Data Cloud – Salesforce Clouds ABC
Salesforce® is the market’s leading CRM platform solution, which smoothly brings sales, marketing and customer service together on one platform. It is possible to fully customize to suit your business and connect the necessary invoicing, quotation, HR and project management tools. But how to choose which clouds or modules within Salesforce would be the most useful for you? In this blog, we discuss the tools of Salesforce Data Cloud® and its benefits for enhancing work and customer experience. However, remember that the best understanding is achieved by having a conversation from the point of view of your business with a knowledgeable partner and/or a representative from Salesforce. Could Salesforce Data Cloud tools be an answer to your challenges?
Salesforce Data Cloud tools – What is Data Cloud?
Salesforce Data Cloud (previously Customer 360 / Salesforce CDP) differs architecturally quite a lot from the other Salesforce Clouds. For instance, the Data Cloud utilizes a zero-copy architecture, which enables direct access to data lakes without the need to move or copy the data. This allows data to be fetched directly from the original source without storing it in Salesforce. As a result, data processing is fast, extensive and versatile.
The Data Cloud integrates and harmonizes all company data into one place, providing a unified customer view. Unlike traditional Salesforce data integration, the Data Cloud is designed for handling larger volumes of data as well as integrating more diverse and real-time data sources. It is said to be the most significant of Salesforce’s released platforms due to its comprehensive coverage.
Data Cloud as a tool in sales, marketing, and customer service
Data Cloud offers the opportunity to personalize marketing while simultaneously creating a better customer experience. The platform integrates with the entire Salesforce ecosystem, making it not just a marketing tool nowadays, but also an enhancer for improving the overall customer experience, covering all different parts of Salesforce.
Data Cloud represents a Single source of truth platform. It can act as a repository for all information while distributing it in real-time across all Clouds. It is a highly scalable platform to which data can be brought in either in batches or as a continuous stream, according to one’s own purposes.
Marketing, sales, and customer service are all supported by real-time updated data, which allows the enhancement of each area. When this is combined with AI-based data processing, the efficiency of operations is at its peak.
Image 1: Salesforce Data Cloud tools – How Data Cloud works?
Data Cloud is based on artificial intelligence (AI)
In Data Cloud, AI is not an add-on service, but AI is integrated into Data Cloud and is a part of all its operations. AI helps to holistically improve the customer experience in sales, customer service, and marketing, for example, in the following ways:
- AI can identify and merge the same individuals into one verified person. Tools based on AI and record harmonization can detect duplicates, for instance, between e-commerce and Service Cloud, even if all the details are not entirely identical. With these tools, it’s possible, for example, to identify duplicates in lists where all the information is not the same.
2. AI used in Data Cloud also significantly reduces the need to sift through information. It enables the discovery of matches that fit one’s criteria from a very broad data set. In addition, in the future, it will be possible to train Salesforce Einstein with Data Cloud data, allowing AI tools to communicate better with each other.
What can really be done with Data Cloud?
Data Cloud enables the import of information from other Salesforce Clouds, as well as from any source outside the Salesforce environment. Data Cloud modifies the data to comply with the Customer 360 data model. This way, customer-related information can be easily brought together in one place in such a format that it is easy to utilize for the diverse needs of the organization.
Data Cloud can integrate and combine data from multiple sources to create a unified customer profile. From this combined data, a harmonized view is formed, which serves as a shared information resource for the entire organization.
As stated, Data Cloud is useful in many areas of Salesforce:
- In Sales Cloud, Data Cloud supports sales and enhances usability by deepening customer information, thus creating more tailored solutions and enabling real-time guidance with continuously updated data. This can be utilized, for example, in offering personalized deals to customers.
- In Service Cloud, Data Cloud supports proactive customer service, as it uses predictive AI to proactively identify challenges and enables intervention before the customer makes contact. Additionally, Data Cloud allows for a customer-specific, dynamic view of each customer with all their service information.
- In Account Engagement (formerly known as Pardot), Data Cloud is often beneficial in gaining deeper customer information and creating more effective, timely, and personalized marketing materials. On a practical level, this means more precise segmentation, bringing customer data from multiple sources, thus creating a more unified customer view, and thanks to better data management, higher quality data. Also, the identification of potential leads is made easier due to multiple data sources, meaning Data Cloud assists marketing even before the actual creation of a lead.
Who is Data Cloud suitable for?
Data Cloud’s usability is wide, which is why it fits well with various organizations and companies. Data Cloud is also suitable for organizations that have strict requirements regarding data rights, as it allows for the determination of compliance with privacy settings (e.g., GDPR or CCPA) through built-in features. In addition, with the ready-made Permission sets, access to data can be restricted as needed.
Data Cloud is based on low-code tools, making it easily accessible to everyone. This means that Data Cloud usage mostly does not require any coding but works with tools like Drag & Drop. However, coding makes it possible to implement more complex and customized solutions, thus providing an even better customization opportunity for the platform.
Do you have any questions or is there something you’re wondering about? We are happy to discuss more about the possibilities of Data Cloud and how it could enhance your business operations.
Writers:
Joonas Ruuth
Salesforce Developer
Elena Lokio
Marketing Specialist & Salesforce Consultant
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