Welcome to the Age of the Customer

Today’s customers are more powerful than ever, with the ability to shift markets and define a company’s success in a matter of seconds. They’re not looking for products, features, or gimmicks; they’re looking for a complete and effortless customer experience. They don’t just want to solve problems; they want to build a faster, smarter future — and they’re disrupting entire industries in the process.

We are all customers, and we are living in the age of the customer.

This is nothing short of a revolution — the fourth industrial revolution, a blurring of the physical and digital worlds — with customers at its center.

Amid this change and opportunity, the question for every business becomes: How will you adapt? How do you shift your entire strategy to create the connected experience your customers demand?

At Salesforce, that’s precisely the problem we’re helping companies solve. Salesforce Lightning connects your entire business around the customer, aligning your sales, service, marketing, community, analytics, and apps around a unified goal: customer success.

So what exactly does that mean?

The sales process is drastically shifting away from the linear model. Succeeding in selling means knowing where your customers are at all times, and being prepared to engage with them on their own terms. Your team needs selling tools designed for this faster, mobile, customer-first world. Sales Cloud Lightning puts the power of the lightning experience into every sales rep’s pocket for a faster, smarter selling experience.

But in the Age of the Customer, selling is only one piece of the puzzle. In this new era, customer service reigns supreme, and your agents need shareable, omnichannel, 360-degree views of every single customer. Service Cloud Lightning empowers your agents to make your customers love you, and Field Service Lightning expands this power to your field service technicians.

It’s crucial for your business to connect to customers, but also to leverage and build peer-to-peer relationships. With Lightning Community Builder, you can build a powerful community of customer evangelists and create more meaningful, one-to-one experiences for every customer. And with Lightning Trailhead, you can continue learning and building even more connection points to your customers.

The Age of the Customer is a powerful shift. The opportunity has never been greater, and every business needs to innovate and transform in order to succeed. But at Salesforce, where we’ve been focused on the customer for the past 17 years, we have the tools your business needs to succeed in this new era.

This blog post originally appeared on the Salesforce blog, 2016: https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2016/03/age-of-the-customer.html