Salesforce IoT: 18 common questions answered

3. How does Salesforce IoT work?

Salesforce IoT works through creating events, rules, actions, conditions, and orchestrations. Let’s look at an example:

• Sensors in the customer’s device detect a failure. This triggers a change in the state of the device to ‘Error’ and starts the relevant ‘Fix It’ orchestration.
• The ‘Error’ state follows a specific rule. This is a predefined logic that tells the orchestration what to do. It can be a simple action (such as to create a ticket for the service desk team), or a smart combination of events, conditions, and actions. For example, Salesforce IoT can automatically send the customer an educational article (Action 1) if the problem can be fixed without professional assistance (Condition 1). Alternatively, it can escalate the ticket (Action 2) if the issue is complex (Condition 2) and requires a field specialist’s assistance.
• After Salesforce IoT executes the ‘Error’ state’s rule, it changes the state to ‘In Progress’ and listens to the customer’s device. If the device sensors determine that the problem is fixed, then the device can transition to the ‘Ok’ state.

This is a very basic explanation, but it illustrates the processes happening behind the scenes. In reality, Salesforce IoT allows putting together data streamed from various sources, including device sensors, third-party services (such as weather forecasts), and Salesforce’s own CRM, Service Cloud, Field Service, Community, and more. This ensures that orchestration can become as complex as necessary in order to automatically deliver exceptional customer service.

5. How can non-developers start using Salesforce IoT?

While Salesforce IoT doesn’t require much coding experience, non-developers might find diving into the IoT world too difficult in the beginning. Salesforce suggests following these five steps to organize the work, going from the solution design to the deployment.

Let’s take a closer look at each step.

#1. Plan

There are actually two goals to achieve here:

• Identify triggers. This is the most crucial part that can’t be automated. You have to discover the crucial customer experience moments and spot the major events that can make your customer either happy or upset. These trigger events vary from between companies and industries.
• Create actions. Envision the best solutions for the identified potential problems. Think of the most efficient ways of resolving different cases.

#2. Connect

At this stage, choose which data sources to connect in order to provide the necessary contextual data.

#3. Transform

Since machines speak the language of logic, you have to describe customers’ problems (combinations of contextual data) in technical terms. For example, broken sensor can equal event 1; create a service ticket can be action 1, and so forth.

#4. Build

Now you can add a new orchestration rule in Salesforce IoT and build the necessary logic using the expression syntax used in formula fields. This way, it’ll be even easier to work with your existing data in Salesforce.

#5. Deploy

When you are ready, activate the orchestration and look at the traffic view to understand just how many people or devices are in each state. Before applying an orchestration, we recommend testing whether or not it is designed correctly. In fact, Salesforce IoT platform trackers perform this task perfectly. They can provide a detailed view of orchestration activity and help identify any unwanted results.

Despite this low-code approach, configuring Salesforce IoT is not that simple. Complex cases including multiple events, conditions, and several data sources require the help of experienced IoT and Salesforce development companies that understand how to unlock this smart technology’s full potential.

7. How can Salesforce IoT improve customer experience?

Be it a hospital or a farm, Salesforce IoT enables a business to get customers’ critical data immediately. Streaming data allows product and service providers to react proactively and offer assistance to their customers even before problems become apparent. Rather than getting upset with an interrupted service or risky health indicators, customers can receive a solution or action plan right when they know they need it—and oftentimes even earlier.

This proactive approach prevents service quality claims and helps resolve service tickets more quickly. Solutions will be applied before a customer even reports a problem, and in turn the overall product performance will become smoother. This means companies no longer have to annoy customers by asking for information; they already know everything about the issues at hand.

9. How can Salesforce IoT improve products?

With connected devices storing information collected from sensors, IoT can then help pinpoint the cause of an issue and find faster ways to solve it. The contextual data can also go beyond product performance parameters and include environmental data. This will shed light on the performance of equipment under varying circumstances.

Certain behavioral patterns can offer insights into improving the product or preventing repeated issues. Businesses can then analyze the information gathered from several customers in order to deliver more comprehensive solutions, as well as develop valuable improvements for their offerings, for example through smarter inventory management.

11. How can Salesforce IoT increase efficiency?

Salesforce IoT offers service automation, whereby the support team no longer has to call or visit customers in order to clarify details, and can therefore solve issues faster. In fact, device-generated alerts render product monitoring unnecessary. Likewise, orchestration allows for the creation of rules for automated ticket escalation if an issue recurs.

13. How does Salesforce IoT connect to other products?

You can enable Salesforce IoT in all Salesforce products within Lightning Experience, which is a great plus for existing Salesforce customers who are striving to unlock the power of connected devices. In particular, native integration with Salesforce Einstein, a robust AI tool, allows for the extraction of valuable insights from enormous volumes of data gathered by IoT devices, including video, images, texts, voice records, and sensor data.

15. Has anybody seen results with Salesforce IoT?

As Salesforce’s IoT offering is still quite young, not too many cases exist yet. However, existing Salesforce IoT examples look promising.

For example, take Samson Rope, a 140-year-old company that produces rope for a wide range of global industries. They provide lifetime (up to 10 years) service support for over 8,000 lines of rope. Field Service Lightning and Salesforce IoT helps Samson Rope manage all of their lines, monitor their customers’ rope conditions, and identify when they will need replacements.

Another case is Jacuzzi, which utilizes Salesforce IoT to track the states of their hot tub filters. The retrieved data goes to the CRM and helps Jacuzzi spot the ideal times for filter replacement.

Likewise, the authorities of the town of Cary, North Carolina, revolutionized traffic light functions with the help of Salesforce IoT and Service Cloud. Connected stoplights trigger alerts that get sent to the traffic and police departments in order to help quickly resolve traffic issues. Alerts are also sent to drivers via the Waze app in order to direct them to alternate routes. Salesforce IoT has allowed for the quick dispatch of technicians to fix issues and minimize problems for the citizens of the town.

17. Is Salesforce IoT secure?

Gartner states that security is the top technical concern for organizations deploying IoT systems. This is because companies have almost no control over the sources and nature of the software and hardware utilized in their IoT networks.

Unfortunately, many connected devices have little to no cybersecurity protection and only add more variables to the IT risk formula. Salesforce IoT addresses this challenge by utilizing access tokens for secure access, which are described in detail in Salesforce documentation.