Salesforce Live India: 'Trailhead saw 70% uptick in youth sign-ups during lockdown'

Salesforce hosted a day-long virtual event Salesforce Live on Thursday, which offered innovative ideas, new ways of working and customer engagement. The opening keynote address to the topic "Our Path Forward, Together" was kick-started by Arundhati Bhattacharya, CEO & Chairperson, Salesforce, along with Sunil Jose, Senior Vice President, Salesforce; Deepak Pargaonkar, VP, Solution Engineering, Salesforce and Rajiv Sabharwal, Managing Director & CEO, Tata Capital. 

According to Bhattacharya, the digital transformation imperative has only become stronger today. “We have seen the different kinds of impacts on geographies, on economies, on businesses and enterprises. Each one is spreading their own path. But each one is also trying to find the best way in order to survive and grow towards the same. I believe that Salesforce is the platform that can empower you on this journey. I'm really confident that not only you all but Salesforce itself will come out stronger from these challenges, mainly because our community is value-led. We lead with the values of trust, customer success, innovation, and equality. When we talk about trust, We're talking about not only earning but reaching the trust of our customers, our employees, as well as our other stakeholders, such as our channel partners and alliances.  

It's so very important for us to ensure that all of you are successful. And towards that end, I think Customer Success is something that really and truly is at the core of it all. As we look at our customers and find ways of making them successful, we also try and ensure that we innovate on a daily basis. And we have been doing so even during the crisis as you know, we have a platform called work.com that not only helps you to open safely, but also helps in ensuring that going forward you remain safe. Similarly, value equality is something that we hold very close to our hearts. And we work daily, in every single action that we take within and outside the company, we do lookout in order to live this value that we have. We, therefore, believe that business can actually be a great platform for change.” 

Sunil Jose says that Salesforce is committed as a business to innovation. “There's an immense pressure to transform digitally and you have to do this quickly. When we talk about it, we have most of our conversations at a CEO level at a CXO level over the last few months, everyone has been talking about how they've changed their long-range planning in the last few months to clearly go back and figure out a way how do they run their organisations more digitally. This is what we call the digital imperative.  

COVID saw your customers living their lives from home. It's a new normal; your employees will be working more and more from home. Everything is now done digitally. So companies need to be equipped with tools that let teams collaborate from anywhere, sell from anywhere, customer services from anywhere. And so, we are talking about how the digital imperative will take the customer experience to an extremely new level right within the control of what your employees will need to. As this imperative starts with the customer in the centre, we must walk a mile in our customer’s shoes to think through how the changing landscape is. Which is exactly why at Salesforce, we build Salesforce Customer 360 to put the customers in the centre. It's a digital first platform designed to give you all the tools your teams need to work anywhere, collaborate anywhere, sell from anywhere, give the best customer service ever from anywhere, and really do the best work of their life. The future we exist isn't today. And this is exactly how the new world is.” 

Explaining about Salesforce’s upskilling and learning platform, Trailhead, Bhattacharya said “Relative to Salesforce’s first customer 360 is Trailhead, our online learning platform for everyone. Our commitment to jobs and education is what Trailhead offers. And it offers this to everyone, giving them the opportunity to learn and upskill incredibly important in today's economy, with the young workforce Trailhead is something for which we have seen a lot of success for users in the Asia Pacific. Between March and May of this year, Trailhead actually had a 70% uptick in youth signups. We had more than 1 billion, half a million users actually and these have earned more than 6 million badges for successfully completing the modules that certify you have completed a particular element within Trailhead. We'd really encourage you to go explore Trailhead and take advantage of the learning and the upskilling opportunities that are there for you on this platform.” 

Deepak Pargaonkar showcased some of the benefits of Salesforce’s work.com. Salesforce Customer 360 allows the organization to focus on its customers and the relationship with them. However, employer relationships are also equally important, he said. "Employees will ask you the questions: Is my organisation taking care of me? Does my organisation allow me to take appropriate care to keep me safe during COVID-19 times? At Salesforce, we've been thinking day and night about this. And we cannot do this without Work.com. With Work.com, business and health data can come together so that organisations can take appropriate care of teams and employee safety and also provide appropriate business coverage for the optimum outcomes.  

"People are keen to return to their workplace but when it comes to that, I’m very particular about the wellness of myself and my colleagues. With work.com, it starts with my regular wellness assessment and wellness check. With the help of Salesforce Survey templates, organisations can customise it for their own requirements to ensure that organisations can capture appropriate data, at the same time providing their own regulations to maintain appropriate privacy. You can take the assessment and hit the submit button. Once you hit the submit button, this data is securely uploaded into the command centre. The command centre is a place where operations managers can take a look at your qualifications and decide on my visibility to return to the work. Also, you’ll get a notification and a list of available shifts to the next week. Shift availability is to ensure that I have flexibility because I'm taking care of my family, my children, and checking available shifts. There is a comprehensive shift management functionality delivered with Field Service Management, Scheduling and Optimization in Work.com.” 

Elaborating on how Tata Capital managed to drive growth and meet its customers’ expectations during the pandemic, Sabharwal shared, “2020 has been a challenging year. It started out well but soon came COVID in March, and from then the lockdown started. We at Tata Capital felt that because of these lockdowns, our customers should not suffer any disruption in services, which they expect from us. Because of the fact that we invested in technology, well in advance, we were able to move to work from home immediately. In fact, we didn't have a single day's loss. The fact that we could now record all queries of customers taking all the service requests while being at home and respond to them, just made it easier for customers to deal with us. Not only did we deal with customers in terms of responding to the queries, but we could also look at requests which were coming from customers in terms of offering new loans to them, more in terms of customers who wanted to get in touch with us to repay their instalments. All of that was made possible, because of the fact that we had Salesforce with us. We could record all queries, we could respond to them in time. And they could reach out to us through multiple channels.” 

Speaking about Tata Capital’s vision and growth strategy going forward, especially in response to the on-going pandemic and the economic slowdown, Sabharwal said, “We have defined the long term vision for us in giving returns of 15% plus and growing 20% plus to our investors. We don't want to change that vision. The only thing which will change would be the means to reach that. I think the opportunity in India still remains strong. We are still under-penetrated on credit. And there's a huge opportunity to do so. We may see a hiccup for a year or two, but I think so we will bounce back. However, during this period, what we've decided is that the channels through which we will communicate with our customers will become far more digital in nature. So during this period, we decided to focus more on secured loans, focus more on the salaried segment, and on higher-rated corporates.”