Salesforce unveils features to boost automation for marketing and sales

Salesforce unveiled an array of new automation features for its marketing, commerce, service and sales offerings this week.

Marketing Cloud’s Account Engagement API enhancements are designed to automate personalization and engagement. It does this with new integrations for the company’s CDP and external segmentation tools. 

Users can now create and share segments within the CDP, enhance them with additional account attributes for personalization and activate engagement across channels. For example, a company could attract freemium software users with a personalized enterprise software upgrade journey across video, email and mobile.

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Other upgrades include:

• Composable Storefront for Commerce Cloud. This lets retailers take a headless approach to commerce while offloading the management of site hosting, security and scalability. Users can create and deliver flexible, custom commerce experiences to any device or application without additional expensive architecture.
• The Store Associate app gives retail workers fast access to customer insights and inventory levels. It is designed to create more personalized shopping experiences via ship-from-store functionality, Buy Online Pickup In-Store and omnichannel inventory visibility. 
• Contact Center for Service Cloud hopes to improve agent productivity and efficiency with a unified agent desktop across all channels and AI-powered recommendations.
• The Service Catalog automates frequent service requests, like refunds or subscription plan changes. Customers can make these requests through a storefront-like experience. 
• Flow Automation Packs automates the life cycles of various tasks — like managing incident tickets and customer onboarding processes.
• Einstein Bot for Sales can perform multiple tasks including answering customer questions, connecting them to the right rep via Slack and automatically scheduling meetings.
• Enablement tracks sales rep’s achievement milestones and delivers training programs in the flow of work, ensuring they are up-to-date on the latest product features and new sales techniques.

Why we care. With inflation, supply chain problems and labor shortages, companies need all the automation tools they can get. Companies know this — 91% of organizations say they need automation technology, but only 23% have actually implemented it. Salesforce seems focused on helping with this.