Salesforce has announced Foundations, a free upgrade that gives Enterprise Sales and Service Cloud customers access to cross-CRM features.
These capabilities come from the Salesforce Commerce, Data, and Marketing Clouds.
Meanwhile, Sales Cloud users may also gain access to features from Service Cloud and vice versa.
Some of the new capabilities available on Sales and Service Cloud, with the Foundations upgrade, include case management, opportunity management, email campaigns with targeted segmentation, and secure payment links.
All these features will funnel into a new UI, as shown below.
[caption id="attachment_63284" align="alignnone" width="850"]
Check out this screengrab of the Salesforce Foundations UI[/caption]
From this UI, the CRM giant claims users can build a unified view of the customer and more connected customer experiences.
Salesforce stressed the significance of connected experiences in its 2023 State of the Connected Customer Report.
The study found that 79 percent of customers expect consistent interactions across departments. However, 55 percent suggest that it generally still feels like they are interacting with separate departments instead of one organization.
Tricky data integrations and costs play a significant role in this. Yet, with the additional functionality from Foundations, Salesforce promises to simplify building that all-important unified customer view.
Furthermore, Foundations customers may leverage thousands of integrations and third-party extensions from the Salesforce AppExchange.
Those include extended free trials for 25 integrations from “leading” Salesforce partners. They include Docusign, RingCentral, and ZoomInfo.
Such tech suppliers can bring features like document generation, video conferencing, surveys, and more into the Salesforce environment.
David Schmaier, President & Chief Product Officer at Salesforce, pinpoints additional CX automation opportunities through leveraging these integrations and new features. He said:
With Salesforce Foundations, businesses of all sizes and industries can now automate sales, service, marketing, and commerce with unified customer data on a single platform, empowering them to integrate their entire front office and deliver real-time, personalized customer experiences to drive revenue, answer service issues, create marketing campaigns, set up payments, and more.
Yet, perhaps most crucially, Salesforce Foundations will help sales, service, and marketing teams to share insight and collaborate.
For instance, Service users can add customers to marketing onboarding journeys to acquaint them with new products. They may also easily upsell, with newfound access to sales quotes and commerce payment links.
