Most likely you have already heard about Salesforce’s newest $1.33 billion acquisition, Vlocity. Let’s find out how the Vlocity acquisition adds value to Salesforce and its customers. Also, what new opportunities the ISV brings with itself.

Salesforce the global CRM leader has been around for over two decades now providing end to end business solutions right from lead generation up to customer success with an added advantage of an AI led analytics tool and cutting edge IoT based solution. Salesforce provides a customer 360 approach through its cloud based solutions.

So why Vlocity? What does it bring to the ecosystem?

Salesforce provides extensive solutions across a gamut of industries horizontally, nevertheless, it has always concentrated on allowing their partners to build expert solutions for industries vertically. That’s where Vlocity marks an entry. With Salesforce’s all-encompassing solutions and Vlocity’s in depth industry specific expertise, certain industries have the leverage of using a combined package all in one place.

Vlocity, being a fairly new industry cloud expert has gathered profound technical know-how in six varied industries, they are:

1.  Communications,
2.  Media and Entertainment,
3.  Energy and Utilities,
4.  Insurance,
5.  Health and
6.  Government

How the Vlocity acquisition helps customers

Let’s analyse by looking at a use case on how Vlocity has helped Telus, a communications organization.

Telus is a North American telecommunications company that provides products and services, such as wireless, data, Internet protocol (IP), voice, television, entertainment and video.

In order to gauge customer loyalty, Telus decided to chase its most significant metric, Likelihood to Recommend (L2R). L2R is part of the NPS (Net Promoter Score) and at Telus it determines customer satisfaction and is correlated with revenue and profitability growth. As a result, an initiative to improve service quality seeking 4 objectives was launched:

1.  Accelerate “Time to Market” (TTM) for new offerings
2.  Reduce “Average Handling Time” (AHT)
3.  Reduce “Quote to Order” cycle time
4.  Provide a consistent experience across assisted and unassisted channels

Telus started by deploying Salesforce’s Service Cloud and CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) system. When Service Cloud restructured account, contact, lead and opportunity management thereby contributing to higher L2R scores, the CPQ software wasn’t agile enough and lacked flexibility to generate quotes and capture orders for communication services. It would sometimes take agents up to 20 min to generate a quote for a customer.

It was at that point when Telus was introduced to Vlocity at a Dreamforce event. Telus realized that Vlocity had already built what they had been investing millions and months to develop themselves: Communications Industry Cloud.

As a result:

1.  10% increase in customer L2R
2.  24% increase in order accuracy
3.  54% faster quoting and ordering
4.  80% faster product launch time

Here, we can clearly see how Vlocity can help customers who belong to specific industries by saving them millions of dollars and enabling them with a lot faster production launch time.

Read the full story here.

How the Vlocity acquisition helps Salesforce partners?

While the cloud based software company has built a robust platform that has wide application and usability, in order to implement Salesforces’ solutions that cater to specific organization requisites, the company has equipped its partners to do the job. The acquisition of Vlocity now means a new door open for opportunities relevant to Vlocity’s expertise.  

What’s in it for Salesforce developers?

As we may see a boom in the number of customers seeking Vlocity’s solutions, Salesforce developers will need to get familiar and master in Vlocity’s products to seamlessly assist clients in their integrations and customizations.

Therefore, combining the omnichannel capabilities of Salesforce along with Vlocity’s rigorous industry expertise can help numerous customers worldwide looking for industry specific solutions that are integral to running their business operations in a coherent fashion.

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