Salesforce World Tour Sydney was huge! Here’s a recap to see what you might have missed.
This year’s Salesforce World Tour Sydney was a huge success, attracting thousands of trailblazers who joined both in person at ICC Sydney and by tuning in for the live stream of the main keynote. Irrespective of company size or industry, attendees came to uncover innovative ideas and solutions to help solve their business challenges. The venue had a vibrant spirit of collaboration, and it showed just how much the Salesforce ecosystem had evolved.
With a significant number of senior executives travelling to Sydney to attend, It was evident that Salesforce continues to see Australia and New Zealand as a crucial region for growth. The delegation’s focus went beyond topics like Speed-to-Value and Data Cloud, as they also sought to learn more about the impressive work across the region.
During the event, 8Squad’s CEO, Frank Cuiuli and COO, Jessica Thompson, had the opportunity to meet with several members of the global executive team. It was a highlight to share details about our growth and latest innovations, including our Centre of Excellence (CoE). We were encouraged by the team’s interest in understanding why CoE is proving so popular and how it differs from traditional managed services offered by other partners. Their interest further validates our commitment to helping businesses extract the full value of their Salesforce investment while continuously improving and adapting their platforms.
Highlights from our favourite sessions
World Tour Keynote
The keynote kicked off with Gadigal Elder Uncle Allen Madden welcoming attendees to Country, followed by a performance of Great Southern Land by Mitch Tambo and Reigan. Pip Marlow, CEO of Salesforce ANZ/ASEAN, opened the keynote with Salesforce’s story of becoming a Customer Company. The Salesforce team use the same tools their customers do and face many of the same challenges, including the struggle with overwhelming amounts of data and rising customer expectations for more personalised experiences.
Despite the rise of personalised services, 56% of customers feel they are treated like a number. Meanwhile, 40% of CEOs are unsure if their companies will remain viable in 10 years. To help companies navigate these challenges, Salesforce has developed the Customer Company Playbook and introduced new software suites to improve technology investments and deliver stronger customer experiences.
Three areas of the playbook that 8Squad focuses on with its customers include:
- Create a Customer 360. Salesforce announced new Sales and Service suites that enable companies to understand their customers through a 360-degree view of their interactions.
- Build apps and automate now. Automating workflows and creating low- or no-code apps are critical to achieving efficiency and value from technology investments. Salesforce’s workflow engine, FLOW, supports automation and scalability and incorporates AI tools like Einstein to provide smarter insights. 8Squad created a Mulesoft practice last year to help customers integrate software and connect data from various sources and is one of the only certified Partner Development Organisations in the region, collaborating with independent vendors to bring this to life.
- See and understand your customers with Data Cloud. Companies can now transform and extend their data in Salesforce by including any other data source. This integration provides a single source of truth that can be used across the Salesforce ecosystem, allowing companies to understand their customers better.
Lastly, we learned about Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new infrastructure layer that unifies the foundations of the various clouds and allows Salesforce to scale rapidly and securely using public cloud partners. As one of the few accredited partners in the region, 8Squad recognises that Hyperforce will be especially important to customers from highly regulated industries that need stronger compliance, security and privacy solutions.
For those who missed the keynote, Salesforce+ offers the ability to watch parts of it online.
Government and Public Sector
Grace Edwards from 8Squad attended the Modernise for Speed, Scale and Impact in the Public Sector session and shared her thoughts. One of the key challenges the public sector faces is how to deliver personalised experiences at scale for millions of citizens while being inclusive of all.
The session discussed three ways to personalise at scale:
- Join your data together – with Salesforce tools like Mulesoft and Data Cloud to create a complete database, without replacing the existing system.
- Accelerate your productivity – through automation, innovation, and visualisation tools to reduce repetitive tasks and enable case workers and agents to understand the needs of the people they connect with.
- Simplify it all – by gathering the right information at the right time from anywhere, and enabling the work in government to happen anywhere, anytime.
Customer Story:
Lauren Dean, the Executive Director of ChildStory, spoke about the agency’s transformation to support its mission of looking after vulnerable children. Her agency implemented Salesforce Service Cloud and Public Sector Solutions to build a state-of-the-art Customer Relationship Management system, providing real-time data to professionals to support children in need. Lauren’s advice to other government agencies when considering technical solutions was to “think” and “work” differently, keeping a beginner’s mindset and letting the design be experience-led.
For more relevant insights for your organisation, contact Grace Edwards, Key Account Director for Public Sector.
Financial Services
The How Financial Services can Deliver Greater Business Value Faster session emphasised the importance of non-technical considerations for successful digital transformation in financial services. A BCG and Salesforce report, “The Great Reset,” found that only 42% of financial organisations exceeded the expected value creation from their transformation efforts. While data and technology play a significant role, the remaining 70% of the solution must come from redesigning back-end processes, policies, and operating setups with human-centricity in mind.
The session featured a panel of technology and customer experts from NAB who shared advice for other financial organisations. They stressed the importance of technology stability and recommended looking for low- or no-code solutions to help scale and minimise bespoke developments. Adopting a continuous improvement approach makes it easier to deliver multiple value drops along the way, aiming for progress rather than perfection.
Across the financial services sector, 8Squad sees businesses recognise the value of digital transformation. They’re embracing customer and broker 360, automation, service modernisation, straight-through processing, and data-driven engagement. However, they face challenges implementing these initiatives cost-effectively and incrementally while working towards a larger future-state roadmap.
To overcome these challenges, organisations can partner with companies like 8Squad to leverage industry best practices and accelerators. However, investing in solution and architecture design frameworks is essential to avoid a product-first approach that can lead to technical debt and siloed systems. Financial services businesses can unlock value and provide better experiences for customers, brokers, partners, and employees by focusing on human-centricity and continuously improving their technology.
If you’d like more information about the latest trends across the financial sector, please contact Brett Gibson.
Service and Service Modernisation
Constantine Georgiou attended the How to Scale Service that your Customers Love session, where he listened firsthand to the panel of service leaders from Intrepid Travel and BizCover. They discussed how automation, omnichannel contact centres and innovative technologies like Voice could enhance customer experience and scale businesses.
During the session, we learned that companies use 1,061 different applications on average, but only 29% are integrated, according to Mulesoft’s Connectivity Benchmark Report 2023. Meanwhile, the latest Salesforce State of Service report revealed that 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.
Bizcover leveraged automation of customer engagement to double its customer base without increasing employee headcount and now manages 10,000 customers per service agent, while Intrepid achieved 60% faster case resolutions with their Salesforce solution.
At 8Squad, we’ve seen technology’s positive impact on managing scale at contact centres, efficiently and effectively handling multi-channel interactions in line with changing customer behaviours. Contact centre effectiveness is now critical, given the changing tide in customer loyalty from brand to service. We also see many agent wellness initiatives and how technology can assist in improving customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and retention.
Contact Constantine Georgiou if your organisation wants to learn how to modernise or scale up its service teams.
There was so much to learn at Salesforce World Tour Sydney and we hope our recap has helped you gain some insights into the topics covered throughout the day.
If you have any questions or are interested to learn more about the latest Salesforce innovations covered at World Tour Sydney, please contact our team, and we can arrange a time to explore it further.
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