Unifying to untangle value with Salesforce

Your customers may not know it, but data silos are the bane of the customer experience. When information isn’t shared freely between business functions, piecemeal data makes it hard to understand your clientele and even harder to solve for their needs. This can lead to a lot of inconvenience and frustration.

Interoperability bridges the gap between disconnected functions, enabling an organization’s critical applications to interact seamlessly through a common language. It creates a single source of data truth that unifies teams and keeps them on the same page. Access to holistic, real-time data empowers teams to zero in on customer needs, make better decisions and deliver truly memorable customer moments.

Our new global Accenture research, Value untangled: Accelerating radical growth through interoperability, has found that highly interoperable companies are 16% more likely to be able to improve customer experience (CX) when it’s a priority. Beyond this, interoperability allows organizations to act fast and accelerate growth. We found that companies that improved interoperability in the last two years grew revenues 6x faster than their peers that did nothing.

A formidable force

Salesforce is a platform that embodies interoperability in action. With the new release of Genie, Salesforce unifies data across clouds to capture everything about a customer—across every interaction—up to the millisecond. This, along with the platform’s extensibility and market-leading integration and analytics capabilities through MuleSoft and Tableau, allows you to quickly build and customize new apps while delivering personalized experiences on a level that’s never been done before.

Together with Salesforce, we’ve helped leading organizations adopt key success drivers for improving their own interoperability to keep up with changing business needs and connect with customers in new ways:

• By leveraging the cloud: Marking one of Pacific Life’s first large-scale transformations, we helped the company digitize its business through a suite of solutions built around the Salesforce Financial Services Cloud that also includes Marketing Cloud, CRM Analytics and MuleSoft. More than six disparate user groups were transitioned to an integrated technology platform that allowed marketing, sales, and service teams to collaborate and operate more efficiently. With the cloud providing a robust foundation for shared data, Pacific Life is now better able to meet and anticipate customers’ evolving preferences in the channel that suits them best.
•  By utilizing composable technology: Our work with the National Multiple Sclerosis Society highlights how composable tech can drive interoperability through repeatable solutions that can be configured and reconfigured at speed. During the global pandemic, the Society had to pivot quickly or risk canceling its flagship Bike MS fundraising event. Accenture helped the Society build a novel composable solution that used Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud as its core. The solution was then integrated with popular sports tracking apps, Strava and Zwift, to tap into new audiences and donors and connect riders across state lines. The event surpassed original targets with nearly 24,000 participants and $36 million raised and helped reimagine Bike MS for a socially distanced world.

The future is interoperable

While the benefits of interoperability are clear, enabling it remains a challenge for most organizations daunted by a tangled technology landscape. The reality is, most enterprises now have more than 500 applications, with eight out of 10 saying they plan to buy more from multiple vendors in the next two years. 

However, organizations delay at their own risk. The longer you wait, the more difficult it will become to retrofit interoperability on an ever-growing application stack. There’s no better time than now to untangle your tech and use interoperability as a catalyst for true enterprise reinvention. The good news? Salesforce naturally lends itself to this approach and Accenture has the tech skills and industry expertise to accelerate your path to value.

Read more about the benefits of adopting interoperable systems at Value untangled: Accelerating radical growth through interoperability.