IBM and Salesforce partner to unlock data across clouds and enterprises

A recent Bain & Company survey found that 80 percent of companies say they deliver superior service, but only 8 percent of customers find that to be true. While many companies preach about great customer service, not many actually practice it. We want to change that.
Think about your own experiences when it comes to the challenge of providing great customer service. How many times have you had to provide the same information over and over? How often have you been bounced from department to department or “expert” to “expert” because they didn’t have the right information to solve your issue?  How many times have you dealt with an automated voice system that couldn’t understand you or repeatedly sent you to the wrong place?
For many organizations, the issue is not that they don’t have the right data. It’s that they don’t have access to the right data when and where they need it.
As companies grow, expand and evolve, in many cases their IT environment has not been able to keep pace. The result is a myriad of applications and data scattered across mainframes, cloud applications, servers in other divisions, business partner records and personal spreadsheets. Even when organizations can get access to the data, they can’t work with it in a format that helps them to drive insights.
The best companies are focused on using cognitive solutions to deliver incredible customer moments.  That’s why IBM and Salesforce, the world’s number one CRM company, have entered a strategic partnership to accelerate how customers unlock and monetize data and intelligence with joint solutions.  With new integration patterns designed specifically for Salesforce, IBM Application Suite for Salesforce helps organizations realize their full potential by unlocking access to data across multiple clouds and enterprises for use by Salesforce clouds.
The crux of these solutions is their simplicity. Now, it’s easy for anyone to make the right connections in minutes without needing any technical support. Business users are empowered to be even more responsive to customers through do-it-yourself interfaces that enable integrating Salesforce data with other business systems to quickly analyze, manipulate and act upon customer data held in Marketo, Asana, SAP and more.
For organizations looking to get even more functionality out of Salesforce, the solution expands to enable powerful interactions between Salesforce and enterprise IT systems. IT professionals can broadcast Salesforce events to enterprise applications for real-time updates. They can easily keep data in sync across the CRM and other applications through pre-built templates to popular software-as-a-service (SaaS) and on-premises apps. Developers building Lightning or Apex applications have Odata 4.0 support to ensure fast, virtual access to any record in any enterprise system, whether off the shelf or home grown.
The key advantage of the IBM and Salesforce partnership is the ability to connect enterprise and external data that sits outside a company’s CRM system to its CRM data to gain better insights on how those elements will impact clients. Organizations will have a full picture where and how events are impacting their customers, and consequently, their bottom line.
Through this partnership, IBM and Salesforce customers will create more engaging customer interactions.  For example, a financial advisor will be able to more easily consider outside factors such as news and financial market reports that may affect individual clients. The advisor can use that knowledge to take a preemptive and more personalized approach to managing those portfolios and relationships. Insurers will have better insights into adverse weather events that can impact clients in a particular region, helping them to proactively engage with those who might be affected.  That is the vision we are bring to our customers.
And the best part is you can get started today. If you want to learn more join the webcast or visit our website.
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Quelle: Thoughts on Cloud