Salesforce’s latest buy, 1.33B for Vlocity, was already in the cards
Crunchy Numbers
At an all-cash, 1.33B buyout, Vlocity has recovered about 8.2 times its investment amount. In their early days, nearly 6 years ago, they were inspired by Veeva to target much more in market space than just life sciences, and eventually end up with an IPO of their own. Ever since its own development process and offerings kept up with Salesforce’s own quite minutely. Here’s more on that story.
What’s in it for Salesforce?
To begin with, it built industry-centric CRMs for 6 major verticals, the verticals being communications, media and entertainment, insurance and financial services, health, energy and utilities, and government and nonprofits. And providing its own industry-specific solutions to cash in on customization demands has long been a Salesforce target.
What this could mean for its service suite...
- The acquisition indicates a renewed focus to put industry-focused solutions front-and-center.
- The deal is projected by analysts to rake in revenue from these industries over the next few years.
Capabilities added
For one thing, adopters of the technology will be able to communicate to them in their terms, bridging the disconnect between products, industry, and bottom lines in these 6 trades. Also, this translates to better, more relevant customer experiences in these major industries.
Platform Features
Straightaway, Vlocity turns around your CRM to handle trade-centric transactions and cultivate code-free interactions across the device spectrum. It helps you make the most of brief, informed interactions with clients to put forward your most accurate face through a customer’s channel of preference. Moreover, it seamlessly integrates with enterprise data and apps to personalize responses.
Then, it helps agents to connect to clients on their personal needs and build brand trust and recall and keeps business flexible to market changes.
In all, the entire suite of offerings is completely Salesforce native, letting you forget about the platform and concentrate on the customer.
To elaborate, here’s a look at Vlocity’s entire suite of Platform features:
- OmniScript
These are dynamic, integrable business fill-out forms with easy drag-and-drop support, with templates catering to each device channel. As a pre-configured client interaction solution, it supports several common script elements. - Industry Console
A command-center of sorts where you can preview 360 interactions, relationships, and visualizations. - Dataraptor
The Dataraptor natively and declaratively maps complex structures, while also assisting with codeless external data integrations. - Process Engines
These enable personalized recommendations and product offers, contextual search capabilities, as well as handling for decision and price matrices. - Mobile
Gets your enterprise on board with mobile accessibility, Touchpoint transformation, as well as convenient wearable focused reminders. - Clickstream Analytics
Overall, it accelerates product response and value-adds through integration with Wave Analytics to identify microtrends and push market capture efforts.
What does Vlocity bring to each vertical then?
- Communications
Here, the ISV drives personalization in selling and elevated subscription experiences to compete with disruptions. - Insurance
Covers the breadth of administration tasks in an insurance firm from quotes, billing, claims, and service to facilitate hassle-free usage by agents and policy owners alike. - Media & Entertainment
Delivers on subscription lifecycles, campaigns, as well as omnichannel capabilities for new players to handle launch, volumes, and sales. Offerings also count transformative, greenfield billing solutions - Healthcare
Transforms with front-desk and middle office solutions for sub-optimal processes simplifies fulfilling healthcare plans and brings down the cost to access practitioners. - Energy & Utilities
Brings solutions to lower case resolution and handling times, as well as case deflection. Also delivers one-stop platforms to manage commercial as well as residential clients, service providers, sale contracts, and marketing efforts, - Government
It helps governments unshackle themselves from dragging weight from decades-old processes to instantly propel governance.
From ‘No Software’ to ‘No Customizations’
The premise for Vlocity’s success in the industry-focused space is that it eliminates, at least to a large extent, the need to write and maintain custom code.
For its part, it takes care of platform compatibility to the letter, leaving establishment from its target verticals to worry less about things breaking or platform upgrades.
Nevertheless, it’s hard to put a pin on how things will turn out eventually for its Super-parent platform, Salesforce. Though there’ll always be emerging industries, verticals, and disruptors to customize for, the big-league clients may want reliable, platform associated solutions from Salesforce for their most common use cases.
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