Meet Communications Cloud
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define Communications Cloud.
- Explain how Communications Cloud helps solve key challenges in the communications industry.
- Identify ways that Communications Cloud can benefit your organization.
Before You Start
Before you start this module, make sure you complete the following content. The work you do here builds on the concepts and work you do in that content.
Communication Industry Challenges
Meet Sophia Perez. Sophia is a sales manager at Infiwave, a communications service provider (CSP) that sells communications equipment and services to businesses and consumers.
Recently, Sophia’s been worried. Like many businesses in the communications industry, Infiwave is facing a period of rapid change, with fast-paced technical innovation and increased customer demand for connectivity, new technologies, and 24/7 service. Infiwave can’t keep up with the changes. On-premises systems, legacy systems, and siloed architecture stacks are holding Infiwave back. The sales reps in Sophia’s team must perform many manual tasks, and they have to find information in different sources to do their jobs. This makes the sales process slow and takes time away from engaging with customers.
Sophia knows that slow and inefficient processes impact sales cycle times, affect customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), and lose business. Infiwave used to be an industry leader, but now it’s losing market share to new digital-first operators and other CSPs that are embracing digital transformation. How are these companies succeeding? They’re improving customer relationships and accelerating sales by:
- Using digital technologies for simple and seamless customer interactions.
- Streamlining and automating manual tasks.
- Utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) and standardized processes to provide more efficient, personalized customer interactions.
Infiwave employees met this morning and learned that Infiwave is starting a digital transformation with Salesforce Communications Cloud.
Sophia is delighted. It sounds like Infiwave is finally moving into the 21st century! She can’t wait to learn more about Communications Cloud, especially how it will help Infiwave reach its business goals.
Welcome to Communications Cloud
Sophia learned this morning that Communications Cloud extends Salesforce Einstein 1 to provide a solution specifically for the communications industry. It helps businesses digitally transform to deliver new, industry-standard customer experiences while increasing operational efficiencies.
Here’s a summary of the key features of Communications Cloud as part of Einstein 1.
Communications Cloud has prebuilt processes, integrations, and data models, to support CSPs, including business-to-consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), and wholesale markets. It powers digital-first journeys and delivers perfect orders with a catalog-driven, modular approach that meets telecom industry standards.
The Benefits of Communications Cloud
Communications Cloud won’t just help Sophia’s sales team—all Infiwave departments can benefit. This is because the solution enables employees to:
- Know their customers and deliver personalized offers and experiences anywhere, at any time.
- Launch converged service offers quickly.
- Capture accurate quotes and orders.
- Author, negotiate, and execute contracts.
- Orchestrate timely order fulfillment.
Watch this video to see Communications Cloud in action. See how Communications Cloud solves all those pesky industry challenges.
Faster Product Launch
Communications Cloud gives you a shared product catalog designed especially for the communications industry. The underlying product model complies with TM-Forum standards and enables flexible integration with BSS and OSS systems. The shared catalog will help the commercial and technical teams at Infiwave to collaborate on product design, development, and maintenance. With the shared catalog, teams can:
- Quickly define, launch, and update products, promotions, bundles, and services from reusable product, service, and network resource components.
- Configure the workflows and policies spanning order configuration, decomposition, orchestration, and fulfillment to fit requirements.
- Manage commercial offer catalogs flexibly across product lines, business segments, partners, and geographies.
Personalized, Efficient Service
Meet Carole White, a potential Infiwave customer.
Carole wants to buy home internet service. She enters her information on the Infiwave website to start a purchase but gets stuck. She calls the help center but has to repeat her details to a customer service representative (CSR). The entire process takes too long. Carole becomes annoyed and decides to shop with another CSP. Too bad for Infiwave!
Like many customers today, Carole expected:
- The Infiwave CSR to know her and why she was calling.
- A fast, efficient, personalized experience.
With Communications Cloud, disgruntled customers like Carole are a thing of the past. The solution builds on Salesforce Sales and Service Clouds and uses their customer relationship management (CRM), AI, analytics, and guided-selling tools.
With these capabilities, sales and service teams can:
- Access customer profile information instantly, including current services and devices, preferences, relationships, billing, usage, and interaction histories.
- Use automated processes and guided workflows to resolve customer billing and service inquiries across assisted and unassisted channels.
- Gain insight into service effectiveness and communicate and apply process changes in real-time.
- Provide excellent, consistent customer service—across all sales and service channels.
Accurate Order Capture and Fulfillment
One of Sophia’s key frustrations is the time it takes for Infiwave sales reps to complete the quote-to-order process. Communications Cloud incorporates Industries Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ), Contract Lifecycle Management, and Industries Order Management, which streamline and optimize the order process, including:
- Reducing quote-to-cash cycle time by guiding sales reps through the configuration of complex quotes and multi-location, asset-based orders
- Dynamically generating quoting and contractual documents and then forwarding them electronically for customer review and approval
- Orchestrating timely service fulfillment while providing customers, sales, and service teams with real-time visibility of order status
Faster Onboarding
Guided selling and unified quote and order interfaces mean less time to onboard new sales and customer service employees. And it’s not just new employees who benefit from the guided processes, call scripts, and unified interfaces provided by Communications Cloud. All sales and customer service teams and customers enjoy better process compliance, consistency, and improved accuracy.
Complete Customer Lifecycle Management
Communications Cloud supports the full customer lifecycle. It orchestrates quoting, order capture, billing, and service inquiry resolution across channels and devices. Teams can view customer account relationships, active devices and services, billing, usage, and interaction histories to fully understand the customer account and preferences. Once a customer has purchased products and services, Communications Cloud supports all post-sales activities, including service upgrades and downgrades, disconnections, reconnections, and moves.
What’s Next?
Seems like Communications Cloud is the answer to Sophia’s dreams. Now that she knows the key functions and benefits of using Communications Cloud, she’s keen to learn how to implement them.
Let’s take a deep dive into the communications-specific set of apps, tools, processes, and data that make up Communications Cloud. Time to explore the solution map.