Salesforce, Inc. (CRM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone. Welcome to today's session, how growing businesses transform customer service with digital channels, and thank you all so much for joining us today. My name is Ariana, and I'm on the corporate marketing team here at Salesforce. And before we begin, I'd like to cover a few quick notes with you about our webinar platform. Today's webinar will be available on demand after we wrap up, and it will be accessible through the URL you are on now. [Operator Instructions]. We'll do our best to answer as many questions as we can at the end of the presentation. And with that, I will be turning things over to Lauren to get us started.

Perfect. Thank you, Ariana, and hello, everyone, like Ariana said, welcome to how growing businesses transform customer service. with digital channels. We are so excited to have you join us. Today, we're going to talk about how growing businesses just like you can delight customers and grow loyalty. And best of all, we're going to hear how an incredible SMB Trailblazer has done just that using digital channels. So without further ado, let's get started. I am your host, Lauren Giurata. I'm an associate product marketing manager on our Service Cloud team here at Salesforce. And I am really excited to introduce our guest of honor, Guillermo Salazar. Guillermo, can you give us a quick rundown of you, your role and your company?

Sure. So I lead the business systems team here at Rippling, which I will say a lot of that entails Salesforce work, and what we do here at Rippling is we're -- we aim to be an HR platform that brings together HR, payroll, benefits and IT. And the idea is you have a single source of truth for your employees and manage employee operations a little more efficiently, all in one place.

Awesome. Thank you for that. I'm so excited to dive in, as I know we all are. But before we begin, I just want to give a quick reminder that customers should base their purchasing decisions on products and services that are currently available. All right. Let's get down to business. It is no secret that customer expectations change over time. And right now, we know that customers are becoming much more demanding. They want great service and they want it now. But not only are they more demanding, they're also more anxious and more difficult to satisfy overall. And this is leading to a 54% increase in case volume. As you can imagine, more cases, places more stress on service teams. In fact, 75% of service professionals find it more difficult to manage the influx of cases recently. So in order to meet customer expectations, they just like have to juggle customer demand while also managing the strain on their service team. Luckily, there is a solution that can do both. How many of us reach out to companies via chat or social media for help before we even bother to pick up the phone to call. I know that I do and honestly, customers are just like us. They want to reach out for help via digital channels. Customers are constantly on the go. They really don't have time for store visits and long wait times on the phone to speak with an agent. They need to be able to find answers quickly, effortlessly and on their own terms, which means any channel at any time. But more so, they really want to be personalized. They don't want to repeat themselves or answer questions that have already been asked before. So that means businesses need to support customers across multiple channels without missing a beat. And that can be a bit of a tall order. Now before we dive in and go forward from here, I just want to ask you all quickly, which support channel do your customers prefer? You have the options of chatbot, portal, messaging or speak with an agent. Go ahead, I'd love for you to let me know in the chat portal on your screen, which one you think comes the most with your customers. I'll give it a couple of minutes while we let some of these answers come in. It's kind of a difficult question. I feel like sometimes it depends on what my question is for the core team, but we'll dive into that in a little bit more detail a little bit later on. Thank you to those of you that have already submitted. I'm going to wait another couple of minutes, not another couple of minutes, 30 to 60 seconds, we'll say. I want to make sure everyone has a chance to get their thoughts in here. All right. Last call. Anybody else want to submit the chat, pool. Okay. Great. We're going to go ahead then. All right. Okay. This is a big split. As I would expect each channel definitely has its loyal followers, so 13.7% for chatbot, 19.6% for portal, 21.6% for messaging and 45.1% for speaking with an agent. That is interesting. I maybe would have expected a little bit less for speaking with an agent, but that's great. We'll make sure that we factor that in as we continue through the webinar. So thank you all so much for participating. The good news is that our jobs have shown us that we have A lot of people that want different channels and luckily digital channels are just as revolutionary for your business as they are for your customers. Gone are the days of meeting more agents or increased budget. With digital channels, you can improve agency efficient -- agent efficiency, reduce service costs and grow customer loyalty, all at the same time, lastly. Suddenly, that 54% increase in case volume will feel like a walk in the park. Your agents will be happier, your customers will be happier and your business will be saving money. It's really a win-win win. So by now you're probably thinking, these digital channels sound pretty great, but how do we get started using them. Well, in the spirit of getting the people what they want, self-service is a great first step. You just saw about 20% of people love using portals, and I'm betting most of you would prefer to update an order or schedule an appointment on your own, something kind of simple without needing to talk to an agent. And it turns out you're not alone, 65% of customers feel the same way. And what can agents do in all that extra time, they can focus on the more complex cases. But as a growing business, you really need more than just self-service. Again, as we just saw with our poll, people don't just want portals. They also want chatbots. They also want to be able to speak on the phone with someone, customers really want to be able to reach you using everything from portals and chatbots to phone calls and video calls. Luckily, Salesforce helps you navigate all of these channels. And you can use automation to make sure your customers and your agents are getting the information they need as quickly and efficiently as possible. So the moral of the story here is that customers' needs really aren't one-size-fits-all. So your support channels can't be either. With that, I am excited to dive into our chat with Guillermo so that we can hear a little more about how Rippling uses digital channels to fuel business growth. So please drop any questions you have into the chat, and we'll try our best to answer them as we go. All right. I'm going to throw up a slide that I have a little bit more information about Rippling. And then to kick things off Guillermo, could you just walk us through what prompted you to use Salesforce to redefine your customer service?

Sure. So we migrated from another tool into Salesforce. And -- but even before the migration, Salesforce was the system of record for our customers, and we wanted to keep support close to the center of gravity to that process and to that data. So in other words, this -- we wanted to enable one clear view across GTM, and of course, we consider support part of GTM, that's kind of the high-level reason. But to give you more tangible reasons, we wanted a customizable way of giving agents a better rep experience, which we were able to accomplish through service console. One of the more technical aspects is we also wanted an extendable platform that we knew -- that we were a, familiar with and b, we knew we could integrate it with other tools like our Rippling APIs. And then one of the most important reasons and one at the heart of the migration was we needed advanced routing skills -- sorry, advanced routing functionality. And that's where omnichannel came in, so we make full use of omnichannel and leverage it fully. Other reasons, the list goes on and on. We had a need for a customer community for portal, for example, a place where customers could land, get support, get chat, potentially purchase services, get training, et cetera. Moving to Salesforce, we have full context of the user, et cetera. So it made identity management a little easier. It made authenticating users a little easier. And the last bit I'll say that I'll touch on was, and this is a compelling argument always when you're in favor of Salesforce actually is we wanted to avoid having to create a bunch of integrations with other systems because we have to pull in data, the case data into Salesforce, knowledge data into Salesforce, maybe sales data back into the support application, et cetera. So we want to avoid those integrations. And again, moving to Salesforce gave us a better integration across GTM.

Great. There was a lot of goodness in there. I think that, that -- like you were saying, kind of the whole view of the customer, having one single source of truth, that is something that we hear a lot, but is really helpful for our businesses. So I'm glad to hear it in that way for you as well. And you mentioned you're using a lot of different channels. How did you decide which support channels to offer?

Sure. So one of our aims here was to keep response times low, right? And for us, we saw chat as a very viable option. So then the natural question is how are you able then to keep response times, so low, right? And if you think about it, response times actually start when a customer has a problem. It's not necessarily when they reach your channel for support. So what that means is in the past in doing UX research on this topic actually, what customers have told me is, hey, you make me fill out this giant form areas, sub-area products, sub-area topic, subtopics, all these forms. And then at the very end, it finally gets to kind of get it off my chest and tell you what the problem is. So the response time starts with -- in that process. And for us, we don't ask users to fill out the giant form. All we ask for is the description of the problem. So right off the bat, the experience is, you don't fill out a form, you don't do anything. The idea is we get help to you fast, just tell us the problem and we move on, right? So if you follow the flow here, the next natural step would be to classify the case. And to do that, we use an in-house tool to classify the case, that's actually very similar to what Einstein Case classification does. In our case, our tool was in place for a long time. It was already trained on large data sets, et cetera. So it just made sense for us to continue to use that tool. So again, have the customer be able to submit their issue quickly, classify it quickly, make full use of omnichannel here, route it, classify it, take into consideration complexity, products, agent presence, et cetera. So once you do that, we have -- and the case finally makes it to the rep or the chat finally makes it to the rep, we have full user context, we now have their account, their contact cases, workflow data, et cetera. And all of that combined, that flow combined allows us to keep response times very low, and it's why we've been able to leverage chat so successfully.

That's great. That's really impressive. I know you all have seen really impressive results using chatbot. And you kind of touched on this a little bit, but can you maybe give us a little more detail on why you really think chatbots are so successful for Rippling or why you decided to kind of focus so heavily on chatbot?

Sure, sure. So I think you touched on this early on. And -- on a more subtle level, I think we're fulfilling an expectation of immediate support of instant responses. In the age of messaging apps, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, I think the consumer Internet is trained users to say, "Hey, if I have a problem, I send a message and I get an answer. So right off the bat, I think chat has been successful for us because we're starting on a sound premise. And we're fulfilling that expectations that customers may not even know they have, okay? The next step is the more obvious one, and if you can solve the routing problem, if you can solve the classification problem. Bottom line is you can get high-quality answers to customers faster. It's really that simple. And that's so important for us as a company. We deal with payroll, taxes, et cetera, things that are very time-sensitive and very critical to the business. So we definitely take that seriously, and really prioritized getting answers to customer, like I said, getting answers to them faster. And you see this, you see this all the time. And for example, this is why you might see when a customer tweets at a company in a public place because they feel they haven't gotten a response quickly enough. So that just kind of illustrates and kind of build on point that, hey, we expect answers quickly and we expect good answers quickly.

Absolutely. I know I definitely experienced that when I reach out to a company. I am a little impatient I'll admit when I'm waiting to the answer. So it's great that a lot of companies are moving in this direction of using digital channels to get quicker answers. And you touched on how important it is to deliver that amazing customer experience. And on the flip side of that, a big part of that is accelerating agent productivity to enable yourselves to do that. So what are some of the ways that you at Rippling are focusing on accelerating agent productivity?

Sure. So we wanted to build an ecosystem here. We wanted tight integration between our case management, our support portals, our chat and our knowledge base, et cetera. So again, we -- by keeping knowledge embedded into support, for example, we're able to have reps. We're able to have eyeballs, everyone on the same thing, keeping the process consistent. Now I think a big part, a big piece of this is to keep -- is to provide personalized support, and this is something I'd like to get into because the answer to that problem again is have you classified -- if you can classify the case, if you can route it correctly, if you can automate a way out, the business process, automate the way up boilerplate language, all that leads for the reps is a focus on the customer. And ultimately, that allows us to provide more personalized support. So imagine you're a rep at a company, you come to work, you log in and you're part of a key. All of a sudden, you're fishing in that queue for a case that might be relevant to you that you might be able to solve that you might not, that you have to figure out, okay, what response do I send here, what do I do? Oh, it's not a me, you transfer it, et cetera. Now imagine a different scenario, which is what we aim for, where you're a rep, you come into work and all you bring are your smarts, and the minute you sit down, you make yourself available in omni and you hear a ding. And at that point, you get a case that you're confident you can solve because from experience, you know that cases are classified correctly. You know that cases are routed to you correctly. And it takes everything out, it distills everything down to that interaction with the customer. So imagine the amount of personalization and efficiency you can provide to that customer when that's all your focused on. When you're focused on cases and we manage your workload, and as you become available, you get another ding and you move on to the next days. You have nothing to focus on but the customers.

Yes. I think that's a great point. I think making sure that the agents are free to focus on whatever is coming in from customers is definitely a core element. So that's great. And I'd love to chat a little more about how your customers can reach out for help from Rippling. So I know you have your chatbots. Can you walk us through how your customers can access those chatbots.

Sure. So there's 2 main channels of support here at Rippling. One is you e-mail into support at rippling.com. And we have a lot of process around e-mail to case and support. The other way is you can log in to the portal where you can have access to chat, access to knowledge base and access to whatever resources we make available at the time. Now both operate on the same premise that I mentioned before is you get the item, you classify it, you route it and then you get it to the right rep, who can then either answer your case right away or reply to your chat message right away. So the idea for us is to get that response is to get you to a person faster and get you a better response faster. So whether you're e-mailing us in from chat, e-mailing us or chatting with us, we will provide that same experience of as close to an immediate response, that's kind of the holy grail, which -- it's kind of an asset that we're trying to approach here as close as possible to a real-time response.