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360 degree Engagement Experiences with the SFDC Customer Data Platform!

06/07/2021

Salesforce announced on June 02, 2021, about the recent launch of AI enhancements enabled by the Einstein platform integration with its customer data platform (CDP), just as competitors large and small are making similar investments. Salesforce is also tightening integration between the ecommerce cloud platform and the CDP, as well as making it possible to segment audiences in real time based on factors like membership status, loyalty tier, and points balance. These offerings headline a wider series of updates Salesforce is making across its Digital 360 portfolio of applications and services as part of its overarching Customer 360 strategy. Other new offerings range from reports that analyze customer journey by channel to features that make it simpler to engage customers via Snapchat and WhatsApp platforms.

There’s also now a Progressive Web Application (PWA) Kit and Managed Runtime. Enabled by headless services provided by Salesforce, they allow developers to more easily decouple front-end and backend technologies to customize application experiences. This capability should allow organizations to accelerate digital business transformation initiatives and make use of Salesforce application programming interfaces (APIs) to drive faster development of applications while retaining control over the front-end application experience.

Building a ‘single source of truth’

In terms of strategic initiatives, the Salesforce CDP is part of a crucial battle for the company. Rather than housing customer data in a traditional customer relationship management (CRM) application, which can be more challenging to access, organizations have started to employ CDPs to make data more accessible to a range of omnichannel applications that drive multiple digital business transformation initiatives. In effect, the CDP becomes the hub around which customer engagements, whether occurring in real time over email, phone, social media platforms, or mobile applications are all tracked.

In many cases, the source of truth is now at the core of digital business transformation strategies that require companies to finally unify customer data in a way that makes business insights actionable in near real time, rather than generating yet another business intelligence report after it’s too late to have any meaningful impact.

While a CDP doesn’t replace the need for a CRM application for a sales team, it does play a more strategic role by enabling organizations to engage customers in a much more consistent fashion. Engagements that occur across social media networks and mobile applications can be more easily personalized, monitored, and analyzed. IT vendors, from makers of marketing automation platforms to providers of enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, are all vying to become providers of the CDP any organization standardizes on.

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