Consumer Goods Keynote Profitable Growth with #1 AI CRM

 Auto-transcribed on Tuesday, September 17, 2024.media and text playback available on this page: https://aliceapp.ai/recordings/tuJOwB4Lei6moxNqQ193dGPSsYjEVgak

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Speakers:

 Speaker A - 21.99%

 Speaker B - 17.2%

 Speaker C - 14.31%

 Speaker D - 10.04%

 Speaker E - 13.08%

 Speaker F - 11.46%

 Speaker G - 5.14%

 Speaker H - 6.78%

Notes:

- Devin Kunisch leads our industry advisor team here at Salesforce. Prior to coming to Salesforce, he spent 15 years as an operator in consumer goods. There's going to be lots of data, AI and CRM. Thank you for spending this hour with us.- The decision was not easy and Salesforce knows that. Why? Because we were selecting global platforms. Salesforce was selected because the global presence, we were sure that they will help us to scale in any market that we wanted. They are focused on innovation, continued innovation.- Kimberly Clark is obsessed for data and AI. The company is building its first commercial data lake in Kimberley Clark. Using AI, the company can infuse insights into the flow of sales execution. The efficiency that we brought by bringing insight and data into our flow of work was terrific.- Consumer goods cloud retail execution is designed to help sales teams from the field to the hq, deliver the perfect store. The power of data, AI and automation completely transforming the Kimberly Clark route to market. Now let's see it come to life in a demo.-  demo follows a DST sales rep from pre tour planning to retail distribution. Emily sees an alert notifying her of rising out of stocks and a few key products. In one click, she gets a clear, contextual summary of the inventory changes from the last few visits.- If you aren't tired of the consumer goods group, we have a few more things for you. We have an awesome session to help you generate business value. And we have tomorrow a chance to talk about improving planning and execution with your data.

[00:00:03]  Speaker A 
Hello, Dreamforce, how we doing? Awesome. As they said. My name is Devin Kunisch. I lead our industry advisor team here at Salesforce. Prior to coming to Salesforce, I spent 15 years as an operator in consumer goods working with all of you in this industry. And here I get to share all of the things that we're learning in the industry and that's what we're about to do today. So you're going to hear from us a great keynote full of all the innovation in this industry, full of what we're hearing from customers just like you all. And I promise there's going to be lots of data, AI and CRM. Okay? But before I do all that, I just want to take a brief moment to say thank you. Thank you for spending this hour with us, thank you for being a customer and thank you for trusting us with your transformation journey. So let's talk about. I said I spend a lot of time with consumer goods customers just like yourselves. Let's talk about what we're hearing first. Most of the executives I talk to are saying, look, it's going to be a little harder to grow than it has been in the past. Right? Growth is going to be tough to come by. Well, part of that is the macro environment. Can't get around the fact that consumers are trading down for lower priced goods. If they were shopping at the natural channel before they're moving to mass and grocery, if they were at mass and grocery, they're now down to dollar. That's just an economic reality. But there are some internal things as well that are causing challenges. About two thirds of CG leaders tell us that they do not believe they can get the right data to their teams. And we talked about AI. That's one of the hot terms of this conference. But almost half of AI projects never make it to production because they're unable to prove value. That sounds like doom and gloom, right? Well, let's talk a little bit more about some of those challenges because I promise there's a solution coming. First, here are the barriers that we're hearing internal to teams. The first is data silos. I talked to a lot of customers about the way that we serve the customer. Our charts are dictating that customer experience. Right. Siloed data between service and sales or service and marketing is impacting. And this is a complex industry. We have complex channel partners, we have distributors, we have very powerful retailers that we work with. And that complexity drives a lot of disconnected systems. So I'll give you a story. I was with one of the largest CG companies in the world a few years ago and we were going through their awesome commercialization process that they had just created 80,000 touch points to get that perfect product with all the right insights into the retailers, you know, buying queue. But when they go to get that all important feedback to tell me whether or not they're accepting it, their key account managers were writing that down in the notes page of the PowerPoint slides which they had just presented to the retailer. Right. And we talked about that macro environment that's going to lead to limited resources. We're going to be asked to do more with less. Okay, that's the end of the doom and gloom because I want to tell you, we are bringing a very powerful platform to the industry to help you deliver profitable growth. It all starts with our purpose built industry cloud, consumer goods cloud, which you're going to hear all about in just a moment. And then on top of that is all of the integration of data. B two b data, B two c data. Anything that you're buying, third party data retailer data can all be brought in and that data is going to be made actionable because the important part about data is taking action on it, right? It's great to know that the, uh, customer was shorted on their latest order. It's really great to know that if you're about to walk into a buyer meeting and pitch them something new, you want that to alert you right before you walk in. So on top of all that, you might have heard our main stage keynote today. We're going to bring agents so we can help those humans take action on that data. And you're going to see lots of really cool industry specific innovation coming up. So I like to organize our time together into three chunks. This is our roadmap to becoming an AI enterprise. We talked about that data foundation, getting rid of those siloed trapped data hidden in Excel spreadsheets or the notes page at the PowerPoint slide. And then we want to integrate planning and execution, linking together the teams that call on those headquarter buyers to the teams that bring it to life at the shelf every single day. And then we're going to close the loop. I talked about getting rid of the structure silos. We're going to personalize that service experience, and you're going to hear from some awesome trailblazers about how they're doing that. Underneath all of that is built in AI to help you take action right in the flow of work. So let's jump to our data foundation. Let's talk a little bit more about that. So here are the challenges that we've seen. I talk a lot about this concept of gray data and I was with a customer this morning, I had five before I came over here. And they all kind of head nodded at this. Gray data is data that lives in Excel, spreadsheets or other systems in siloed because no one ever sees that. The notes in the PowerPoint slide, one key account manager has access to that and then you have to have a meeting to talk about it. That data is static and requires a lot of human analysis. The opportunity is to move to this platform that brings unified data together, making that data actionable in real time. So you can see, hey, they shorted that order. I need to change the conversation I was going to have with that buyer and bringing humans and agents together. So that transformation is happening very quickly. In fact, we're actually launching innovation. We have data cloud for consumer goods, what datacloud does for consumer goods companies. It brings together all of your consumer and customer data to deliver profitable growth. Right. It's unifying and activating that data, whether that's b, two B data that you're taking from orders from customers, or b, two C data that's the service center. And we're putting that in with a customized CG data model and CG data kit that helps you implement further and faster. We have AI built in that will help you increase productivity and drive the right business outcomes. Because remember, it's really important that that AI project delivers value quickly so you can get that funded. And we're going to link planning and execution so information can flow from key account manager teams who are helping figure out what the plan is at hq, out to the field to drive that segmentation, whether it's retailers or the consumers who those retailers serve. And we're going to bring together a single source of truth so people aren't in those meetings and qbrs wondering what the outcome is, they're actually going to have the answers right there. And there will be segment specific innovations, retailer segmentation, account and product performance dashboards, and guided selling. So with that said, I want us to take a deep dive into the product. I'm going to bring to the stage Mister Rob Garf, our vice president and GM for retail and consumer goods. Rob, way to go.

[00:07:13]  Speaker B 
Awesome. Awesome. Here we are. It's so great to be back at Dreamforce with all of you. As Devin talked about, he got into data and the importance of bringing both your customer and consumer data together and unifying it. I'm going to switch gears here and step through our next phase, which is integrated planning and execution, all with AI embedded in the flow of work. And this is something that the team has been hard at for the last over five years, making investments in building this integrated platform. Now, CG Cloud is one of 15 industry solutions that are purpose built to solve your problems. It's the most comprehensive front end solution for global brands. And now Devin talked about some of those dynamics that we're living through in the world today. What has remained true for the last several decades, and really has been the thesis driving our vision from the beginning, is that around half of promotions that are created at headquarters aren't executed in the intended fashion at the store. I mean, think about it. Well, really, let's face it, stubbing our toes at that moment of truth at the shelf. And that's why our vision is to bring b, two b and B two c, planning and execution together with data and AI to ultimately enable consumer good companies to drive profitable growth. And our customers are seeing tremendous, tremendous value. You can see it here. Faster time to value, reduce risk and complexity, lower total cost of ownership, and AI driven innovations. You can see some of the specific metrics here. But what really came to life for me was earlier in this year when I was at the Barcelona summit that we put on each year for our customers with accenture, and we had the digital director of technology globally for one of the largest consumer good manufacturers in the world, talk about their trade promotion management rollout they talked about. Now it's running in 40 different countries and the implementation was measured in months and not years. And now millions, actually billions and billions of trade is being flown through that platform. So let's take a little closer look at CG Cloud. Now, CG cloud enables an integrated and intelligent closed loop infinity loop that brings both planning and execution together. Let's look at first the left side, where this loop starts. It's with forecasting and planning, and it's doing it in collaboration with your partners, whether that's a grocery store, whether that's a local pub or an independent bodega. Think about your key account manager being able to spin up a customer business plan and then optimize the trade activities. Now, brands can manage all of aspects of their trade, budgets, payments, deductions. And the cool part about this, as you just heard this flows in through a seamless workflow to the right side. And that's our omnichannel execution, whether that's your sales rep in the field, or it's your delivery driver. At the store, even your call center agent. Or think about it autonomously through digital sales. This is where all brands can personalize all interactions and these interactions can be both digitally and physically. Now it's super interesting. I was down in Australia at the beginning of the year hearing from the CIO of Kalanova talk about their rollout and she used the words hyper personalization. Super interesting to me because that's really a term that was reserved for b two c, and now we're seeing such an impact in b to b. Now we can't forget about the middle of this equation, AI, data and action right at the center of this infinity loop. Think about it. It's a conveyor belt of agents that are coming together with humans to provide the right answer at the right time, no matter who that end user is. And with infusing agents in AI through this workflow and this infinity loop, we're able to create intelligent planning and seamless execution all the way down to the shelf, providing the right visibility, the right activities and ultimately the right way to deliver your promotions 100% of the time. Now let's talk about AI for 1 second. You might have heard a little bit about that over the last couple of days, over the last couple of years coming from Salesforce because we're putting all our eggs in that basket. And today we introduced Agentforce. Now for consumer goods cloud. I'm super proud of our product team. I know Goofran, iftikar and team are in the room. They've been hard at this for several years, bringing AI into the flow of work. So what does that mean? What does that look like? Well, it's advanced predictions in trade promotion optimization, including seasonality and clustering. It's about efficient inventory management and it's about personalized service. You're going to hear a lot more about this over the next couple of minutes, but I'm really excited about what's to come. It's really transformational in terms of what we're doing with putting AI in the flow of work. All right, enough for me for now. I will be coming up in a little while so you don't get totally rid of me. But in the interim, we really want to see what this looks like, right? You want to see what this planning looks like in this new world. And in order to make that happen, I'm super excited to bring up Colleen Ludwig, our solution engineer, who's going to walk us through this. Over to you, Colleen.

[00:13:40]  Speaker C 
Thank you, Rob.

[00:13:45]  Speaker D 
Hi, everyone. I'm Colleen Ludwig, a principal solution engineer at Salesforce trade promotion management is our industry built solution that improves trade promotion effectiveness from planning funds and claims management to reporting. It helped customers save up to 30% in admin time and significantly improves gross margins. I am m so excited to share with you our innovation within trade promotion management today. AI infused claims management will improve liability, UM and crewels promotion planning will be easier with product clustering and seasonality and AI infus. Key account insights for joint business planning will make real time reporting easier than ever. A shout out to jack driving our demo let's dive in. A cross functional team at Alpine uses consumer goods cloud to drive revenue and efficiencies. Tom our revenue growth lead relies on analytics to determine the optimal price promotion and assortment strategy. The analytics here shows him what exactly is driving revenue across the business. He has access to a price analysis cockpit. The price elasticity curves are crucial for shaping everyday and promotional pricing and provide value to Alpine's cross functional teams. Kate is our key account manager at Alpine and she's responsible for driving business growth and selling in new flavors at retailers. Right on our homepage are key AI generated insights on performance. She has the ability to drill into her gap versus forecast metric, see a breakdown by subcategory and can even ask questions of her data here. It's clear that she needs to spend her time focusing on closing the gap between the energy and nutrition bar product lines. Now that she's identified a gap in her forecast, she heads on over to her customer business plan and this is where she's going to determine the optimal time to run the promotion. With time dimension planning she has the ability to drill into different time blocks. She sees that Q one is the right time to drive sales and drills into her monthly view where she decides to run the promotion in the spring. During March she heads on over to her northern Trail Outfitters account page and this is where we see the value of having your TPM integrated with your CRM. As she can see all of her customer information directly in line with her trade planning activities. And now with datacloud she can unify both the b two B and B two c data and get new insights on NTO's consumers. With information like demographic microsegments and product information, she can then use that to create better promotions. At Alpine, uh, she asked Einstein to help create a UH promotion to close the gap in her forecast. She drills into the creative promotion and this is where we see Einstein's predictive capabilities come in which uses historical data as well as product clustering and seasonality to determine the forecasted uplift of the promotion. And this gives Kate a true total cost to serve with the promotion. As uh, she finalizes the promotion, she uses her closed loop dashboard and this is where we see the beauty of integrated and intelligent planning and execution as she sees insights from her field teams across store participation, compliance and competitive intel. And this is that infinity loop effect that brings together trade promotion and retail execution. Now that she's closed the gap in her forecast with ease, it's time for her to prepare for an upcoming buyer meeting. She heads on over to slack in her northern Trail outfitters account channel and this is where she sees all of her Salesforce data directly within slacken canvas helps keep her organized here with lists, links and resources. She's ready for that buyer meeting. AI summarization helps keep her focused. She sees a notification from marketing cloud letting her know that a buyer is attending an upcoming trade show. She's able to take advantage and manipulate Salesforce data directly within lists in elevate promotion. Um, planning is now easier than ever because her cross functional team gets notified when she moves the promotion to a new phase. It's now time for her to prepare for that upcoming buyer meeting. She asks Slackbot to help her create a bespoke presentation for her buyer and this presentation gets created within minutes and includes all of the relevant information about the promotion workflows with intelligence built in. Help Kate be proactive. Here she gets a notification letting her know from retail execution that promotional materials weren't received in California and Oregon, she can kick off an emergency workflow to expedite shipping, saving the day. So with key account management, consumer goods, cloud and slack, Kate and every key account manager can plan, grow margins and drive profitable growth. Thank you. Back to you, Robin.

[00:18:43]  Speaker B 
That was phenomenal. All right, so we got a great picture of integrated planning. So what's next? Well, we're gonna then obviously seamlessly flow into execution. But before we see that in action, I wanna bring up a trailblazer who is really investing in a transformation to move their route to market to a whole other world. And that trailblazer is senior director of uh, digital sales for commercial transformation from Kimberly Clarke. Welcome up on the stage, Cecilia Molina. Welcome. Thank you.

[00:19:20]  Speaker E 
Thank you very much for inviting me to the stage to turn the Kimberly HM Clark story. For those that are not familiar with Kimberly Clark, that I hope there are few people. So Kimberly Clark is a b, two B and a CPG company that have a proud story of 150 years. We have presence in more than 175 countries and our portfolio is built up of iconic brands like Hiatt, Kleenex, Kotex, Depend, Andrex, um, among many others well known brands.

[00:19:53]  Speaker B 
Such an amazing family of brands. All right, let's get into it. Uh, Cecilia. So we talk about transformation, we talk about digital transformation. You often remind me that it's not just about the technology. So can you talk about the journey where you've been and where you're thinking of going?

[00:20:08]  Speaker E 
Of course, that is a great question. So Kimberly Clark's purpose is about delivering better care for a better world. So this is our purpose. And because of that purpose, we are in continuous transformation, seeking for ways to connect and serve our consumer in the best way possible. If I take this statement with a retail execution mindset, what better serving our consumers means is about creating the most powerful and seamless purchasing experience. So as when you want to buy our products, you can find them in the stores of your preferences with the Pax format that better works for you and at the price that you are willing to pay. So this is the ambition that triggered Kimberly Clark to embark in a digital transformation three years ago when we decided to completely remash our sales execution routines, rethink the skills that our people should have to win in this transformation and to review all our technology offering to be successful in the transformation that we wanted to perform. So we started by Latin America, but latin american region. And if I have to portray the picture that we found, I am pretty sure that it will resonate to many of the people in the audience. Why? Because we found like seven applications that were completely disconnected. Our uh, analytic, uh, our insight were divorced from the flow of the transactions and we have a high technology obsolescence. All of these as you can imagine, impacted negatively in the productivity of our people because they have to jump through different tools, different look and feels to perform their basic operation. So it wasn't there when Salesforce showing our transformation journey to change that reality. If I have to reflect where we are now, I can say that we were very successful. Why? We were not only able to uh, simplify the layout of our applications, but with success of moving our discussion from isolated applications to the concept of a platform. Platform is a core concept in the strategy of it in Kimberly Clark because it brings a lot of benefits like some of the ones that you are hearing in this conference is allow you to scale quicker, to deliver features quicker to the market, to connect your data with your transactions at a very efficient cost.

[00:22:58]  Speaker B 
Love it. Love how you walked us through that. It's a, uh, people transformation, a uh, technology transformation. Process and even a skills transformation as well. And also while we think about a transformation, I loved how you talked about, you're really thinking about the customer and consumer first and then working backwards to see what you can change now. You talked about the success, you talked about the benefits. Can you get into a little bit more detail on some of the impact that this transformation has had on your business?

[00:23:26]  Speaker E 
Of course. So we simplify the environment. I mentioned this multiple times, but let's talk about the benefits that brought to Kimberly Clark. So we were able to increase in Latin American our net sales value in 1.1%. Of course, the platform alone didn't do the macheg, it didn't increase the sales. But I can guarantee that without the platform, without CG cloud, we were not able to make this sales increase. The second thing, the second benefit is this transformation was looking to increase our numerical distribution and we success on that because we increment 5% the presence of our products in the retailer shelf. And last but not least, we move, we convert 10% of the time that our salespeople were investing in their office, planning for their visit, planning how they will engage the customer. This time we reconvert it, um, and um, put it into sellout activities. Sellout activities, for those that are not familiar are investing your time being in the point of sales, working with your retailers.

[00:24:36]  Speaker B 
Wow. So productivity, more shelf space and growth. That's not a bad combination. That's fantastic. All right, so let's talk for a moment about Salesforce. We're going to run out of tape, so we'll make this one a little quicker. But tell us a little bit why you picked Salesforce. You definitely had a lot of different options out there. You're somewhat of a build shop. Why platform and why Salesforce?

[00:24:59]  Speaker E 
Okay. The decision was not easy and Salesforce knows that. Why? Because we were selecting global platforms. For those in the audience that work in global teams, I am pretty sure that you understand how difficult it is to influence your local markets that they need to implement a global platform. Why? Because they want to select the vendor that is in their region. But we knew that if we took this approach we want success. So we were looking for a technology partner that could bring innovation, uh, in our merchandises and sales processes that have ah, global presence and that most important that can deliver in the three channels that we operate more trade, traditional trade and the hybrid environment. And we invited very strong players. But Salesforce was selected because the global presence, we were sure that they will help us to uh, scale in any market that we wanted the second one, because they are focused on innovation, continued innovation. And this event is a live example on the focus that sale for has in the innovation. And the last is the concept of platforms that we can see that they are all about platform and integrating processes.

[00:26:19]  Speaker B 
All right, I have one last question for you, which it probably could be a session unto itself, but I'm going to throw it out at you. And that's data. Uh, AI in the flow of work. What is Kimberly Clark's, what is your philosophy and approach on that?

[00:26:33]  Speaker E 
Okay, so, uh, we are obsessed for data and AI. Ah, yes. And I think that this was also one of the key success of this transformation. When we embark it into a transformation in parallel, we start building our first commercial data lake in Kimberley Clark. So we put data in a unique, unified model. And how CG cloud contributed to that. It helped us to bring discipline in the way that we ingested data. Uh, but it also helped us to leverage the data and, um, bring insights from the data, uh, using AI and infuse these insights in the flow of our sales execution journey. A quick example. So, before this transformation, making and building the route and the sequence on, um, how we will visit our customers took a lot of time. So what we did in this journey is we developed an AI algorithm, um, that put the insight on how we need to, how the salespeople should visit their customers in a mobile. So the efficiency that we brought by bringing insight and data, uh, into our flow of work was terrific.

[00:27:40]  Speaker B 
Awesome. All right, fantastic. Cecilia, thank you so much for your time. Thanks for taking the journey here. A big round of applause for Cecilia. Thank you very much. All right, so we heard about the tremendous impact retail execution can have on a global brand like Kimberly Clark. Let's see what this looks like. And in order to make that happen, I want to bring up our rockstar product marketing manager, McKee Horner, to show us what it looks like. Take it away, McKee.

[00:28:10]  Speaker F 
Thanks, Rob. Thank you, Rob. And hello, Dreamforce. My name is McKee Horner, and I'm a product marketer here at Salesforce. Now, what we just heard is the power of data, AI and automation completely transforming the Kimberly Clark route to market. Now, let's see this power come to life in the platform. Consumer goods cloud retail execution is designed to help sales teams from the field to the hq, deliver the perfect store. With this technology literally in their hands, customers are increasing their share of shelf and saving time in every visit. Now, drivers can maximize sales. With Vanceale's capabilities, field teams can save even more time with incorporated AI powered inventory checks, and you can build the Lightning web components you know and love directly in the app. Now let's see it come to life in a demo. But before we do, quick shout out to our demo driver, Jacques. For today's demo, we're going to follow David, a DST sales rep at Alpine from his pre tour planning to retail distribution all the way through. Wrapping up his day now at Alpine, they're connecting the field to the hq. Emily, a sales manager at Alpine, starts her day in Salesforce to get a feel for how her territory is performing. Upon logging in, she sees an intelligent alert notifying her of rising out of stocks and a few key products. She quickly goes to her retail execution dashboard to identify exactly which retailers have this shortage. Upon looking at this list, she sees one of her top accounts, nto store 201, listed, so she decides to click in for more detail here. Datacloud has enriched her account with unified data from B two B and B two C sources. She sees calculated insights like perfect store score, which rank each store based on things like promotions, visit, compliance, and out of stocks. She even sees new promotions from her trade manager, Kate, who we just met, recommended by Einstein, and perfect for her customers and consumers. Now, Emily still wants to get to the bottom of what's happening with this out of stock. Luckily, she's got Einstein by her side. In one click, she gets a clear, contextual summary of the inventory changes from the last few visits. Turns out a few units were damaged in transit. To remedy this, she asked her AI agent to add this store to her field team's next tour of visits with instructions to sell in that new promotion and replace the missing inventory. Now let's pivot to the field to see how this gets executed. David, our DSD sales rep, opens his tablet upon arriving to the warehouse and instantly sees critical information like weather and traffic alerts. Now, David's a seasoned pro and knows that connectivity in the field can be a little spotty. So he completes his first sync of day to make sure he has all the information he needs, regardless of connectivity. With this information reviewed and this tour clearly mapped out, David feels ready to start his day. As always, he completes his vehicle safety and security checks and every action he takes, like logging this critical safety data is captured and available for leadership review. With pre tour checks complete, David only has one last thing to do before he's ready to hit the road. Inventory management. Now, David's warehouse has already received all his products, so all he needs to do is confirm and load the inventory onto his truck. He can update the product quantities to reflect his inventory. And if there's a discrepancy, he can make an adjustment and provide a reason. Once everything looks correct, he completes inventory checkout. Now, with pre tour checks and inventory management complete, David leaves the warehouse to go to his first visit. When he arrives at the store, he opens the account to his visit cockpit. Now CG Cloud has been paying attention in the background and notices when he's within proximity to the store auto completing check in for him. With geofencing for this customer, they preorder their products. So all David needs to do is to confirm and deliver the shipment in full and record any shortages. However, some of David's customers don't place pre orders. Some of them place orders when he arrives to the store. Luckily, he's able to handle Vancouver too, from the very same platform when placing Vance sales. He can even save time with Einstein order recommendation. David, uh, loves this new feature because it shows consumer goods. Cloud knows his customer just as well as he does. And Einstein has looked through things like inventory pricing conditions, promotions and order history to recommend a perfect order. David accepts the order, confident that he's saving time and delivering the optimal mix of products. And in just a few clicks, he creates a detailed bill of materials for the customer's review, completing the transaction smoothly, after which he finishes his visit and continues on with his tour. And at the end of his tour, David finishes his day with happy customers in the rear view. Now David's experience reflects what every customer's experience can be when they operate on an AI powered execution platform integrated with their planning solution. But the buck doesn't stop there to take us through step three in our journey towards an AI enterprise. It's my pleasure to welcome up Shermie Shaw.

[00:33:29]  Speaker G 
Thank you, McKee and good afternoon, everyone. Brief, uh, introduction. Shermie Shaw, I'm the vice president of global consumer goods here at Salesforce and I have the pleasure of working with some of our largest customers in North America and globally. I am here today to talk to you about something that's top of mind for all of us. You guessed it, service center transformation. The reality is the service center has not had it easy. Uh, we have cases that are up 21% since the start of the pandemic and, um, these reps are really bogged down with, uh, manual tasks and it's taking way too long to get through and be able to resolve and focus on that customer experience. So questions I get asked often are around how do I deliver these seamless experiences. And how do we maybe activate the service center to create revenue? And also how do I keep those costs down while really lending itself to that total customer experience? So to talk about that more with me, I wanted to invite up the vice president of consumer services and integrated business units at Whirlpool, Ben Brown. Thanks, Charmi, thanks for being with us here. Ben.

[00:35:01]  Speaker H 
Uh, thanks for the invitation.

[00:35:03]  Speaker G 
So let's, uh, start with, tell us a little bit about whirlpool and your role in the organization.

[00:35:10]  Speaker H 
So Whirlpool is a global kitchen appliance brand, um, diverse brand portfolio. Uh, diverse product portfolio headquartered in the US. I joined the team, uh, twelve months ago, um, in two areas. One, looking after our consumer services organization, which is everything post purchase from digital, our consumer experience center, our field technicians, and also looking after a number of our, uh, um, independent business units end to end.

[00:35:39]  Speaker G 
Fantastic. Well, we've enjoyed a lot of success together over the last few years, particularly in sales, retail and your builder business. And now we're really excited on your next chapter with us, which is service transformation. So before we get into it, can you tell us a little bit about the current state of your service center?

[00:35:57]  Speaker H 
Yeah, so we're on a journey to build a world class consumer services organization. And when I say that we're looking at, uh, how do we build the best experiences, products and services that really add value for the consumer. If I look to today, and from a technology perspective, um, we have data in different places and our employees are needing to use far too many systems to be able to serve the consumer. So we're at a stage now where we're looking to invest from a technology perspective.

[00:36:29]  Speaker G 
So you talked about your desire to reimagine the customer experience. Can you tell us a little bit about why Salesforce as your strategic partner and platform as you go through this transformation?

[00:36:41]  Speaker H 
Yeah, if I think about it from my perspective, um, there would be three. The first would be simplification. When I say simplification, I like the fact that Salesforce looks at its product not only from the consumer perspective, but also from the employee, from the agent perspective, because that's one thing that we really need to work on to allow our employees to serve the consumer. So one is simplification. The second is agility. Because at the pace that technology is moving forward, we need to have a platform that's agile enough that as technology is evolving, as consumers adoption of that technology, um, advances, we're able to plug in the developments that happen. So second is around agility and then the third is innovation. I know somebody before mentioned um, it, but it's important for me that we listen to our consumers. We obviously have a clear strategy internally but having the opportunity to work with a partner that's looking at use cases all across the market, all across industries allows us to look at problem solving in a different way.

[00:37:45]  Speaker G 
Well and when we think about that innovation and you talk about personalizing those experiences, can you tell us a little bit about how you see Salesforce helping you with that mission?

[00:37:57]  Speaker H 
So there's going to be a lot that we can do in that space. But first of all we need to make sure that we have um, our ah, data in a way that allows us to look at the consumer as one source because then we can look at the personalization. I think there'll be a lot of user cases that we can explore that's going to allow us to look at where is that consumer on their journey with us and um, based on where they are, how do we best interact with them to serve them or to offer them additional um, opportunities, uh, and products?

[00:38:27]  Speaker G 
Well we are very excited to be on this journey with you. So before I let you go, what's next for whirlpool? Any sneak peeks?

[00:38:34]  Speaker H 
Okay, so the first thing is we need to move on to service cloud. So uh, that's our immediate next step. And then there'll be a lot coming after that. But the MVP, I'm hopeful. I'm looking over to my IT team now that will be sweating but I'm hopeful that we'll have it ready in six months. So as soon as we launch that um, I'm excited to see what possibilities we have working together.

[00:38:55]  Speaker G 
Well Ben, thank you again for being here with us today.

[00:38:58]  Speaker H 
Thanks a lot, Shami. Thank you.

[00:39:03]  Speaker G 
All right, well we just learned about the power of service with Ben. Now let's see it in action. I'd like to welcome to the stage Claire Pelton.

[00:39:16]  Speaker C 
Thank you so much, Hermie. Hi everyone, I'm Claire Pelton, a lead solution engineer here at Salesforce. Consumer goods cloud is the engine behind allowing brands to create best in class customer and consumer experiences. In the next few releases we'll be launching Einstein account summarization and upsell recommendations for service agents. And of course agent force is coming to consumer goods as well. So now let's see all this live in a demonstration led by the wonderful Mason. So far today in our demonstrations we have been following alpine brands as they've gone through their trade planning and retail execution. Now we're going to flip over to their d two c side of the house with one of their consumers named Colby. Colby is a longtime purchaser of Alpine brands products and has recently made a purchase and now he's headed out onto the website to check in for an order status update. Now as this agent that Colby is interacting with is grounded in both Alpine's transaction and consumer data it's able to quickly respond back with an answer on when Colby can be expecting his order. Now Colby has another question here about some of the ingredients in the bars he's just purchased and that this agent is able to respond back just as quickly. But as we'll notice this isn't just a link to a knowledge article that Colby then needs to go in and read through and find the answer about these nutrition facts. What's happening here is that this agent is actually able to dig into the context of the question that Colby just asked, combine it in it uh, with all of the rich unified data coming in from their knowledge base and all that unstructured information and then ground it in the structured data that they have on this specific consumer with their specific recent purchase and then summarize all of that to come back with just the exact answer that Colby is looking for. This is pretty cool. Now for most customers their interaction would end there with a satisfied customer and a deflected case. But Colby is a bit more inquisitive than most and asked one last question about some of the sourcing in these ingredients. Unfortunately our alpine agent isn't able to give him an answer right now so we're going to need to pass this off to a service rep. But before we do, let's recap what we just saw. In the past Colby would have been taken down a robotic, menu driven decision tree chat to maybe get to an answer but probably get passed off to a UH service rep and then just leave. But with agent force he was able to interact with an agent that was generating responses in real time that he can interact with in his own language just like he was talking to a live service rep. Alright now back into our demonstration. This is where we're going to introduce Annie. She's a service rep at Alpine and based on her availability and her skill sets she's the one that's going to be picking up this chat from Colby. Now as Annie is getting ready to respond to Colby she's going to leverage Einstein account summarization to get her up to speed on what's been going on within this chat so far she's able to access all of the backstory of what's been happening in Colby's interaction with the agent and also all of the rich demographic data that we've gathered throughout his unified profile, throughout the entire relationship that we've had with Colby. And then lastly she has recent transaction history that's coming from external systems. Now as Annie is responding back to Colby she's going to be continually fed Einstein service replies that help her to triage this case. And what's happening with these service replies is that uh, Annie is able to uh, take all of the context of the conversation at hand and then Einstein is feeding her up how she should be addressing this with the customer. And as we'll notice as Annie, as Colby is responding back and providing a bit more information of what's going on in this chat, she is going to be continually updating these, uh, service, uh, replies right in real time. Now this allows Annie to create these consistent and best in class experiences that consumers and customers expect from Alpine. Now as Colby has his questions answered on some of the sourcing, Annie also has one last significant moment with him because she's working in the same systems as her trade planning and retail execution teams we saw earlier, she's provided hyper personalized recommendations of what products Colby should be purchasing next. And as we'll see, these products aren't just a link to a webpage. What's happening here is that, uh, in the backend Einstein is looking through all the promotions and the availability of product near Colby's location and then comparing that with his own product affinities and things we've gathered about him through data cloud to recommend the exact bar in the exact location that he should be shopping at. This is a really amazing example of how Alpine brands is turning their service teams from a cost center through to a revenue generating center. All right, now that Colby's got his questions answered and he's ready to head out on his next big hike, we are going to wrap up this case that we have with him. And with just a click of a button Annie is able to generate uh, an overview of everything that just went on in this case so that her teammates and agents can learn from this in the future. Now what we've just seen is an example of how Alpine brands is creating best in class experiences that drive loyalty. We went from a personalized e commerce website through to an AI generated bot that is able to help customers self serve in the way and the channel that they want to through to service agents that are uh, armed with generative AI right in the flow of work and what's amazing about all this is that even though we've been seeing it through a consumer's example, all of these tools are also available to help build your b two b relationships as well. So whether your teams are helping triage claims, discrepancies or they're making sure that a consumer gets their bars before they head out on a hike, consumer goods cloud for service is at the ready to help build those best in class white glove experiences that your consumers and customers expect. All right, Devin, I'm going to pass it back to you to close us out. Thank you.

[00:45:53]  Speaker A 
Awesome. Thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen. Let's just get a quick round of applause for all the speakers for my incredible solutions demo drivers, and most importantly for our trailblazers, Cecilia and Ben, the most important ones. Ok, we talked through the roadmap to become an AI enterprise. We're going to bring together all of that really rich data that currently lives in silos or is trapped on someone's desktop and make that an actionable data foundation. Then we're going to help you integrate your route to market, bringing planning and execution together so that everything that happens in the ivory tower, all the beautiful plans that we have, actually comes to life at shelf. Wouldn't that be fun for once? And we're going to help you drive that personalized service experience so that you can deliver exactly what it wants. I will say this, if you'll forgive me, a cheesy James Bond reference. I think our agents are going to give you a license to thrill your customers. So. Yeah, I know. Sorry, guys. Okay, folks, this is going to be an awesome roadmap for transformation. Thank you so much for spending time with us today. If you aren't tired of the consumer goods group, we have a few more things for you. We have an awesome session to help you generate business value. We have a product roadmap. So all the things we talked about at a high level, all those interesting innovations like AI guided inventory checks, or guided selling or joint business planning, we're going to go deep into that product roadmap at 345. I'd love for you all to show up. I also cannot wait because next year I feel really confident that we're going to bring together consumer goods agents. An agent that's going to help you do promo planning. An agent that's going to help you build a bottoms up forecast. Those are going to be awesome. And we have tomorrow a chance to talk about improving planning and execution with your data, which will be a customer interview. And if you want more information, just whip your phone out, take a scan of that QR code right there. You can get our consumer goods cloud guide which will take you through a lot more detail. And if you don't have enough resources there, go to consumergoodscloud.com dot. But thank you so much for your time with us and have a wonderful rest of dreamforce.