Salesforce’s Response to COVID-19

While organizations across the world are struggling to deal with the COVID-19 crisis, Salesforce has wholly committed itself to working with its customers every step of the way. It’s almost as if they were prepared for a pandemic even before it hit us! Let’s take a brief look at how Salesforce is using its products and resources to help clients and communities navigate COVID-19. While Salesforce’s current focus has transitioned to getting people back to work, these technologies have proved to be invaluable over the last couple of months and we hope you’ll find them useful as your organization similarly transitions back to normalcy.

1. Leading Through Change In recognizing the fact that we’re currently living through a substantially altered business landscape Salesforce, aims to place itself at the vanguard of technological and policy based leadership through a combination of data driven tools, insights and resources. All of these are geared towards helping its millions of customers chart a path through the torrid waters of this challenging situation.
   

2. COVID-19 Data Tracker Salesforce has utilized their vast resources to implement a number of data trackers across key areas such as the economy, the government, the healthcare industry, and the global response to the pandemic. All of these trackers are aimed at providing a consolidated hub for partners to view, analyse and eventually utilize to make important organizational decisions backed up by reliable statistics.
   

3. The COVID-19 Partner Innovation Initiative In order to further provide support to the global partner ecosystem, Salesforce has created a COVID-19 Partner Innovation submission form. This is aimed at collecting key information from ISV and Consulting Partners that are interested in building solutions from scratch or marketing existing solutions that address the multitude of challenges presented by a global pandemic. Salesforce’s cross-functional teams will review each submission request individually in order to ascertain how best to address your request as well as your requirements. Thought they cannot promise to include every solution in their marketing they will strive to include as many path breaking solutions as they can manage.
   

4. Work.com Work.com is an initiative that Salesforce hopes will allow leaders to gain a holistic, 360-degree view of their organizations ability and readiness levels in terms of returning to work and normal functioning. It will enable and include a variety of solutions including contact tracing, emergency response management, employee wellness assessment, and shift management so as to improve and optimize organizations’ responses to the COVID-19 crisis. Work.com will bring together health experts, business leaders and the full potential of the Salesforce ecosystem in a resource centre that is informed by reliable sources of data such as the University of California San Francisco.

5. The AppExchange Playbook and Toolkit Salesforce has released a consolidated collection of guidelines, tips, strategies and best practices so as to allow your Salesforce AppExchange solutions to thrive despite the current situation. Some key components of this playbook cover areas such as keeping your teams engaged and informed, digital marketing strategies for your AppExchange solution, AppExchange listing best practices during COVID-19 and how to go about selling and interacting with customers during these increasingly uncertain times. They’ve also released a specialized AppExchange toolkit that has been curated with solutions that are best equipped to make your life a little easier during this period of transition for businesses the world over.
   

6. B-Well Together B-Well together is an initiative that focuses on rejuvenating your spirit as well as aligning your body and mind. It is an online holistic wellness program geared towards showing the Ohana how to de-stress, reduce their anxiety and remain positive throughout the trials and tribulations we’re all facing both from a business perspective as well as on a personal front. Thought leaders such as Arianna Huffington and Deepak Chopra have led sessions focusing on everything from the importance of sleep to integrated approaches on reducing anxiety.
   

7. Salesforce Care Salesforce Care includes a pre-configured employee help center, customer service, and contact center application that is used for quick inquiries, and for keeping customers and employees informed. Almost 2,000 organizations and associations from 47 nations started utilizing this platform, within a week of its roll out. Some key aspects of Salesforce Care for organizations include Einstein bots, communities and portals all of which better enable organizations of all sizes to collaborate with employees and customers from anywhere. It also includes two key programs in Quip and Tableau. While Tableau ensures vastly deeper insights into your data, Quip allows your teams to seamlessly work remotely. Both have been made free to download and use for 90 days. Salesforce Care also offers SocialStudio, a one-stop-solution for that allows you to manage, monitor and sculpt every aspect of your social media presence. This along with significant augmentations to myTrailhead and Salesforce Community means that it’s now easier than ever before to address employee and customer concerns.
   

8. Trailhead Salesforce has taken it upon themselves to provide easier access to their certification program as well as to be more accommodating to trailblazers all across the Ohana. In doing this they’ve removed their standard maintenance cycle, waived cancellation fees, made remote testing more readily available and extended their deadline for new partners. Partners now also have access to up to 10 free certification courses until September 2020. Trailhead has also introduced a number of new trails and modules designed specifically to help you collaborate virtually, succeed and maintain productivity remotely as well as enhance overall employee wellbeing.

We’re immensely grateful to be part of a Salesforce ecosystem that allows us to leverage the full extent of all of the above, not only for ourselves but also for our partners across the globe.

To stay abreast of all of these changes be sure to tune in to Salesforce’s Partner Townhall series, every Friday or visit the Salesforce Partner Portal and its dedicated COVID-19 tab.

Media coverage in TimesTech | Silicon India

Read other Extentia Blog posts here!