Unlock Customer Data with Salesforce Customer 360

As an admin, how do you help your teams engage customers on every channel and touchpoint? Professionals in sales, wealth management, and healthcare, for example, require a deep understanding of the people they sell to and serve.

At Dreamforce ’18, Ron Pereira, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Salesforce Customer 360, led a discussion about:

• Setting the vision for tying together siloed customer data to give your company a complete 360-degree view of your customers
• The Salesforce platform and how it provides solutions for achieving 360-degree views for commerce and marketing, for example

Salesforce is on the journey to providing a 360-degree view across multiple domains and industries. Ron touched on some of the solutions we have in place already, and the direction we’re heading to help your users get a rich 360-degree view of their customers.

A 360-degree view of your company’s customers is the foundation of that understanding. But a one-size-fits-all approach is a tall order. To address this issue, we’re working on a solution for you—Salesforce Customer 360, which is available in a pilot program.

We recognize that most experiences are delivered in silos. For example: commerce, service, marketing, and social; while each might be well done in their respective silos, they’re not always connected.

The sources of service, marketing, commerce, and social data, while also siloed, provide lots of great data on their own. Bringing it all together, however, is the challenge. In each silo, you might know “Sam.” But how do we unify her identities so that we know who Sam is regardless of the touchpoint?

We can do this by bringing together a clear platform approach. One that:

• Accesses data across systems using a federated approach through APIs
• Lets admins manage data, and create and reconcile customer profiles through a thoughtful user interface
• Maps relevant data to a canonical data model

So that we end up with: a single profile and unified ID that lets you understand your customer across disparate systems.

Salesforce is committed to working toward giving your users a unified view of their customers. In our development of Customer 360, we want to deliver content-specific views based on the line of business. Marketing, service, and commerce all have different needs, and you need a customer 360 solution to give each type of user a relevant slice of the customer 360 pie.

Delivering on Customer Expectations

It’s quite common for a customer’s journey to take some twists and turns. So, how do you help your teams connect this customer journey to deliver on the experiences that customers expect? Ron talked about our customer, Sam, who starts her journey when she sees an ad, clicks on it, then sees more ads that include coupons.

Think about this journey ranging from:

• Having the initial awareness of your company’s products and services, and then
• Searching and browsing, followed by
• Purchasing your company’s products and services, and finally
• Returning for more

Ron described this journey as an “unaided commitment from a consumer to choose your brand over all others.” If you were to exclude promotions and specials, would your customers choose you? If so, that’s loyalty! That’s what you can control when you deliver on your customers’ experiences.

Those experiences span many touchpoints, each one representing opportunities—or as Ron calls them, “kapows”—for gathering information about your customers. That information helps your teams identify unknown consumers so that those customers become known ones. That’s when your teams can ultimately deepen their connections with customers.

Marketing to Unknown Customers

When a customer, such as Sam, first interacts with your company, your teams can identify that Sam is a person. But your teams don’t really know who she is. In other words, they know that she’s an individual, but they don’t yet know her consumer attributes.

Salesforce already offers a way for your company to market to customers like Sam. It’s Salesforce DMP (data management platform).

It captures signals from disparate sources—not just the stuff that team members own—so that they can more effectively drive your company’s marketing program, specifically in terms of:

• Planning
• Activating
• Personalizing
• Optimizing
• Gathering insights

Salesforce DMP is the centerpiece for making outbound marketing efforts more effective and targeted. Your teams get that 360-degree view from a marketer’s perspective. And that helps them enhance their marketing campaigns to make them more personalized and relevant. Over time, Salesforce will bring together technologies to build a holistic view of your customers.

Servicing Your Company’s Customers

Your company’s service agents need their own 360-degree view, too, which differs from that of your marketers.

Take, for example, a look at the sales for commerce view of Sam from the Northern Trail service center.

It’s an ideal view, right? As Ron mentioned at Dreamforce, that view isn’t easy to achieve. It includes data that’s from multiple sources. For agents to see that Commerce Cloud data, they need real-time access to it.

But seeing that Commerce Cloud data isn’t enough. Your agents also want to know what level of service to deliver to Sam. Is she a VIP? Is she a member of your company’s loyalty program? Is she due any loyalty offers? Again, that data comes from another source.

Accessing data from multiple sources is a key way to get to know your company’s customers, so we’ve been looking at the approach that Mulesoft takes. They provide a common API framework that accesses data from disparate systems.

And that framework is key for building that rich 360-degree view. With it, you define the relevant data points you want to surface for your users, such as your service agents. And then from there, you determine the experiences you want to deliver to your users.

How You Can Prepare

• Watch the Dreamforce ’18 presentation
• Map the various systems that your company uses
• Map out your customers’ journey
• Share your findings with your stakeholders
• Start mapping your company’s 360-degree vision!