Discover Salesforce Envision

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe the Envision program and some of the activities.
• List some Envision use cases.
• Explain the benefits of working with an Envision team.

You just learned that design is critical to solving problems, understanding your customers, and building experiences that delight them. While many companies believe in the power of design thinking, applying those practices is sometimes easier said than done. Many companies buy the coolest new technology or create a slick new user interface, but don’t take the time to deeply understand their customers.

In fact, according to an IBM study, 90% of companies believe that understanding their customers is critical to their business, but 80% of customers believe that companies don’t understand them. A lot of companies want to understand their customers, but they haven’t shifted to a human-centered approach to get close to them. What’s going on here?

Each organization’s experience is unique, but here’s the bottom line: Applying design to the customer experience and transforming a business into a design-led organization is a big challenge.

At Salesforce, we understand firsthand that this path can be challenging, but the opportunity is also exciting! 

Introducing Salesforce Envision

Salesforce created Success Cloud Envision, a design-led engagement, to help you use the principles of design to unlock customer insights and build actionable blueprints for amazing customer experiences on Salesforce. 

Over the course of an Envision engagement, our experts work at the intersection of design, Salesforce technology, and business, using a design-led approach to understand customer needs, build powerful customer experiences, and deliver rapid innovation. With Salesforce Envision, you walk away with greater insights about your customers, a focused vision for the future, and an actionable technology strategy for achieving that vision.

Envision Engagements

At this point, you may be wondering how we approach the engagements and what they look like. Let’s be clear about one thing first. We tailor Envision engagements to your business needs, goals, and objectives. And since all of our customers are unique, so is each engagement. 

That said, here’s how they generally work. 

Envisioning the Future
We bring together a diverse, skilled team to uncover the needs and desires of your customers. Taking a design-led approach, the team works with you to paint a clear and aligned picture of your customer, their challenges, and their specific needs, and then works with you to create a prototype and roadmap for executing on that vision 

Rallying Around a Vision and Objectives
We also focus on gaining alignment within your company. Our team brings everyone together and helps you come to a shared understanding of the customer and agree on a few outcomes and objectives. Through a series of exercises and workshops, we work with stakeholders across your organization to settle on a vision and a plan to achieve that vision. 

Bringing Ideas to Life, Faster
Design thinking is all about being agile and moving fast. Next, working together we quickly build iterations and prototypes of potential solutions. We review the feedback and build additional prototypes until you get a final prototype that aligns to your overarching business challenge. 

Time Frame
Envision programs run between 2–3 months. During the first month, we focus on creating alignment in your organization around the problem or challenge you want to tackle. During this phase we do activities such as stakeholder interviews, user research, and alignment workshops.

The second month is all about alignment and adoption. Our team works with you on activities such as alignment workshops, co-creating ideas, and creating visualizations and concepts.

The final month is all about validating and delivering an action plan. The team works with you on rapidly prototyping designs and minimum viable products (MVPs), validating and refining, and then building a future roadmap.

Staffing
We staff all Envision engagements with four industry experts in business, technology, Salesforce, and human-centered design. We also provide an on-demand expert to fit your needs.

What Do You Want to Achieve?

Now let’s take a look at some use cases. Here are some common challenges our customers address with Salesforce Envision.

Accelerating Time to Market
Speed is a key theme of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Companies looking to identify problems and build customer-centric solutions faster work with a Salesforce Envision team to get strategic and tactical guidance on:

• Improving research and discovery capabilities
• Prototyping and rapid experimentation

Potential outcomes

• Faster releases of new products and services
• Lower development costs

Creating Alignment Around the Customer Experience
To win and retain customers, companies need to get aligned around one view of the customer experience that’s easy, intuitive, and delightful across all channels. Companies work with an Envision team to drive alignment and confidence around a single customer experience, focusing on:

• Alignment workshops between functions and divisions
• Customer experience modelling
• Customer narrative development
• Cross-platform solutions

Potential Outcomes

• Greater internal alignment
• Increased brand equity
• Improved customer acquisition and retention
• Improved customer and employee experience

Embedding Design into the Organization  
Design is not a checklist, a recipe, or a series of maneuvers; it is a way of thinking that when adopted at scale can transform an organization. Our Envision team helps companies build a culture that’s focused on the customer and that embeds design into the fabric of their organization through:

• Stakeholder alignment workshops
• Customer-centric innovation
• Multiphase platform roadmap

Potential Outcomes

• Improved employee engagement
• Improved talent retention
• Increased productivity

Conclusion

Design is not a to-do list, but a way of thinking. It helps you gain a deep understanding of your customers and then use those insights to quickly create products, services, and interactions that they love. Successful businesses scale this approach across their organization to increase business value. 

Work with an Envision team to get a clear vision and transformative roadmap based on your business and customer needs. From planning and dreaming, to designing and building, we show you how you can bring your biggest ambitions to life.

Resources

• 2015 dmi: Design Value Index Results and Commentary (IBM Research Study)
• Consumers believe brands don’t understand them (Analytics Magazine Study)