In early 2021, Enehano Solutions officially became a certified Salesforce Interaction Studio implementation partner. There are three certified colleagues in our team who can harness the power of Interaction Studio. Today we will talk with one of them – Jakub Lysáček, our Salesforce Marketing Automation Lead. He will tell us how Interaction Studio can help marketers personalize their offer, what specific features they can use and how easy or difficult it is to implement it into an existing environment.

Can you briefly introduce Interaction Studio to us?

Interaction Studio encompasses Salesforce’s acquisition of Evergage announced in early 2020. Evergage has been named global Leader in Gartner’s Quadrant for Personalized Engines several times. It enables real-time marketing offer personalization across various inbound channels, including websites, mobile apps and branch apps.

‍

What problem does Interaction solve and how does it do that?

Interaction Studio deals with situations when a business needs to make a real-time decision on the next best action to take in that moment for a specific client via a selected communication channel.

Communication is always initiated by the customer. This can include a user browsing on the website, calling the call center to complain about a product and it can also include indirect communication like a declined card in a store. Interaction Studio can monitor all these events and evaluate them in the context of all customer data collected over time. It uses rules defined by the business and machine learning algorithms to identify the best possible choice for the client in the given context. And all this happens within milliseconds.

Interaction Studio’s central point is a unified customer profile to which all events occurring on all communication channels are assigned. In addition, this profile supports several identities, which is why you can work not only with known clients but also with an anonymous prospect who might turn into a client or who identifies himself upon signing up into the client zone. Interaction Studio offers a truly centralized omnichannel customer experience.

Could you tell us 1-3 key benefits (features) that Interaction Studio provides to users?

From the user perspective, Interaction Studio is quite a simple tool to master. Marketers can use it for content management, segmentation, campaign creation and campaign evaluation.

My favorite features are the so-called Einstein Recipes where a user creates his own unique recipe in a playful way. In practice, this recipe represents a recommendation of a specific product or a set of products, conversation or a different action.

Recipes are created as a combination of built-in machine learning features and business rules. Each recipe is composed of ingredients, i.e., pre-defined algorithms which help Einstein (AI) make decisions. This could include algorithms such as co-buy, co-search, people like me and many others.

In addition, the recipe is composed of filters, which are traditional decision-making rules from the perspective of demography, geography, owned products or marketing and GDPR consents.

With recipes, you can also set up a booster to measure specific criteria (e.g., preferred product brands, categories, etc.).

Last but not least, variables can be added to the recipe to make sure the algorithm continues to develop and re-learn.

The outcome of the recipe are personalized recommendations which can be displayed as a website banner, recommended by a call center agent or included in an open-time email. Open-time email is an email whose content is dynamically created once the customer opens it.

Needless to say, recipes are re-calculated in real time and continuously updated based on the client’s behavior.

‍

To whom would you recommend Interaction Studio?

Given the robustness of the platform and the associated price level, in our region, Interaction Studio is a good option for bigger clients, typically in segments like banking, insurance, telco, healthcare and production. However, most use cases can be found in retail and consumer goods. Although this is an inbound communication tool, it’s a perfect fit for various outbound tools like Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Can you use Interaction Studio without other Salesforce clouds or how is it linked with the Salesforce architecture?

Yes, Interaction Studio can work like a standalone product, as well as an addition to an existing CMS or CRM.

Clients who have already been using Salesforce tools like Marketing Cloud or Sales/Service Cloud can benefit from native connectors between Interaction Studio and these tools. Connectors are available for free and they enable interconnection between Interaction Studio and for example Sales Cloud within hours, without the need for IT interference or extra development.

Most readers will probably want to know how difficult it is to implement Interaction Studio (from the first idea until deployment and use).

It always depends on the client and his requirements. In general, we recommend to start with 2-3 simple use cases which have a good price-benefit ratio, the so-called proof of concept. In this way, clients can create a really strong business case and test the platform for themselves. In corporate environment, PoC can be performed within approximately 10 weeks.

Do you think that Interaction Studio sufficiently responds to digital transformation needs in a post-covid era?

The pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation and Interaction Studio is definitely a tool which will ride the digital transformation wave for a long time. After the acquisition, Salesforce got new allies – Marketing Cloud and CRM platform with which it can be nicely combined.

When these tools are used together, they create a strong business and marketing ecosystem.

Enehano has become a certified partner. What does it mean for us and our clients? Are there any benefits?

From the business perspective, this is an area where Enehano team members have vast experience. From the perspective of technology, it was essential to get to know the tool itself and we managed to do that thanks to the Salesforce Enablement Program, where the Enehano team went through the entire implementation cycle – from the first client meeting through an analysis and architecture solution proposal up to intense implementation of the whole platform. Within implementation, we dealt with issues like Interaction Studio administration, web mapping and personalization, data integration, segmentation, predictive algorithms, reporting and many others.

Salesforce representatives oversaw the entire process and after it was successfully completed, we officially became part of a small group of partners who can implement Interaction Studio without the Salesforce team’s participation. This means that clients can get in touch with Enehano directly and we will be happy to help them.

Interested in more information or got any specific questions? We will be happy to talk, get in touch with us.

‍