As marketers, you are the custodians, advocates and protectors of the most important people to your organisation – your customers. Whether you’re in the business of soft drinks or whiteware, the deeper the relationship, the more loyal your customers will be.
And it’s not just loyalty you’re after. You want to engage and inspire them. To do that you need the time and space to conjure up the marketing magic that matters. The kind that differentiates customers’ experience, so your brand stands out in a crowded market.
What’s often been standing in your way until now is technology, as Nick Rosen, AVP, Marketing, Commerce, Data & Loyalty at Salesforce, points out at the Agentforce World Tour Sydney ‘Future of Marketing’ Keynote. Underusing technology might leave you wanting, but understanding how to most effectively use it can open up a whole world of opportunity. Our re-imagined Marketing Cloud, which brings together every component in the Salesforce marketing tech stack and integrates it with Agentforce, does just that.
“What it means is a lot less time connecting the jigsaw puzzles of a MarTech stack. It gives you back 70% of your time for your imagination so that you can re-imagine what the customer experience can be,” Nick says.
The Future of Marketing with Agentforce
Hear from marketing experts on how Agentforce transforms customer relationships across the full lifecycle.
Re-engaging with customer relationships all the time, at every level
The most successful companies are those that go into full relationship building, which means engaging with customers across the entire life cycle of their business journey. Customer success doesn’t only reside at the top of the funnel, says Steve Hammond, EVP & GM, Marketing Cloud, Salesforce.
It’s why the ability to enable “personalisation in milliseconds” is at the heart of a re-imagined Marketing Cloud. It is built directly on top of the Salesforce platform, with Data Cloud at its heart and direct access to Agentforce.
“Marketing Cloud enables marketers to bring in data about streams of behavioural context – and the click streams that you need in order to understand the context – to make sure you can create the best possible experience for people.”
It also makes it easier for marketers to connect across the business and break down the stubborn barriers that can prevent collaboration with peers in other parts of the organisation, such as technology, product and finance.
Additionally, integration with Agentforce enables native agentic experiences that automate everything from decision-making to campaign management. Agents learn from every bit of data and every piece of feedback, so they are continuously improving and shaping their output to meet — and exceed — customer expectations.
Personalisation and Market Intelligence are re-imagined
Marketing Cloud, including Data Cloud and Agentforce, is now available natively in Australia and New Zealand, so you don’t have to worry about regulations or your customer data being stored offshore. “It’s all here and it’s all been done for you,” Steve says.
These revolutionary tools are designed to optimise customer personalisation, which is no longer a nice-to-have – it’s absolutely critical to business success. Almost three-quarters (74%) of customers in the 2023 Salesforce State of the Connected Customer Research expected personalisation when they provided personal data. Since then AI’s use has exploded and it can now enable the kind of deeply intuitive personalisation that turns a casual customer into a lifelong brand advocate.
Steve points out that while personalisation has been around for 20 years, it’s mostly been designed for web pages and emails. This is rapidly changing with Salesforce Personalisation, which has been built on top of Data Cloud and can be applied across service teams, sales teams and AI agents.
“Now when you are deploying agents you can have recommendations coming up based on people’s interactions across channels, you can put in A/B tests – everything you know and love with personalisation,’ he says.
And you can do this using Data Cloud, which enables marketers to create a sophisticated and comprehensive marketing campaign targeted at a specific customer group, using Market Intelligence, in just minutes.
“We are in an interesting era. I honestly believe as marketers, we have to start thinking heavily about what agents are going to do to our businesses and the channels that we use. What is marketing going to look like in two, three, five years. We have to be ahead of that curve. So we’ve been building technologies that will let you be in a position to manage your data and your customer interactions ahead of those curves that are coming.”
Customer success story: Fisher & Paykel’s AI-powered personalisation journey
So how does this capability play out in the market? Mark Henderson, Head of Digital Operations and Customer Data at Fisher & Paykel, says his team has been using it to drive amazing customer success.
Before implementation their data model could create segments of, at best, 100 customers to serve targeted recommendations to. It was a time-consuming task defining customer groups, but they found the payout was worth it.
Then, in November, the team deployed the new capability in Marketing Cloud and discovered the power of true personalisation. In just four months they recorded some impressive stats:
- 33% order conversion from 11,000 viewed recommendations;
- 40% increase in product views across key categories;
- Two weeks to launch global product page recommendations across three brands;
- 100 days saved annually in marketing operations – one third of a team member’s working year!
Re-imagine your customer experience today
The Fisher & Paykel experience neatly encapsulates the gains for marketers who are willing to dive in and experience all that Marketing Cloud with Agentforce can provide.
But Mark points out that the road to customer success at exponential scale has been a long one for his company. For most of its 90-year history, Fisher & Paykel thought of itself as being product-led, then it understood that to achieve its goal of becoming “the most human-centred appliance brand in the world”, it needed to switch to being customer-centric.
As marketers you too understand how critically important it is to be customer-led and that’s why the arrival of agentic AI marks the beginning of an entirely new and exciting era. Agents make it possible to finally achieve the ultimate prize in marketing, one-to-one customer personalisation, while freeing your operations team to focus on what brings them joy – creating magical campaigns to delight customers and drive outstanding business success.
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