Inspiring Extraordinary Customer Success with Salesforce

By Alexandre Dayon, President and Chief Strategy Officer, Salesforce

Salesforce has by far become the largest and most widely-known CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform. This unrivalled success is well-deserved due to the many incredible advantages and extensive resources that Salesforce provides for its users. In order to provide its hallmark ease of use, as well as to educate its customers on the excellent functionality, flexibility, and customization options that it offers, Salesforce has invested an incredible amount of time, money, and innovation in providing users with an outstanding array of resources. The interview excerpts containing the insights from Alexander Dayon, President and Chief Strategy Officer at Salesforce, briefly elucidate Salesforce’s widest range of applicability and effectiveness for the largest number of users.

As many people are working remotely in the wake of the pandemic, that has affected organizations in terms of how they manage their workforces with platforms like salesforce. What are the challenges you feel you have noticed within this space?

If I look at how Allianz has managed the transition to working from home, I would say there are a wider set of challenges than it meets the eye, as you need to be well equipped with the technology enabling the work-from-home system. For instance, facilitating a helpline that answers customer's calls. Since the major challenges that organizations face nowadays is centred around adaptability, Salesforce has an upper hand, you can access the system anytime, anywhere without hampering the productivity. When I look at other non-technology related challenges that we, as an insurance company have at the moment, is more around offering data protection. Across Europe and other areas, companies are implementing increasingly stringent data protection measures. As we are operating globally with customers from around the globe, with some of the regulations implemented, it becomes much more difficult to access the information around the globe. As a result, Salesforce effectively responds to this urgency as we have data centres across different parts of the world. For us, anything that provides data protection is something we can maximize, using Salesforce.

In terms of regulations that come into play, they are plenty and varies from country to country. Britain has its own set of rules now, thanks to an impending Brexit. How has that affected the workflow for you and how have you improved it with your technological understanding and the processes that you have leveraged to make such a project successful?

Working under the parentage of Allianz Care, a global health partner issuing international health insurance with a high number of customers based in UK. Subsequently, we faced a challenge few with Britain leaving the EU. As we couldn’t operate under EU anymore, we quickly needed find a partner in UK. Luckily we have the Allianz company that becomes the actual insurer for this. Hence, we had to transfer all our businesses from Allianz Care to one of our sister company which then enabled the operations of our businesses in UK. That, in itself was quite a cumbersome process of transferring policies, which proved to be quite strenuous on our back-end systems. The interesting thing is if you take a look at it through Salesforce, it is actually quite simple. Salesforce allows the much required flexibility that our back-end systems don't.

Salesforce Can Give You A Lot Of Things. The Offering Is Pretty Vast In Terms Of What Salesforce Offers Itself, And Also With Third Party Applications

In your personal experience as a global head of client relations what would you say in terms of the evolution of salesforce platform itself? What changes would you like to see in terms of the evolution of such a platform, and how organizations work with your teams in today's agenda?

Salesforce has evolved as an outstanding system of integration and functionality. The CRM provides the backbone service needed to allow easy data collaboration between multiple departments, centralized customer information, an array of reports and statistical options, and the ability to run on any browser, tablet, desktop, or mobile device. Moreover, I think we cannot fight existing systems that customers have because we have our entire system for managing insurance policies which we are definitely not willing to give up. We like to think about how can we compliment what organizations have, and accordingly, Salesforce helps us in addressing these agendas. Moreover, Salesforce helps any other spontaneous requirements to be quickly integrated and plugged in to what we already have, helping us functioning more efficiently.

Being a health insurance company that deals with millions of people, when it comes to the data protection aspect, I do believe you have a really good protocol and approach in place as is. It would be really great if you could elaborate on that for our clients and readers to have a good idea of how Allianz has coped up with data management and data protection.

As a health insurer, we store massive amounts of data, with amplified data protection required for the sensitivity of the information, and being a part of the Allianz group, we adhere to Allianz privacy guidelines. This is very closely related to the general data protection regulation in the EU, and all the companies that work with the Allianz group comply with those guidelines, which I think is important because when we deal with other parts of companies within the Allianz group, we know that they are following the same rules. When you look at data protection through the lens of an international company, we don't just EU members who access our data. In fact, we have people in the middle east, colleagues from Singapore, Asia, Latin and North America. Moreover, we constantly review our business models to adapt to the changing needs of our customers. For instance, China implemented a data protection law for barring transfer of data outside China. Hence, we cannot attest a global model to China as it has its own set of rules and we need to implement the business model correspondingly. Thus, these set of guidelines and regulations drive the technology forward in accordance with the organizational structure, which in turn, shapes your business model.

What advice would you like to share with budding and evolving companies? What would you like to suggest them in terms of Salesforce implementation and also working with technology?

Salesforce can give you a lot of things. The offering is pretty vast in terms of what Salesforce offers itself, and also with third party applications. What frequently happens is you can get carried away and become overwhelmed. It is more like going to a sweet shop and deciding which one to pick. For me, it is about stepping back, looking around your immediate needs. The guiding principle to my team is look at the 80-20 road. We don’t solve all the problems at once, and rather focus on 80 percent of them before moving on to the next. The other key factor is you need to be clear and sure about what your process is or what are you trying to get assistance for, to support your process. After that, you can conceive ideas on how technology can help enhance your processes. For me, these are the most crucial constraints on implementing Salesforce and developing relevant technologies.