Salesforce IoT Explorer Edition Seeks to Unlock Customer Insights with Connectivity

The Internet of Things (IoT) is touching more and more parts of consumer and business lives. Salesforce launched its Salesforce IoT division with the stated mission of connecting the world of IoT connected devices to Salesforce in order to empower businesses to know more about customers and connect with them in a deeper way, according to the announcement. The company said it is looking toward a future in which businesses of all sizes can collect IoT data at scale, trigger actions with real-time rules and use Salesforce to proactively engage with customers.

The most recent new launch from the company is the launch of Salesforce IoT Explorer Edition, which will help bring that vision to life. This is a platform service, designed to remove barriers to connecting businesses and harnessing IoT data in order to build, iterate and deploy proactive sales, service or marketing business processes.

Here’s how the company has said that Salesforce IoT Explorer Edition works:

• Low-code orchestration. Not many can afford hiring a team of developers to build proactive IoT business processes. That’s why Salesforce IoT Explorer ships with an easy to use, low-code interface.  Business users can click their way to create rules-based automation for any connected device.
• Customer Context. Data is meaningless without context. If you’re sending service agents to repair a wind turbine, wouldn’t it help to know if this is the customer’s second failure in a week? Or, to know if this is a proactive sales opportunity because the equipment is approaching end-of-life? By connecting device, sensor and application data to the Salesforce Platform, IoT Explorer Edition puts that customer context in the palms of users’ hands.
• Proactive Engagement. IoT Explorer Edition is designed to shine here: sales, service, and marketing for future opportunities. For example, a local car dealership can trigger proactive sales campaigns when connected cars reach a certain mileage threshold or proactive service when vehicle diagnostics report failures.

Pilot customers include Emerson Climate Technologies, Schneider Electric (News - Alert), Lippert Components and Rehrig Pacific. Salesforce IoT Explorer Edition is expected to be generally available on October 17, 2017 as a platform service add-on to any Salesforce Cloud.