Digital Transformation, Data Strategy & AI in the Media Industry – with Vicky Nisbet

This month, we talked to Vicky Nisbet, industry leader in the UK for Comms, Media, Sports & Gaming within Salesforce.

Vicky openly shared her career story and how she got to where she is today at Salesforce. She offered insights into customer trends she’s been seeing, and examples of how Salesforce customers are using the most advanced technology to power their media companies.

We’ve summarised a few of the most interesting points in this blog post. You can listen to the podcast episode in full on Spotify, or watch the video on YouTube.

What are some of the key challenges clients have faced as a result of the pandemic?

There’s one thing we can say for sure: the pandemic has changed everything. But we really need to understand what that impact on the media industry as a whole was. From broadcasters becoming hugely important, to event businesses not being able to run events and losing 80% of their revenue overnight.Digital transformation was already a big topic before we went into the pandemic. The big difference has been the speed with which we’ve had to react to things.

Vicky Nisbet, industry leader in the UK for Comms, Media, Sports & Gaming at Salesforce

Vicky Nisbet, industry leader in the UK for Comms, Media, Sports & Gaming at Salesforce

Companies have had to make decisions quickly. They no longer have the luxury of running a six month process where they can evaluate all the options out there. At Salesforce, we made sure that our clients had the right technology in the right place to enable them to change the way they worked and how they interacted with their own customers.

What are the benefits of Customer 360 platform experience?

Customer 360 brings teams together on a single platform with a single view of a customer – whether that’s the sales team, marketing or commerce. When you have linked cases across sales and service, the utopia of it is to take your service centre and make it a profit centre. So that when customers have problems, by utilising the technology, service agents can actually sell solutions to customers or generate leads that end up going to the salespeople. So it becomes a real benefit to have proactive sales agents on a single platform through the Customer 360.

How are your clients thinking about their data strategy and how are they executing on that?

Data is at the heart of every business, but there is one problem that we haven’t solved yet. The volumes of data that we generate are off the scale! So it’s less about the data we can get, because we have plenty of it, but more about what we do with it. It’s how we collect the data and make it usable. The key is to ensure that data stays identifiable so that it’s used in the right way to personalise customer experiences. And by doing that we earn the right to more data. Then it becomes like an infinity circle where we take that data and we actually utilise it.

It’s going to become difficult with the removal of third party cookies. And here is the challenge: as a consumer, I want personalised experiences, but I only want it the way I want it and when I want it. I get fussy about what data I share – and then I get upset if nobody’s chasing after me in a personalised way. Our media clients have a real challenge to bring this together.

How is Salesforce using AI & machine learning to enable intelligent information and insight for clients?

Salesforce’s Einstein Analytics tool takes the behaviours of a customer and provides a score or a prediction. That gives you a more realistic view of your forecast. And the beauty of it is it’s never ending, it’s only ever going to get better. Imagine you implement something like Einstein Analytics – it gets better every day that you use it, because it takes more data, more behaviour and is able to predict more accurately. And fundamentally, as a business, we need to know what’s going to happen. The beauty of technology is being able to predict accurately how we’re going to land, what our revenues are going to be, and therefore, how we change or course correct.

As chair of the equality board at Salesforce for UK & Ireland, why is diversity and inclusion important?

Thankfully, we’re in a world now where, when my two daughters get into the workplace, it’ll be a better place than when I started 25 years ago. It is important for me, as a woman in leadership, that I leave the place better than I found it.

At Salesforce, equality is one of our core values. We do have a lot of enthusiastic employees that really want to help, and what we’ve done with the equality board in the UK & Ireland is to harness that enthusiasm. Salesforce is the most diverse place I’ve ever worked, but it doesn’t mean we’re there – it’s a journey, not a destination. We need to continue to ensure that we have the right working environment to achieve equity for everybody, regardless of their background.