In Full View: Unifying Customer Data with Salesforce 360

The Irish philosopher Edmund Burke once stated that “Good order is the foundation of all good things.” Although these words were tagged to the unfolding French Revolution of the eruptive 18th century, they could be stripped off, polished, and fixed to the unfolding technological revolution.

One area that sees rapid growth and expansion is ecommerce. Improvements and innovations are never-ending, and so to structure the workings of your ecommerce company has to be constantly kept in order. One influential ecommerce platform that excellently does this is Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware) via its cross-cloud tool of Salesforce 360.

From marketing to sales and commerce to services, Salesforce 360 ties together the different cloud platforms of Salesforce and unifies the data, creating a single source platform to view your customers.

Whether it’s a customer’s shared preferences, purchase history or any of their previous interactions with your business, all customer data can be channeled together and viewed in a single place. The highly centralized experience provides businesses with a strongly organised platform to enable what Edmind Burke believed to flow from good order.

Having such data in one place allows for a complete view that can improve their customer experience, as well as better predict the wants and needs of customers via its Einstein artificial intelligence: predict the best sales opportunities; create a more accurate personalized marketing journey; pinpoint product recommendations; and deal better with solving customer service issues.

Another strength of Salesforce 360 is better analytics. Simply by having a unified view of your customers helps to deliver more comprehensive data. This can then be used by your marketing team to better construct campaigns, eventually leading to higher numbers of leads and sales.

Then imagine how much more prepared the customer service team will be if they have been equipped with a fully 360 view of the customer that they’re trying to help. If all of a customer’s data is available in one place, problem-solving becomes streamlined, smoother, and faster.

Another simple advantage that makes all the difference relates to language. On Salesforce Commerce Cloud, customer data is identified under Customer Records, yet is known as Personal Accounts Objects within the Service Cloud and Sales Cloud, and as Data Extensions within the Marketing Cloud. What a linguistic ordeal which can lead to a lot of hair pulling. (I wonder whether Salesforce has attempted to standardize these terms?) It’s up to you to identify these data points across clouds and tie them together. But at least Salesforce 360 simplifies this and resolves the language barrier.

And so although each Salesforce cloud brings with it valuable customer data, 360 bridges these lonely clouds and gathers them together to create the ideal skyline for data management. If you struggle to unify customer data across platforms, or aim to aggregate and strengthen data management, then Salesforce 360 may well be the foundations for all good things, as Mr Burke would say.

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware) development & strategy teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.