20 Years After Its Formation, Salesforce Finally Wants To Understand Customers Better

When we're in the mood to be amused, we frequently look at what our competitors are up to.

Salesforce, for example, always manages to make us smile. Last year, the question posed by its co-CEO after his company acquired MuleSoft for $6.5 billion was: “…this is integration software, what does that have to do with CRM?”

If a world leader in Customer Relationship Management software wonders what integration has to do with its product, one has to start wondering if it is in the wrong business. We, at NexJ, have long recognised that our CRM provides real value through integration alone. It allows us to bring together client, account, and company data directly from the source, without the need for replication. It’s why we can claim to offer a comprehensive customer-centric view without the cost and complexity of data duplication.

Speaking of comprehensive customer view, here’s what made us spill a lot of our coffee this morning.

Salesforce announced the acquisition of big data firm Tableau Software Inc for $15.3 billion, the biggest in the company’s history, because it wants to offer “more data insights to its clients.” According to media reports, the decision was made to accelerate Salesforce’s roadmap for its Customer 360 initiative. The aim, apparently, is to help companies “gain a complete view of their customers.”

One could argue that the decision is based less on strategically enhancing its product and more on an attempt to buy growth. Keeping in mind that Salesforce came into being in 1999, one has to wonder if it isn’t a little too late in the day for them to try and understand a customer better.

What is NexJ’s Comprehensive Customer View?

Here’s our elevator pitch: It helps you spend less time toggling and more time actually servicing your clients.

What NexJ’s Comprehensive Customer View has always done (and done really well, going by our list of awards and accolades) is provide bankers with a 360° view of their contacts in an easy-to-view and navigable format. Our CRM empowers them to make recommendations instantly without the need for collating data, by consolidating information across company-wide sources — from profile information and demographic information to activities, and related account information — to create a single view of key data.

Why is Salesforce just waking up to this?

According to press releases announcing its acquisition, Salesforce made the decision to bring on board a partner that could help people see and understand data, in order to help it understand customers better. It refers to big data analytics as a complex process that can uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends, and customer preferences, all of which can help companies make better business decisions.

What NexJ CRM has been doing since Day One, in order to drive results, is focus on Relationship Hierarchy. This allows bankers to access detailed information on each client, including transactions, coverage team, related parties, and documents. The functionality also models client relationships, including personal and professional relationships, ad hoc hierarchies, and referrals, all of which can be viewed for each relationship.

We also use an Interaction Journal to log all client interactions, including meetings, communications, and events, allow bankers to capture and view notes about every contact, and provide custom fields and categories for the collection of extended profile information. In short, our Comprehensive Customer View has always been geared towards driving referrals and opportunities to increase proposals and close deals, support business growth by driving client loyalty, enhance face-to-face client experiences, and provide bankers with insightful information.

If you have questions about understanding your customer, figuring how important integration is, or how these pieces come together to offer real value to your advisors, we suggest you give us a call. Or wait for the next 20 years until Salesforce finally figures it out.

Author: Adam Edmonds

Vice President, Products

With almost 2 decades of experience developing customer management solutions in financial services and insurance, Adam Edmonds is responsible for establishing overall product vision and designing easy to use solutions that solve real market problems.

Adam is excited to share the lessons he has learned and his insights on where the industry is heading with readers of his blog. He encourages readers to join the discussion or reach out to him with their own insights, best practices, and solutions to industry challenges.