Salesforce Data Cloud unifies customer data, offering real-time insights and personalization across industries. It surpasses traditional CRMs with AI-powered analytics, seamless integration, and scalable data management capabilities. We explain how it can benefit you in this blog.
You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t agree that we’re creating more data than ever before. From e-commerce and online customer interactions to IoT devices and more, this rapid increase in data volume and variety creates massive opportunities for businesses. That is if you can process it all and gain the right insights to take action. Now, imagine a tool that not only centralizes the data you receive but also provides real-time insights and analytics. These tools are known as customer data platforms (CDPs), and they can enable faster and smarter decision-making within your organization. Salesforce Data Cloud is one such tool that is transforming how businesses interact with their data.
What Are Customer Data Platforms?
Before diving into Salesforce Data Cloud, it’s critical you understand CDPs. Customer Data Platforms aggregate data from various sources to create a comprehensive customer database that is accessible to other systems and software applications. The main goal of a CDP is to provide a single view of each customer, complete with all the data you have available about them, so you can gain a 360-degree view of your customer.
As a result, you can better personalize your marketing for your customers, improving their overall customer experience while enhancing your company’s efficiency.
This might sound like a customer relationship manager (CRM), but it’s not. While CRMs do collect a lot of data related to customer-facing interactions, they don’t collect data about how your customer interacts with your product or service. CDPs collect both types of data, usually in the form of first-party data, which is collected directly from the customer rather than shared or purchased from other companies (third-party data).
Here’s a short list of some of the sources a CDP uses to collect first-party data:
- Website
- Mobile application
- CRM
- Social media pages
- Point-of-sale systems
- Email campaigns
- And more
The CDP collects all this data and then combines it into one customer profile, which is then shared with other systems that might need it, such as when targeting customers on Google or Facebook.
This process allows your company to better understand and segment your audience so you can tailor your marketing campaigns to your target audience. This could, for example, turn into a remarketing campaign for people who’ve abandoned their carts or help an organization develop a new product or tool based on the number of customers who switch to another company due to a missing feature.
Salesforce Data Cloud, like other CDPs, unifies all your company’s data. Unlike other CDPs, it connects directly to Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform to provide solutions for other lines of business, including Sales and Service. This centralization gives your teams a single source of truth for every customer. Once all your data is in Salesforce, it’s activated across all your existing processes and applications within its CRM. This means your teams can engage with customers using relevant data and insights in the flow of work.
The platform also collects multiple types of data, including first-party, second-party (data from partners), and third-party data, which sets it apart from those that can only collect first-party data. Salesforce Data Cloud can also process this data in real-time, and since it’s connected to Salesforce’s Einstein 1 Platform, it can also provide AI-powered insights. Lastly, Salesforce is scalable and flexible, so you can increase or decrease your usage based on your company’s needs.
Now that we’ve explored CDPs and how Salesforce Data Cloud stands out, let’s dive deeper into the core concepts and components that make this powerful tool tick.
Basics of Salesforce Data Cloud
As noted above, Salesforce Data Cloud can help impact several different lines of business beyond customers. To understand how, you need to know its core processes.
Source: Salesforce
These core processes are known as Connect, Harmonize, Unify, and Activate.
Let’s walk through how this works together.
Connect
We start by connecting to all your customer data at hyperscale, using an extensive library of out-of-the-box connectors native to Data Cloud and in partnership with the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform. Data sources are not limited, and you can use Data Cloud’s Ingestion API to cover any system without a prebuilt connector. It can ingest data in a streaming fashion or in batches. You can handle transformation on ingestion with clicks or code.
Harmonize
The challenge is that your data from any system can still be in a variety of formats. Salesforce Data Cloud harmonizes all this data – no matter the format – into common data model objects. By mapping to a common model, Data Cloud can work with data from diverse systems in a standard way.
Unify
After harmonization, we apply matching rules to unify profile-type data, forming a 360-degree view of customer profiles. Reconciliation rules determine what information you keep in the event of conflicts. The resulting unified records become your source of truth for every customer, and the original data that contributed to the unified records is still available in its original format.
Activate
The real power of unlocking your data with Data Cloud comes during activation. Activation involves building segments and choosing targets for enriched data. Salesforce applications and other platforms can be the targets of activation – what was once fragmented data returns to consuming systems as a complete picture with added insights. Those activations can be calculated insights, segmentation, analytics in Tableau, triggered automations, grounded AI, and much more.
Source: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=sf.c360_a_data_cloud.htm&type=5
Now, let’s take these components and explore Data Cloud’s impressive range of capabilities and how they can transform your customer data management.
Capabilities of Salesforce Data Cloud
Salesforce Data Cloud has several different capabilities, from data collection and transformation to identity resolution, segmentation and audience building, and data activation.
As mentioned in previous sections, Data Cloud is a great tool for pulling data from multiple locations, integrating it into one customer profile, and providing insights based on that data.
You can then integrate that data into Salesforce’s Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud to help empower each team to create more personalized experiences. But how does Data Cloud provide insights?
It uses the Einstein 1 platform, which brings together Einstein generative and predictive AI, CRM applications (clouds), Data Cloud, and Salesforce’s security architecture (the Einstein Trust Layer):
- Data Cloud enables you to bring together your enterprise data and trust it.
- CRM applications (clouds) have access to Data Cloud and its updates, can trigger actions from within Data Cloud, and use AI powered by the data in Data Cloud.
- Generative and predictive AI technologies and products have access to unified data from Data Cloud to power their capabilities.
- Einstein Trust Layer gives your organization peace of mind when it comes to using generative AI with data privacy and security in mind.
This cross-channel use allows you to integrate each component, train them on your data, and bring AI to your business, business processes, and end users. Salesforce Data Cloud serves as the context engine for Salesforce Einstein, providing the type, quality, and scope of relevant data needed to learn about the world you operate in, predict, recommend, and generate accurate content. With your unified data, Salesforce Einstein is smarter and can efficiently power predictive and generative AI.
All these capabilities and integrations are impressive, but how do they translate into real-world benefits? Let’s examine how various industries can use this technology to drive growth and improve customer experiences.
Benefits of Using Salesforce Data Cloud No Matter the Industry
Your company can gain numerous benefits from using Salesforce Data Cloud, especially for your account management, marketing, sales, and service teams. Some of the industries most prime for accessing these benefits include e-commerce and retail, financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing.
In each of these industries, customer data plays a crucial role. For example, in retail, Salesforce Data Cloud can help create highly personalized customer experiences based on customer preferences and behaviors gleaned from their online and offline data. Data Cloud can help your organization predict trends and customer needs with Einstein 1 so your company can drive growth.
Retail may be the most obvious industry, but healthcare and financial services can also benefit from Data Cloud. Financial services organizations can offer more personalized financial advice or help manage risks more effectively. Healthcare providers can use data from electronic health records, wearables, and other sources to make informed decisions and provide personalized treatment plans.
Salesforce Data Cloud doesn’t have to be limited by industries at all. If your organization does the following, then there’s a use case for you:
- Lead Generation
- Market Segmentation
- Account-Based Marketing
- Event Marketing
- Customer Relationship Management
- Data Cleansing
- And more
For example, Formula 1 uses Data Cloud to personalize experiences for its fans by combining location data, customers’ favorite drivers, and their content preferences. By combining its sales, customer, and marketing data, as well as both offline and online customer interactions, Formula 1 recommended products related to their favorite driver or past purchases.
Regardless of the industry, Salesforce Data Cloud has a way to improve customer experiences.
Conclusion
As businesses navigate the complexities of digital transformation, Salesforce Data Cloud represents more than simply a data management platform. It embodies a paradigm shift in how businesses harness the power of data to drive growth and innovation.
By integrating diverse datasets, enabling precise audience segmentation, and facilitating personalized engagement, Salesforce Data Cloud empowers organizations to thrive in a data-driven economy.
Interested in learning more about Salesforce Data Cloud or aren’t sure if it’s the best fit for your organization? Our Salesforce Consulting Services team is ready to help you determine the best next steps for your business. Contact us
