Salesforce has recently unveiled its Customer Data Platform (CDP) with the next generation of Customer 360. New platform services will enable companies to unify disparate customer data throughout their entire organization and then personalize every engagement based on a single view of the customer.
Customer 360 will go beyond traditional CDP capabilities and extend the power of CRM with consumer-scale data management and activation.
“Customers today will not settle for fragmented experiences, and companies recognize that creating a single view of the customer is imperative to earning their loyalty,” said Bret Taylor, President, and Chief Product Officer, Salesforce. “With Customer 360, we continue to extend our platform in new ways, empowering brands to unify data and personalize customer engagement at scale.”
The latest Salesforce Connected Customer report finds that 78%of customers expect consistent interactions with a company regardless of the department they’re dealing with, yet only 50% of companies tailor their engagement based on a customer’s past interactions.
The Next Generation of Customer 360 Delivers Integrated Customer Engagement
At Dreamforce 2018, Salesforce introduced Customer 360, which allows companies to connect Salesforce apps and create a unified customer ID to build a single view of the customer. Additionally, by extending the power of Customer 360 with MuleSoft, companies can connect any app, data source or device across any cloud and on-premise. Salesforce is expanding Customer 360 with new advancements that will make it easier to bridge fragmented customer data across the entire organization and enable companies to deliver integrated customer engagement at scale.
The next generation of Customer 360 will enable:
Data Unification and Consent Management: Brands will be able to unify all of their customer data to create rich customer profiles. This includes known and unknown data such as cookies, customer first-party IDs and more. The consent management framework will help companies gain the ability to easily have customer consent wherever they engage–from email marketing to digital advertising.
Advanced Audience Segmentation: Segmentation capabilities will allow companies to identify specific groups of people to engage with in real-time based on demographics, engagement history, and all other customer data available. For example, a company will be able to build an audience of female shoppers interested in running shoes based on information gathered from a combination of web browsing activities across several retail sites, marketing email interactions, previous purchases and more.
Personalized Engagement Everywhere: Once a brand knows what audience segment they’d like to reach, it can then activate the customer data across marketing, commerce, service and beyond. This means companies won’t skip a beat, reaching customers and prospects across channels like ads, email, social, mobile and web that are all integrated to deliver a continuous experience with the brand.
Optimization Based on Einstein Insights: With artificial intelligence, companies will be able to analyze and understand how and when to engage with customers to drive customer loyalty and improve business performance. Customer profiles are continuously updated based on their behaviors – as customers click on an ad, browse an e-commerce catalog, buy a product and open an email. This allows brands to leverage AI to drive the most relevant mix of product and channel recommendations to optimize channel engagement and customer satisfaction.
“Enterprises are having a difficult time capturing all of their customer data in one place. With so much data coming in from dozens of sources, it’s hard for companies to keep track of it all, let alone use it to their advantage to deliver the connected experiences that customers want,” said Sheryl Kingstone, Research Vice President & General Manager at 451 Research. “A lot of solutions out there these claim to solve common challenges but miss the mark.”
With this announcement Salesforce has taken a strategic step forward in helping companies truly understand their customers through a single lens and engage with them one-on-one across marketing, commerce, service and beyond.”
Source: https://www.dynamiccio.com/salesforce-brings-customer-360-a-data-platform-for-data-unification/
BEWARE
Tools do NOT bring your company anywhere closer to your customer. You’ll need a ‘corporate culture in which leadership, management, and staff care deeply about their customers, stockholders, and employees, pay close attention to all their constituencies, especially customers, and initiate change when necessary to serve their legitimate interests, even if that entails taking some risk, while strongly value people and processes that can create useful change’ (Kotter & Heskett).
