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

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, Streamline your Service Workflows. My name is Moya McKay, and I am your webinar manager here on the global field marketing team at Salesforce. And before we begin, I just want to cover a few quick housekeeping notes for you all regarding our webinar platform. Today's webinar will be available on demand and will be sent to you via e-mail after we wrap up. So please keep an eye out for an e-mail with a link to access today's recording after the webinar has concluded. Please note that slides will advance automatically throughout the presentation. If you need to enlarge the slide area, you can click on the enlarge slides button located in the right-hand corner of your presentation window. If you need any technical assistance, please click on the help widget located on the right-bottom of the corner of your console. You're also welcome to access the Submit a Question widget on the right side of the presenter window for you to ask your technical assistance question, and we'll be able to help you there as well. We've also added some additional resources which are available to you through the resources window to the right of the slide. So there you can access any additional webinars, white papers, demos, e-books and more. We also encourage you to submit questions at any time throughout today's presentation using the same Submit a Question widget on your console. So feel free to start adding your questions in now, and we'll try to answer as many as we can at the end of today's presentation. But note that if we do not get a chance to answer your question today, we will be sure to follow up with you after the webinar ends. And last but not least, let us know what you think of today's presentation by sharing your feedback with us via our webinar survey that's available to you on your console below. We also welcome you to share your excitement and what you like in the moment in the presentation by using the emoji reactions on your screen. So please feel free to use the thumbs up, smiley face, celebration and heart emoji reactions as we go through today's presentation. So with that, I will hand it over to Neal to kick us off. Neal, over to you.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Moya, for that introduction. Everybody, welcome to our webinar. Before we get started, just a quick note. It's important to make your purchasing decisions based on product capabilities that are available today. Also, we wanted to thank you for taking the time to join us today. We hope you enjoy today's webinar, find it useful, and we're really looking forward to our continued partnership in the future. So some quick intros, I'm Neal from the product marketing team, joined today by Kieran, Senior Automation SE. So I'm sure we can all agree that for businesses across spectrum today, automation is top of mind. But what do we mean by that? As we all know, any process requires collaboration across your entire organization and employees to access the right information at the right time, and end-to-end automation answers this by seamlessly connecting people and systems. And this is the type of automation we'll be talking about today. It's all about rethinking the siloed processes as straight-through processes and eliminating all that friction that employees face in getting their jobs done. And so this slide obviously looks great in theory, but in reality, it's hard to achieve. Why is that? We think that this is difficult -- automation is difficult to practice because business and IT teams tend to approach automation differently. When it comes to automation, business teams want the ability to automate quickly to address their changing needs and the needs of the business. They want to implement solutions without going through IT when possible, and they want to be able to build without having to write code or spend time skilling up on new tools. And also, business teams have the domain knowledge. For example, an accounting team knows their processes around accounts payable and receivable far better than an IT team ever would. But on the other hand, when we think about an IT team, their needs are often in direct opposition. They want to be able to keep track of tools and solutions that are used by the business to maintain clear oversight into security and compliance. They hold that really critical responsibility in organizations. IT teams also want different types of tools. They want tools that help them build and deploy it faster with the flexibility to create bespoke custom solutions when needed. And finally, they want this capability that's often overlooked, which is that to reuse and share assets with our teams. However, both IT and business teams come -- run into challenges when it comes to skill sets and allocation of resources and getting access to the right tools at the right time. So as a result, we see that automations often just don't get built. Everybody knows that there's those inefficient processes in their organizations, but they're unable to automate that. And so we think the ideal solution is spreading the ability to innovate across an organization, empowering both business and IT teams, giving business teams easy-to-use tools and pre-built assets and solutions, while allowing IT teams to focus on the most complex automation challenges and maintaining governance over everything. And so in order to do this, you need an end-to-end automation solution, and this is where Flow comes in. Flow allows you to orchestrate your workflows to fast track interactions between people and systems. And by automating those actions across any system, whether that's in Salesforce, another SaaS application in the cloud or a custom system that you may have built or even legacy systems, those that are on-prem, with Flow, you can give your employees, your customers and your partners alike the ability to interact in dynamic real-time workflows from anywhere. Simply put, Salesforce Flow helps you scale processes and empower people to take action faster and drive efficiency and cost savings. So let's take a step back and look at where Flow fits in. So Flow is really the automation layer within the Salesforce ecosystem. And if we double-click into it, Flow consists of several tools. So Flow Orchestration, Flow Integration, also known as Composer, as well as RPA and the Anypoint platform. And it's really important to note the differences with the solution when it comes to automation. First, there is flexibility. Flow gives us the ability to use the right tool for the right job and not force fit an automation tool that -- onto a use case that it isn't designed for. And then secondly, there's interoperability. So you can build processes that span these different tools, span the different modalities and really automate processes end-to-end and not run into any technical barriers or challenges when it comes to automation. And so today, we're talking about service, and I think it's really important to contextualize automation in terms of the service domain. So when it comes to automation in the service world, we really think there's 3 main buckets here. So the first is customer-facing automation. Those tools that you have that directly touch customers, especially as it relates to self-service. So this means things like self-service portals, but also chatbots. And then next, there are types of automations that help service teams do their jobs more quickly and efficiently. So this means very basic types of automation for routing and to work between different agents and teams. But also things like features that help service teams execute their jobs more efficiently, things like Next Best Action, Macros, Reply Recommendations, et cetera. And then finally, we have process automation, and this is where we're going to focus today. So how do you automate across your organization to work between teams to solve customer issues more quickly? And what this means in practice in terms of use cases is things like incident detection and response, proactive service notification, things like multistep customer onboarding, where onboarding would touch multiple teams; warranty entitlement; checks and external system updates. And so when we think about the impact automation can have on -- in a service scenario, let's look at an example of everything coming together. This is an example of a customer trying to update their order, and we'll see another example in the demo today. Before automation, this end-to-end experience is fragmented. Customers are put on hold by -- while reps try to track down their information across various systems before going through different approval work streams. Once approval is granted, the agent has to make additional quest to inventory fulfillment center before finally notifying the customer of the status of their order update. Obviously, that's not a great experience. But with Flow, this automation can be -- automation could streamline this process by connecting customers, employees and partners. The customer can self-serve without having to wait while each system from the retailer's front office to the partners, to partner to the back office, all the systems automatically track the right information, manage approvals and update status. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Kieran for our demo today.

Awesome. Thank you, Neal. So it wouldn't be a Salesforce demonstration without a few personas that I'm going to walk you through here shortly. We're going to be stepping into the shoes of a fictitious retailer, Northern Trail Outfitters, or NTO for short, and we're going to kind of walk through a journey of one of their customers, Nina, and also some of the folks internally who are working in the call center and on the order management team. So first, we've got Nina. She is a customer of NTO. She has ordered some shoes, but she recently realized in between her ordering and when they're supposed to be shipped, she actually needs them sooner than anticipated. She's about to go on a hiking trip. She needs hiking shoes before she leaves. So she's got a little bit of an issue on her hands and she's going to kind of self-serve to get that issue solved. On the NTO side, if we think about the NTO team, we have Luca, who is a customer service rep. He is working essentially in the call or the contact care center, super passionate about his customers and customer service. And his role is essentially to validate claims, deal with issues, deal with cases as they come in and things like that. And then we've also got David. David is one of the shipping managers at NTO. So he's responsible -- he's more on the warehouse side, right? He's responsible for making sure, hey, we actually have the inventory on hand to actually ship. He is going to kind of have the final approval or final say on these things. He's tracking some of the delivery SLAs. And if we look at what we're going to see live here momentarily -- how do I get the slide to build out? Sorry, it's just the platform is a little laggy. Neal, do you have an easy way to build this slide out for me the whole way through? Thank you. So ultimately, what's going to happen and what we're going to see is Nina is obviously going to kick this off when she places her initial inquiry. And then that's going to create a case. She's going to self-serve. It's going to create a case. That's going to be routed to Luca. From there, that's automatically routed to some back-end systems and taken care of by Salesforce Flow and Orchestration, which is tying together some of these disparate systems. And then David is going to provide his approval on that. And then ultimately, that's going to be routed back to Luca to immediately update, learn and close out that case. So really, the idea is we're going to focus on how Flow and Flow automation is going to help you organize, decompose and streamline what traditionally might be a somewhat complex kind of business process and workflow that might take a lot of sort of ping-ponging back and forth and many days to resolve and just really reducing the time to resolve and reduce the amount of swivel chair that some of the internal teams are having to do. Ultimately, kind of make Lauren and -- or sorry, Nina and other customers like her more happy. Awesome. So with that, I am actually going to take over the screen here. And I will warn you as this is coming up. This is a demo with a lot of screens. There are several different personas that we're going to be stepping into the shoes of here. I will try and make it as clear as possible where we are in this process. If you have questions about any of this that you're seeing on your screen. Please do leverage the Q&A feature that you have available to you, and we'll be addressing questions after the demonstration here. So first, we're going to step into the shoes of Nina. I guess that's no pun intended. Nina is authenticated into NTOs, essentially their customer community or their portal. And she is going to open up a case really quickly. She's just going to self-serve. The way she's going to do that is she's actually going to open up, "Hey, I want to open up a chat session. I need to update delivery date of my shoes". And remember, because she's authenticated here, a lot of this is dynamically populated. And on the back end, we know, okay, what orders does Nina have right now? So this is an authenticated experience which is going to allow us to serve her faster. The first thing that's actually happening here is this is configured to look for an available agent via omnichannel and service cloud. But what is going to happen here is there's no available agents. This just gets auto routed to our bot, how can I help today? I need to check the status of an order. Do we know the order number? Nina does not. So she's going to click No here. And this is where, again, because it's authenticated, we can automatically serve her with her order data, okay, here's my shoe order. What do we need to do? Here's your order, some information about it. Yes, I do need to change something about this. What do we want to do? I want to update my shipping method to premium. And from Nina's perspective, everything is done here. This has kicked off that orchestration that is tying together the pieces of this workflow that needs to happen on the back end now, but she's all good on her end now and we can serve her faster. So that's kind of what this looks like from Nina's shoes. Now we're going to step into some of the shoes of the internal folks to NTO. So we're first going to look at Luca, who's our customer service rep and how he deals with this, and then how this gets passed and routed to David. And we're also going to talk a little bit about how Salesforce with Orchestration is actually interfacing with some other kind of external or back-end systems that need to be updated or reached into as part of this process. Before we jump into Luca's shoes, I just really quickly want to show you what's actually kicking this off on the back end, which is the Flow Orchestrator. If you're unfamiliar with Flow Orchestration, think of it kind of as flow of flows, and it's really meant for kind of complex long-running workflows and business processes. So it's an extension of Flow in some ways. And if you're familiar with Salesforce Flow, this interface probably looks pretty familiar to you, but this is actually the orchestrated process we've built out to streamline this customer experience. So within each one of these, we've got what we'll call a stage here, update the order and Salesforce. And within each stage, we have different steps. We've got interactive steps. We've got background steps. Interactive steps and background steps are both just calling different types of flows. So we've got our interactive steps. This is where Luca, the case agent, is actually going to interface. He's going to look at the case, he's going to look at the customer, determine is she eligible or not. The background steps are where we need things to automatically happen in the background, right? Think of those as your -- essentially your background or sorry, your auto launched flows. So we're going to update the order first and then we need to retrieve the status. And then here, and I'll show you a little bit of what this looks like on the other end, too. We actually need to go and we need to update some external systems. And again, we can compose this and put this together with Orchestration and some of the APIs that we've built in MuleSoft. So we have -- we need to update SAP. We've got a MuleSoft API that this is calling, just passing in some of the order information. We've got a Composer Flow to take care of updating the order on NetSuite. We'll see what that looks like on the NetSuite side, and we have an RPA bot that's being called to update a legacy order management system. And then the final step is just wrap up with Nina, notify the customer that everything is okay. So this is what we're going to see now. Now let's step into the shoes of Luca, who's our customer service rep. I warned you, we're going to be kind of jumping around a little bit, and I wasn't lying. So let's log in as Luca. And what we should see here, and I'll close out these old orders, bring him to the home page. And we give it a second, and you can see here, he's got a notification. This is also something depending on how he's working. He might get this in the Salesforce app. He'd receive this as an e-mail that you have essentially an open task or something you need to do. We click on that. And we can see here that, okay, I've got all the case details. I have all the information that I need on Nina here, what has she opened cases for things in the past? Who is she? But then what we also have here is this work guide, right? And this is the context. This is essentially servicing up a screen flow for us, where I can look at the case, look at what Nina's requesting here and say, okay, based on this scenario. So this is what the Orchestration is powering. I can say, okay, Nina is a great customer of ours. We want to grant her same-day delivery here. She's been asked to upgrade to the premium shipping method. No problem. And he's going to hit submit here. Now -- for now, Luca's job is done, right? So this now gets passed to one of the folks on the order management team, David, and we're going to step into his shoes here and see how he deals with this, and it's a very similar idea. So we give this a second here. And I'm going to log in as our friend David over here. I'll give this just a moment, and this is -- that gives us from a test run of this. There we go. We can see he has a notification as well now. So now this has been routed to him. He gets notified. Same idea. This could also be delivered out via something like Slack, right? If our order -- our warehouse team is working in Slack and this is just a channel where he needs to come in, view the details and approve. So he can come in, David has final say in our demo scenario here over, do we actually have the inventory on hand to allow for this to happen? We do, fantastic, let's confirm this. We can actually see one of our back-end systems has already been updated here by the Orchestration that's executing in the background. We hit confirm. David's job is done. You can also see, as we're going along here, of course, the case status is automatically being updated as we go along. David's job is done. And once again here, we are going to step back into the shoes of Luca. So we've already updated one of those external systems with the order. So we've essentially looked up the order that already existed. And we've updated the date on it, right? Because there's a ship date in NetSuite. There's a ship date in SAP that both need to be updated. So that's already happened, and we're now tracking those IDs back here. We are waiting for the RPA bot. It is asynchronous in nature. So essentially, we have a MuleSoft or Salesforce RPA bot that needs to interface with a legacy system, a system where we don't have an API connector for it. And it does take a moment or 2 because it's more so doing things like a human would do almost where it's kind of logging in, keying things in. We'll actually see an example of that momentarily here. I'll jump into the back end shortly. But we can actually see that's updated now. So okay. We've been interfaced, and we've fetched the data from that OMS and we've updated it. We can see now. Luca has in this work guide. We just need to close this case. Hey, let's notify the customer that this has been taken care of. Fantastic. And close the case out. So we do this. Okay. The case is now closed. Nina is happy. We have served here faster. Luca is happy because he doesn't have to swivel chair into 4 different systems. So from an end user perspective, that's actually kind of what -- how we can use automation to power our service center and serve our customers kind of better and faster. And one other thing -- actually, a few more things I should show you. Let me jump around here. So if I go back and I -- we'll see if NetSuite logged me out. It didn't. Fantastic. I just want to show you. I grab that ID over here. Let's find that order for Nina in NetSuite. So we can see here, and actually, I apologize, it's probably very zoomed out on your end, what we can see here. So this is the ship date that was updated. This was the order for customer, and we have the memo that was captured. This was just pushed from Salesforce into NetSuite to say, "Hey, why are we actually updating the shipping method for these shoes?" So this is how -- and I should also say the kind of how that was facilitated as our Orchestration is actually calling this simple Composer Flow here. This has the out-of-the-box connectors to say, hey, we are going to push this update into NetSuite using the NetSuite Connector, take that order ID that we have already in Salesforce, update that order in NetSuite. So we're just going to simply update the order there. This was built declaratively. And then the other piece of this, which I may have closed, but what I was alluding to is we also have this kind of legacy system. We need to use a bot to go in and update that system. And very simply, we can do that here with our RPA bot. So this is just kind of showing a test run of what this bot would actually be doing, where it's taking the data that Salesforce has passed it. And again, this is kind of in the builder interface, but this is what it would look like when the bot actually runs this. So it would open up this, what I'll call, legacy application. It would look up Nina, find her order and update it with some of those pertinent details. So this is where the body is actually going in. It's keying some of the data in and actually updating some of that and saving that system. This is kind of an example of a back-end database with a front end of LibreOffice. I've seen this with -- we've done things with AS 400, other applications that are a bit older, not very common for them to have APIs or easy connectors that we can work with. So with that, let me get back to my webinar screen here. One moment. Let me stop sharing. Neal, can you still hear me? I'm frozen on the webinar.

Okay. Lots of technical difficulties here. All right. So let's jump into our Q&A. Everyone, if you have any questions, please put them in the chat. And Kieran, I think I'll start with one off the bat here. What is the difference between Flow Orchestration and Flow Builder, which also goes by the name Composer?

So there's -- Orchestration is essentially built on top of Salesforce Flow or Salesforce Flow Builder. The difference is it's a bit newer, though it was kind of a functionality that was released, I think, early 2022, with, I think, spring 2022 release, if I remember correctly. And really, it's meant to account for long-running business processes with lots of stakeholders or individuals involved. So Flow on its own is great. If you think about like your record-triggered automation. Hey, an opportunity closes or something happens, automatically do this, do this, do this with no real multiuser input needed, like Flow has been doing that and doing a fantastic job at that for a very long time, and that's not going to change. When we think about a business process where, hey, someone needs to approve something and then we need to wait for someone maybe over here to, I don't know, upload some documentation for a process and that might take a week or 2 weeks. And then we need to resume there and then do this and then also execute things in parallel, Flow and Flow Builder on its own, if you think about the standard types of flows, don't really have great mechanisms for doing some of those things. So that's why Flow Orchestration was introduced. So that's the primary difference between those. There's also Composer, which we saw a little bit of, assuming I wasn't -- I hope I wasn't frozen for like that whole demo. But hopefully, you saw Composer during that demonstration very briefly. And Composer is kind of an extension of Flow Builder in many ways and they interface together, but they are separate in a way. Composer is sort of a low-code declarative way to use out-of-the-box connectors to integrate different systems together, be it disparate or not disparate, but different Salesforce orgs or something like Salesforce and NetSuite, which is what we saw in the demonstration, or your JIRAs, your ServiceNows, and it ties in with kind of Flow and Flow Builder.

Cool. Awesome. And then sorry, also, everybody, I realize I misspoke and added some confusion. Composer is a separate tool that -- from Flow Builder. Next question, Kieran, is around RPA. Can you talk more about the use cases for that?