Get Familiar with the Guide

Learning Objectives 

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

• Describe what’s included in the Customer 360 Guide for Discrete Manufacturing.
• Explain the benefits of a connected experience.

What Is the Customer 360 Guide for Discrete Manufacturing?

The Customer 360 Guide for Discrete Manufacturing is a collection of resources that helps you create a connected experience for your customers. The guide includes blueprints, best practices, and more to help you build a vision for the future of your business. It helps your business keep up with industry demands, and gives you the flexibility to be resilient through market changes.

Here’s what the Customer 360 Guide for Discrete Manufacturing includes.

• Trailblazer stories: Other customers’ approaches and success stories during their digital transformations.
• Thought leadership: Tips, trends, and insights on transforming customer experiences, including strategies for customer data management.
• Change management: Best practices to help you implement process changes and make the people and teams in your organization succeed.
• Industry blueprint: Key product and industry-specific information that helps you build solutions and uncover opportunities for connecting with your customers.
• Architecture diagrams: Visual representations of solutions and concepts within a system or solution design.
• Business scenarios: Descriptions of common industry-specific scenarios and the related technology and processes.
• Solution kits: Implementation guides containing reference materials aligned to common use cases.
• MuleSoft accelerators: Prebuilt integration solutions that connect common back-end systems directly to Salesforce.

This guide helps B2B companies build a single account view of their customers; create frictionless buying and selling experiences through direct sales and ecommerce partner channels; drive growth with their existing install base; and build trusted relationships with their customers and partners.

How to Use the Customer 360 Guide for Discrete Manufacturing

Often, each department within a company uses different tools to serve the same customer. This silos information and engagement, which results in disconnected customer experiences. To deliver that connected customer experience for your customers, you need a complete 360-degree view and access to accounts, opportunities, catalogs, pricing, inventory information, order status and tracking, as well as case and service requests and reorder thresholds. 

The Customer 360 Guide for Discrete Manufacturing serves as your map to meet the self-service and digital collaboration needs of your employees, partner ecosystem, and customers. In the guide, you see key business scenarios and solutions that are helping manufacturers’ digital transformations—bringing their sales channels online, reaching new customers, supporting new virtual selling motions, driving forecast accuracy, and making well-informed business decisions.

Here are a few examples of experiences that the guide can help you navigate.

Sales Management & Automation: A sales person is trying to manage a potential sale of products or services to a customer or partner in order to generate revenue against a forecasted quota across a defined execution process.

Frictionless Purchasing Experiences: A customer self-service channel that supports order capture and checkout that optimizes the purchase path and user experience. In addition the purchase trend history has AI-assisted Order/Reorder management capabilities. An admin is supported through account-specific pricing and order analytics to measure demand elasticity and promotional effectiveness.

Optimized Field Service: Field service technicians are empowered through management of operational schedules, work orders, human resources, field inventory and replenishment, and service analysis and planning. Ability to match skills and availability for location-based tasks and projects. In addition, mobile device capabilities are incorporated to enable dispatched field service technicians to perform their jobs on-site or on the road.

These are the types of seamless experiences customers expect, and what you can create by transforming your connected experience.

Explore What’s Possible with Connected Experiences

With the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the manufacturing industry is once again going through a period of tremendous change—and has the opportunity to transform. Using the Customer 360 Guide for Discrete Manufacturing, you can navigate how to get from now to the future, so you can prioritize business outcomes, develop a strategy aligned to your vision, and take your organization to the next level. Learn how Manufacturers can drive value-added services and connected customer journeys in their shift to digital. And see how other customers have started their transformation to discover the art of the possible. 

Resources 

• Salesforce: Customer 360 Guide for Discrete Manufacturing
• Blog: How Salesforce Customer 360 Enables Integrated Experiences