Salesforce has unveiled its Customer Data Platform (CDP) with the next generation of Customer 360.
According to the company, the new platform services will enable companies to unify disparate customer data throughout their entire organisation and then personalise every engagement based on a single view of the customer.
“Customers today will not settle for fragmented experiences, and companies recognise 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 personalise customer engagement at scale.”
The challenge for companies is that they are swimming in a deluge of customer data. Many are trying to unify data from legacy systems, disconnected channels, multi-channel attribution and elsewhere. They also need to adhere to regulations like GDPR and adapt to new channels like voice and chatbots. In this reality, delivering personalised and integrated engagement is difficult, and customers often pay the price. A retailer is unlikely to know that the customer who just contacted customer service for a broken product is the same one that also just received a promotional email for that same product.
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.
Salesforce highlighted that by extending the power of Customer 360 with MuleSoft, companies can connect any app, data source or device across any cloud and on-premise.
Here are features that Customer 360 offer:
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. With Salesforce’s consent management framework, companies also can easily gain customer consent wherever they engage–from email marketing to digital advertising.
Advanced audience segmentation: This allows companies to identify specific groups of people to engage with in real-time based on demographics, engagement history and all other customer data available.
Personalised 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.
Optimisations 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 ecommerce 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 optimise channel engagement and customer satisfaction.
