Vocus’s engagement with Salesforce Professional Services to date has focused on evolving its marketing capabilities. The group has had Marketing Cloud for several years, but it’s use was limited. For example, audience segmentation and automation of communications was managed outside of Marketing Cloud and if the marketing team wanted anything changed, they needed to raise a request via the data or development teams.
Vocus wanted the flexibility and control to send more contextual targeted communications, as opposed to the campaigns sent previously which were largely adhoc and not scalable or always on. Also, customer expectations were increasing; the group needed to provide a better, more personalised experience across its digital channels. What’s more, it needed to do all this while improving internal efficiency.
Marketing Cloud offered all of the tools Vocus needed to achieve its goals. It just needed to use them to their full advantage.
“Bringing in Salesforce Professional Services helped us leverage all of the features and industry best practice that the platform brings,” said Wickert. “Maximising that off-the-shelf capability was really important to us as we thought, who are we to reinvent the wheel when everything was just waiting there for us to use it?”
To kick off the transformation project, Salesforce Professional Services conducted an audit to understand the group’s current processes and capabilities. Through the audit, Salesforce identified opportunities to improve Vocus’ ways of working and increase customer engagement.
A key focus was to set marketers up for success and give them greater control in executing and optimising campaigns and journeys. The first stage of this transformation included putting the architectural foundations in place for Marketing Cloud and providing email templates, documentation, and training to the marketing team. The training was recorded as well and now forms part of the onboarding process for new starters.
“The journey we’ve been on has been a bit like building a house. Salesforce has helped us design and build the foundation for that house and we are confident that it’s structurally sound and going to accommodate our future needs,” said Wickert. “The communication and collaboration with the Professional Services team has been amazing as well. They always take us through the solution design so we know exactly what will be delivered. They’ve also gone above and beyond in educating and explaining things to different teams to get them onboard.”
To help Vocus manage compliance and ensure relevancy of its communications, Salesforce Professional Services has also set up a preference centre on Marketing Cloud. The preference centre enables customers to opt-in or opt-out of communications based on product or channel. The Professional Services team has also provided Vocus with a ‘consent sync framework’ to help it manage customer consent and compliance for business units not yet using Salesforce.
