Salesforce Interaction Studio: Taking Customer Experiences to the Next Level

Who doesn’t want to stay ahead of the curve and expand their customer base? Everyone! To accomplish these goals, organizations require a next-level marketing tool. And what better way to achieve these goals than using Interaction Studio, a powerhouse of great insights for marketers from Salesforce.

In this blog, we’ll learn how you can leverage the amazing capabilities of Interaction Studio and deliver the best business value. But, before that, let’s understand what Interaction Studio is and how it can help your business.

What Is Interaction Studio?

Interaction Studio (presently known as Marketing Cloud Personalization) is an interaction management and real-time personalization tool that helps you understand diverse customer behaviors and respond to them promptly. So, what does it exactly mean?

For those getting started with this tool, it can help marketers promote customized products and services that are relevant to specific customers and prospects across various channels like email, mobile and web, all in real time.

For instance, you can capture your customers' web sessions as they navigate through various pages of your website. Armed with this data, you can customize your product/service offerings, page imagery and content suggestions in real time for each prospect. Thus, it enables organizations to personalize web experiences for each customer.

How to Leverage Marketing Cloud Personalization (Interaction Studio) to Create Highly Customized Customer Journeys?

Execute Campaigns Faster: Let Salesforce Einstein Do the Work for You

Building personalized and highly dynamic email campaigns requires considerable technical expertise; marketers need to implement robust customer scoring models and run custom queries. To get these campaigns up and running, you need a developer who can help you build the right front-end logic and deliver customized content to every user.

With Interaction Studio, you can bypass all these technical requirements as Einstein from Salesforce can be used to perform all these activities for you. This is possible because all your data is auto-synced with Interaction Studio in real time.

You can run engaging campaigns using the following three steps as soon as your team comes up with an offer.

1. Define your visitor segments in Interaction Studio without using any code.

2. Identify the content on your web page you want to use in your campaigns or decide on a template you want to use for email campaigns.

3. Enable Personalization Builder to ensure your campaigns perfectly align with each member of your target audience. Next, preview the results and execute the campaign.

With Interaction Studio, marketers can deploy highly personalized campaigns that otherwise require complex AMP scripts written by the developer.

Leverage Interaction Studio and Marketing Cloud to Enhance Your Customer’s Offline Experience

A successful and seamless Interaction Studio implementation will not only help capture information about your prospects' online interactions but offline interactions as well. Based on the nature of your business, offline interactions can either be hotel reservations, visits to a physical store, transactions at an ATM, scanning a loyalty card at stores, call records of your customer service team and more.

By capturing both online and offline customer interactions, you can gain a 360-degree view of customer interactions to enjoy the following benefits.

1. Tailor each customer’s online experience based on his offline interactions.

For instance, when a customer leaves your store, you can enable a customized push notification or present a tailored web experience on the customer’s next visit to your website.

*Note: Interaction Studio allows you to tailor customer experiences based on their last offline interaction.

2. Enable customer-facing employees to gain insights to facilitate the best customer experience while interacting with them.

Another benefit of implementing Interaction Studio is the ability to execute server-side campaigns effectively. With these server-side campaigns, marketers can extend the capabilities of Interaction Studio to other channels. Thus, you can allow other applications to call campaigns automatically.

To be more precise, a third-party application can place an API call to Interaction Studio by simply passing customer information to the latter. In response to this API call, Interaction Studio sends a JSON payload encompassing the campaign details for that specific customer.

So, by utilizing server-side campaigns in the Interaction Studio, businesses can provide customer insights to front-line employees, who can use the information in all their customer interactions. You can also leverage Salesforce Einstein to make a good offer when the customer connects with you the next time and develop efficacious content and promotional campaigns to engage customers and increase conversions. Also, server-side campaigns are easy to integrate with your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, call center, Point-of-sale (PoS) and your other existing systems.

Respond in Real-time to Customer Interactions

If your business has a retail or an offline aspect, you must rely on customer data exports every single day to run your Marketing Cloud implementation. While depending on data is necessary, it impairs your team’s ability to ensure personalization in real time.

With Interaction Studio, you need not worry about those data gaps and time glitches anymore! The Interaction Studio captures customers’ interaction data as and when they interact with your business across any channel in real time. Marketers can use these insights and trigger Marketing Cloud journeys as a customer qualifies for a specific audience segment based on their behavior. Interaction Studio allows marketers to tailor the entire customer experience across every touchpoint be it a brick-and-mortar retail store, mobile, web, social media advertising or phone in real time.

How Can Interaction Studio Drive Transformative Business Value?

Solving Customer Pain Points with Interaction Studio

Businesses generally rely on generic data while interacting with customers. With Interaction Studio, you don’t have to do that anymore! Why? Because you will have access to all the data pertaining to each customer with just a few clicks. This allows you to personalize your interactions with the customer based on their behavior. You can tailor your product and/or service to provide the right solutions to their problems. Here are some use cases.

• Eliminate Scripted Customer Service

Today, prospects and customers do their homework on brands, products and services, before they contact customer care. However, when it comes to speaking to a customer service representative, more than 70 percent of customers don’t like to repeat their issues to different support executives of the same business.

Interaction Studio enables your company to deliver top-notch personalized experiences to customers each time they reach out to your brand. The novel Salesforce product gives you a clear picture of which web page the prospect was looking at on your website before calling your customer service agents.

For instance, let’s imagine that someone visited the page on mortgages on the website of your banking business. Your customer service rep has this information. So, when this prospect calls, the service rep can directly ask, ’I noticed that you’re interested in our mortgage products. Can I answer any specific questions that you have regarding the same?’, instead of asking generic questions such as “How can I help you today?”. With such data insights, customers don’t need to explain what they’re looking for repeatedly; you can provide personalized experiences to your customers instantly.

• Customize On-site Content

How about displaying website content that is relevant to the needs of your prospects every single time? Interaction Studio lets you exhibit different pieces of content on your website that align with your prospect’s interests and needs, thereby personalizing the experience right from the first interaction.

Imagine a consumer visits a page dedicated to iPhones on your website. When the consumer returns to your website the next day, you can use Interaction Studio to display iPhones once again rather than showcasing other mobile devices that are not of his interest.

The personalization doesn’t end here – Interaction Studio helps you ensure consistency in your brand messaging across all your business channels. So, how does this benefit your business? Let’s take the same use case mentioned above. If you notice a prospect is interested in iPhones, you can take another step by sending an exclusive email offering discounts on iPhone purchases.

This not only helps you grab more customers but also re-engage prospects that you’ve lost along the buyers' journey. So, irrespective of what stage of buyers' journey your prospects are at, you can present content that captures their attention on the channels they prefer. Thus, you can create an effective, unique customer experience.

• Record In-Store Activity

Connecting the digital activity of a customer with his offline store experience can be quite challenging and getting the big picture of the buyer’s journey can be even more difficult. Apart from reducing the visibility of the customer’s behavior, the inability to get a comprehensive view of the customer results in a fragmented experience.

More than 80 percent of customers want businesses to understand their needs and requirements, and if you end up missing even a small part of the online or offline touchpoints, you cannot understand your customer well.

Interaction Studio resolves this problem by facilitating good omnichannel experiences for your customers by connecting both online and offline touchpoints. Let’s say a consumer walks into your store a couple of days after visiting your website. Interaction Studio allows you to track all his actions on the website and use this data to ensure that the messages you send to the customer are personalized.

Creating a Strategy for Success

Tracking everything with Interaction Studio is great; but as a marketer, you know that not all data may be useful to your campaigns. So, monitoring KPIs that help you drive your business goals makes more sense.

And to achieve your business goals with Interaction Studio, you need to:

1. Have a good idea of what you intend to achieve from the tool

2. Identify various touchpoints in each customer’s journey

3. Consider the customer experiences you deliver and your marketing goals to make the most of Interaction Studio

For instance, your customers love to interact with your emails but barely engage with your newsletter. As a part of your strategy, you can include products that are up for discount or services in your email to individual prospects based on your Interaction Studio data. Thus, you can increase your email click rates through personalization.

Likewise, if your customers are more inclined to make purchases online, your goal should be to make the shopping experience seamless by coming with strategies to reduce the number of abandoned cart items as much as possible. With Interaction Studio, you can identify the gaps and understand why customers tend to abandon items in their cart and come up with ways to either offer additional customer assistance or simplify the process further.

As you can see, using a single channel for promoting products or services and communicating with customers only through that channel has now become a thing of the past. Today, marketing has taken a holistic approach, where organizations are providing the best possible customer experience every time prospects interact with your brand across all channels. Any shortcomings in this process hurts your ability to engage customers effectively. With Interaction Studio, you can enhance the efficacy of your marketing efforts and create interactive, meaningful experiences for all your customers.

At Solunus, we have helped companies of various sizes in diverse industries make the best use of Interaction Studio to personalize customer interactions and ensure high levels of engagement. Our experts will come up with a robust plan to help you harness the immense potential of the innovative product to meet your unique needs and achieve your goals.

Hope you liked this post. How do you personalize customer interactions? We’d love to know.

About Solunus

Solunus is a dedicated Salesforce partner organization, headquartered in Dallas, Texas. Our unrelenting focus on comprehending the unique needs of our clients coupled with our unrivaled expertise of the Salesforce platform enables us to deliver the perfect solutions that create the best value for IT and business analytics firms.