Tag Archives: customer love

Launching Salesforce Lightning with a global community, a live event and Hangouts

Posted by Sarah Franklin, VP of Admin Marketing, Salesforce

Editor's note: Today we hear from Sarah Franklin, VP of Admin Marketing at Salesforce, the leader in enterprise cloud computing and the sixth largest software company in the world. See how the company brought its community together and announced a recent product release using Google Hangouts. 

It’s not every day that we have the opportunity to bring together people from 119 locations across the globe. The Salesforce marketing team put our heads together to decide how to announce Salesforce Lightning — a metadata-driven platform that is highly customizable, and empowers people to work faster and smarter — differently than previous product releases. We decided to focus on what’s always been at the center of our company: our customers. For us, the solution was simple and collaborative. We chose Google Hangouts to introduce Lightning, so we could share this exciting announcement with our community of developers and users in 20 countries via live video.

We chose Hangouts because we wanted to show our community that we’re committed to using innovative tools. We’d already been using Hangouts in a variety of ways, such as connecting with colleagues in different offices (and sending each other emojis) and hosting webinars with our admin community, so we knew it was a great choice to bring many people together from around the world.

Whether it was 7 a.m. or midnight in their local timezone, people gathered at universities, community centers and local pubs to join the product launch. The day after our announcement, we also hosted a second private Hangout with over 200 people across Europe, the Middle East and Africa in case they missed the launch due to timing. These events created a deeper sense of camaraderie among an already strong community. We sent our community leaders a webcam and tripod, so it was easy and cost effective to get a group together since all they needed was an internet connection. Hangouts gave us the opportunity to encourage dialogue between admins, developers, partners and users in a fun and immediate way.

Many companies measure the success of a product launch based on the press they receive or the number of website visits they get in a single day. We flipped that. Our goal was how could we involve our community and put our customers at the center of this launch. We defined success by the number of customers we involved. More than 19,000 people from our community, from Bangalore to Tokyo to New York City to Paris and hundreds of places in between, tuned in to join the launch.

Our executives were floored when they saw people from all around the world on the screen. We overcame the language barrier by having translators onsite in some of the non-English speaking countries to make sure everyone felt included. We created a personal connection with customers who spoke different languages and brought together engineers, users, executives and the marketing team who have a common passion for our customers’ success.

By focusing on forward-looking technology, we hosted an event that made more than 19,000 people feel like they were in the same room. And with our core focus on connecting companies to their customers, we couldn't think of a better way to introduce our products to the world than with Hangouts.

Celect brings science to the art of retail merchandising

Posted by Devavrat Shah, Chief Scientist and Co-founder of Celect

(Cross-posted on the Google Cloud Blog.)

Editor's note: Today’s guest blog comes from Devavrat Shah, Chief Scientist and Co-founder of Celect, which helps retailers understand buying patterns and customer choices.

Retailers spend a lot of time and money trying to figure out what people will buy and when, online or offline. Many retailers see this as an art, but at Celect, we want to add science to this process. The answer lies in what we call the “Choice Engine,” which gathers data on what customers buy and don’t buy – instead of just simply finding out how they rate products they like. Think of the shopping process this way: If someone browses black shirts and red shirts online, but puts a blue shirt in the shopping cart, they’re giving you comparative information. Celect can take these choices and suggest which products a retailer should stock more or less of – as well as predict when price becomes a factor in a shopper’s purchase decision.

My cofounder Vivek Farias and I, both professors at MIT, decided to put our brains together and see if we could bring our technology to the commercial market. We knew our technology was great, so we bootstrapped a team together – two professors, two engineers, and one person on the ground doing business development. Our biggest challenge was scaling our technology even though we had an extremely small development team. We didn’t want to run a system when we didn’t yet have clients.

Fortunately for Celect, we met the criteria for Google Cloud Platform for Startups, giving us $100,000 in credit for Google Cloud Platform products and easy access to engineers and architects to help us make the most of our infrastructure. We quickly found out how good Google’s documentation is, which matters when you’re a startup that needs to move quickly. We get to tap into the expertise of people who’ve spent 10 years building cloud infrastructure, and they know it very well. The web user interface of Google Cloud Storage is very intuitive to navigate, and gives us an overall view of the system and the resources in use.

We run our workloads on Google Compute Engine, which operates easily with our commodity Linux machines – another way we save money as a startup. Google Cloud Platform also gives us peace of mind about security. Retailers trust us with highly proprietary information, and they’re very sensitive to data breaches. When they hear we rely on Google, retailers know we’re adhering to strong security standards.

Since we’re going after large retailers for our product, we need the scalability to store massive datasets. We can create new data stores in Google Cloud Platform so that every client’s data is siloed from the others. It’s the perfect on-demand infrastructure for a company like ours that needs to run lean for the first couple of years.

At this stage in our growth, we want to make very efficient use of every dollar we spend. The past year has been very successful for us, with some great retailer brands signed on and a threefold growth in employees. Google Cloud Platform will grow with us, while helping us develop our products better and faster.

- Posted by Devavrat Shah, Chief Scientist and Co-founder, Celect

From scratching vinyl to starting up: Q&A with Mitch Hills of AroundAbout

Posted by Flora Wong, Head of Maps for Work Marketing Asia Pacific

Today we speak with the founder of AroundAbout. An activity generating app that started in Brisbane, Australia. Mitch Hills got his first taste for business when he started POGO Entertainment, an event production company, at age 17. He ran the business for more than two years while professionally DJing in Brisbane, Australia, then started his first technology venture at age 20. AroundAbout is a new activity-generating app powered by Google Maps APIs that helps people find interesting things to eat, drink and explore, whenever they want and wherever they are. I sat down with Mitch to learn more about the app, his creative process and how he likes to work.


Tell us more about how the app came about.

I’ve always been interested in entertainment and focused on the idea of “Tinder for activities” — the same simple interface, that gives you a way to find things to do, as well as places to eat and drink, just by swiping left or right. I love hospitality and wanted to create a curated place where people could find cool places and activities, with recommendations they could trust. Once I had the idea, I partnered with developers to make it a reality. Mapping is central to AroundAbout because the app visualises places for users to explore near them. We use the Google Maps iOS and Android APIs for our mobile apps. We chose Google because we wanted really accurate directions and a visually pleasing interface.

How would you describe the transition from DJing to starting your own tech company?

The transition wasn’t difficult, per se, but business itself is difficult. Last year I read 22 books about entrepreneurship, finance and self-development, but reading can only prepare you so much. My background in entertainment was actually incredibly useful, both for building my network and for relating to people who use the app. As I see it, entertainment is about presentation and perception, and that’s useful in any industry.

What do you think it takes to build a successful app for younger people?

Social media plays a huge role in this business, so we invest much of our energy in reaching out to people through social and PR. Young people are also more spontaneous, and we built the app to help feed that spontaneity. Young people also have lots of energy and can be interested in a lot of different things at once, so their tastes and needs can evolve quickly. You have to be constantly listening to what they want, where they’re looking for content and how they’re connecting with each other.


How do you come up with new ideas?

I get inspired by reading about or listening to experts, even if they aren't discussing something directly relevant to me. It gets my brain ticking and my creative juices flowing. I’m always thinking about ideas and come up with something new almost every day. I give it some thought and write it down — some are terrible, but others definitely have potential. I find that the best way to evolve an idea is to talk to people and see what they think.

It’s not easy coming up with ideas that resonate with consumers, particularly in a competitive, fast-moving industry like entertainment. Mitch has an interesting problem: too many ideas and not enough time. For now he’s focusing on AroundAbout and bringing its service to more people by expanding beyond Australia. As for whether Mitch still DJs, he says, “Music will always play a large role in my life, but as much as I like the hospitality industry, I love creating businesses more.”