Salesforce Customer 360A dynamic website unifies a vast enterprise

A platform for building the future

World-renowned for tools that enable millions of companies to better understand their customers, Salesforce faced a unique challenge—it needed to equip itself with the same type of knowledge. By implementing a user experience that elicits similar informed insights its customers receive about their own businesses, the new Salesforce.com delivers a personalized and relevant experience, in addition to providing a platform for brand storytelling, better customer engagement, and cross-selling of products.

Modularity to the max

Salesforce extols the power of the holistic view to its customers—that uniting key aspects of a business within its platform allows a company to laser-focus on its customers and their end-user experience. But a diverse set of tools and products, acquired over twenty years of successful growth for the company, had settled into a fragmented digital landscape, and a disjointed customer experience across Salesforce's many properties and organizations.

argo collaborated and drove alignment among 27 stakeholders to create a design system and strategy for an integrated platform. The platform includes an architecture that bridges and unites everything from social media to events and learning to products and support.

The modular system allows for dynamic construction of pages based on personalization and tagging. Pages are compiled from every part of the organization for unique purposes and people, rather than hard-coded static pages that require continual maintenance.

Strategic execution for the long term

To ensure a system that lasts, the team went beyond website design, to create a product that is responsive to whoever uses it. It is personalized, localized, dynamic, and timely—and unites the properties across Salesforce into an integrated experience for customers. The new Salesforce.com adapts and changes over time and through interaction, while unifying the brand across an entire digital ecosystem.

Such a wide-ranging and infinitely variable system—over 7 billion unique page variations for the homepage alone—must be both turn-key and highly curated. Challenged with a directive to create a more temporal homepage, argo produced detailed strategies for building pages, along with a robust library of 70+ components.

The Personalization Pattern Library has two levels of patterns to combine methodology with intended customer goals. The 12 Meta-patterns are methods inspired by best-in-class brands to drive interaction. The Pattern Families identify UI models that support specific customer goals.

argo designed an in-depth, comprehensive playbook for the design team at Salesforce, to equip them with the background, content, strategy, and instructions for creating pages. The system offers an easy ramp-up, with a flexible set of components that can be used as static, conditional, or personalized as more data is ascertained and testing is done. Personalized components can be implemented progressively, offering the opportunity to identify a sweet spot for Salesforce and its customers.

Even as it changes, it feels familiar

The end result for Salesforce is a detailed, thoughtful roadmap forward, a complete solution that will provide a solid infrastructure for the Salesforce website and create a product that can scale, react, and continually adapt to ever-changing customer needs.

This vision will have implications company-wide, from marketing to sales to support, product, and operations, ensuring Salesforce will deliver valuable insights to its employees and customers for years to come.