We caught up with our partner JCS Consulting, which has a great deal of expertise in implementing communities, self-service sites and collaboration platforms, specially in the Salesforce ecosystem. We had the pleasure of speaking with VP of Cloud CRM Practice, Bojan Kalajdzic, to talk about his vision of how today’s landscape of cloud applications is forcing organizations to rethink the way they deliver relevant information to their employees, customers and partners.
Olivier: What questions are most commonly asked when it comes to building an infrastructure for self-service nowadays?
Bojan:
As businesses have rapidly adopted the cloud, the same question comes up for selection cloud technology as it used to for on premise solutions: “Is a single cloud provider the best way to go, or should I go for the best of breed vendor for each of my needs?”
When it comes to building a support infrastructure, more and more businesses are considering multi-cloud solutions with the objective to use best of breed solutions for specific tasks. Today you can find anything from CRM, Analytics, eCommerce, to middleware tools in the cloud. The key aspect of making these solutions useful is their integration – making sure the intelligence from each system is surfaced in an unified way. When disparate systems become integrated, the value of the holistic solution drastically increases as it improves both accuracy of information and end-user productivity. Traditional ways of integrating systems rely on moving data from one system to another or providing API connectors, which can be costly to maintain and lengthy to develop. The best option ironically oftentimes gets overlooked, and that is the AI-powered search approach.
Olivier: Tell us a bit more about JCS Consulting and your expertise in AI-powered search.
Bojan:
We engage with our clients to bring a unified and smart experience to their customers, partners, and employees via Salesforce Community Cloud solutions. Our clients typically have a need to expose relevant information to their customers and create the collaborative experience we see on social networks, which is what customers expect. By doing so, they are able to share ideas and feedback related to products, discuss specific topics, and solve problems independently and faster. As organisations are pressed for time to create and deliver self-service solutions, we turn to cloud solutions which provide 80% of these common functionalities out of the box. The remaining 20% is the most challenging, exciting, and rewarding part of the project. This is where we make the cloud work for our clients and their specific use cases! More importantly, this is where we leverage AI-powered search to enable the end-users or customers to self-serve by proactively recommending the right information for their specific use case, at the right time.
Olivier: In your experience, what common roadblocks do companies often face when it comes to self-service success?
Bojan:
The biggest problem we face today with web self-service is that users hop from one portal or site to another to interact with a company. As internal departments develop solutions such as self-service portals, they frequently sit independently from other solutions such as communities, blogs, or knowledge libraries. As much as companies integrate these solutions to look similar and seamless via SSO login, they are still acting independent of each other – with no unified view of the customer journey, searches and outcomes. One of the best solutions you can implement is to bring these sites together by providing enterprise search across all systems. Coveo solves that by injecting AI-powered search in the cloud to your users. You can integrate all the sites, portals, and communities without having to move data from one system to another.
Olivier: Could you give us an example of how AI-Powered Search works on top of a Salesforce Community?
Bojan:
Of course! A great use case that comes to mind is one of a large software company which recently implemented Salesforce Community to provide self-support functionality to all their customers. Like most companies going through acquisition, this software company was faced with a challenge of providing a single point of entry for all customers, yet wanted to retain successful developer forums across multiple brands. With AI-Powered Search from Coveo, this solution was easy to engineer and fast to deliver. Customers can now easily search across sites, communities, and forums for relevant information. No matter where they are, the search results are provided in a consistent manner indicating the source of the information. Once a link is selected, the user goes directly to the system that provides the correct information. This is a great example of how integration across systems can be done without moving data, migrating users, or migrating entire platforms.
By considering cloud-based AI-powered search for your next digital transformation project, you are looking at an unprecedented opportunity to deliver engaging solutions that can bridge multiple clouds, including on premise solutions, into one integrated platform. This can all be accomplished in a short period of time with a scalable, high performing solution. Customers who can quickly find relevant information across your communities, help portals, and sites will not only turn into happy customers, but also your best net promoters. This powerful feature will help you grow your business and better understand your customer base. Creating a simple but powerful search across your systems will deliver lasting value in today’s digital economy.
To learn more about leveraging your Salesforce Community to achieve self-service success, check out our eBook: Maximizing Self-Service Success with Your Salesforce Community.
About Bojan Kalajdzic:
Bojan is a Cloud computing leader with 20+ years of experience in IT industry with 13+ years focusing on Cloud Computing. He currently leads the Salesforce practice for JCS Consulting. Prior to JCS, Bojan developed the Salesforce Community Cloud practice at Cloud Sherpas and Accenture. He helped many Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 customers with digital transformation, leveraging cloud solutions such as Salesforce, AWS, Azure, and Coveo. Bojan is passionate about creating customer journey maps to understand business processes from the customer perspective, and deliver digital solutions across all devices (web, mobile, IoT). Bojan helped Salesforce.com design the new Community Cloud certification program in 2016.