance and inclusivity. 

Voice technology has a big part to play here, too. From a purely remote or hybrid working perspective, voice tech means that businesses and employees are not tied to physical locations and can work from anywhere, on any device. But also, by making telephony and voice a digital channel, it powers the unified communications and fully integrated data that make the digital HQ work. Features such as automatic call logging, call recording for quality assurance monitoring and mentoring enable the digital HQ to deliver a step change in customer-first service.

So what does it all mean? 

Trust is the indefinable, unmeasurable commodity that will make the trusted enterprise of the future succeed. The more digital transformation powers ahead, the more remote the touchpoints between businesses and their customers and employees becomes, and the more customers come to expect a good experience, the more important it will be for voice tech to foster the real human connections that will make people trust them.

To discuss how Natterbox can help you to build ‘best in the business’ customer experiences at scale, get in touch.