Dropbox and Salesforce announced a global partnership agreement last week to help customers of both companies get more from the joint use of their products and services. Salesforce has the No 1 marketshare in customer relationship management products and Dropbox Business is the largest collaboration network in the world.
According to Salesforce, the idea is to enable companies of all types and sizes to work with their value chains to better understand and serve their customers’ needs across sales, service, marketing and other commerce channels.
Increase Brand Engagement & Productivity
The companies wanted to focus on two main areas – brand engagement and digital asset management and productivity and collaboration for teams working in a cloud environment. The integration will allow customers to created customized/branded Dropbox folders inside of Salesforce Commerce and Marketing Cloud. This brings the content together in a two-way workflow that can be accessed by both internal team members and external partners.
For example, a retailer using Salesforce Commerce Cloud can create a Dropbox folder to access product images or creative briefs from an external creative agency. The retailer then gets notified when the agency makes changes or additions and can update their online storefront in order to deliver a better shopping experience.
On the productivity front, users will be able to easily share content, such as photos, videos, and slides they have stored in Dropbox, directly within Salesforce Quip. Dropbox will also add support for Quip documents, providing a live collaboration environment for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
Integrations for Later This Year
These new integrations are expected to rollout out the second half of 2018. You can find out more on the Dropbox blog or by possibly attending one of the Salesforce World Tour events.
This news is important to companies who are invested in creating a quality customer experience. Being able to share customer information across platforms creates a unified home for content that can now be kept up-do-date and relevant. Many B2B companies, in particular, have struggled to gain a competitive edge in the marketplace due to the rise of increasingly complex customer interactions and the rise in influence the customer experience now holds as a method of differentiation among companies.
Businesses looking to address customers’ changing needs and perhaps catch-up a bit to their B2C counterparts, should consider these four tactics asserted by customer experience professionals:
Start with your Culture. An intentional shift must be made to focus on the customer experience across every department in your organization. A more customer-centric culture will develop as leadership makes a commitment to employees who become more engaged and dedicated to making the way they do business faster, easier, and more personalized.
Knock Down Silos. Create a more seamless customer experience. That’s why the above announcement has value because you cannot pass customers around from one function to another anymore. No more moving the customer from sales, to account management, to installation, and then to customer support – it’s too disjointed today. Team members all need to access to the same information to quickly and easily help a customer.
Embrace and Manage Change. Customer expectations are continually changing. Your employees need to have the same attitude toward shifting expectations. Developing a customer-committed attitude in operations means moving beyond just a project approach and understanding the changes from a customer’s perspective.
Innovate the Customer Experience. Businesses often focus on innovating products and features. Their focus should be on innovating the ideal customer experience. Develop an initiative that focuses on making interactions with your company faster, easier and more personal.
The power of the customer experience continues to grow in importance. Companies looking to establish a competitive edge need to get current on customer trends and continue to foster customer-focused changes within their organizations.
