This is the first in a series of blog posts delving into how to implement a customer-centric view using a single customer ID with Salesforce.
Salesforce recently hosted thousands of Trailblazers from all over the world to participate in Connections, our marketing, commerce, and service event of the year. It was an amazing event filled with awesome keynotes, super sessions, theatre sessions, networking, and tons of learning opportunities. We also unveiled our Customer Data Platform with the next generation of Customer 360, which will enable companies to unify customer data across their organizations for a single view of the customer. This exciting announcement moves us one step closer to an enterprise customer data management solution that fuels the personalized, integrated, and continuous experiences that today’s customer expects.
The Customer 360 team hosted a number of sessions to cover everything you need to know about connecting experiences on Salesforce products and creating a reconciled profile with a Customer 360 ID. Here’s a quick recap of the team’s sessions and a preview of more to come.
The seamless and continuous customer journey
Today’s customer demands seamless and continuous experiences across multiple touchpoints such as social, websites, chatbots, mobile, in-store, or online support interactions. They want to get what they want faster and with less friction, whether that’s updating an order, processing a return, or being shown new purchase options that they hadn’t previously considered.
In a session focusing on integrated experiences, the Customer 360 product team shared where the platform is today, what to expect in the future and how one of our Trailblazers is working with Salesforce to enable continuous experiences for their customers. Ekta Chopra, Head of Digital at e.l.f. Cosmetics shared insights into important considerations to take before embarking on a project that seeks to unify experiences across digital touchpoints. “It’s all about building an emotional connection with our customers — and that takes time. We have to learn and understand what our customers want and personalize their experiences based on those insights. With Salesforce, we’re able to focus on the right things, including content, how we bring different experiences to life, and testing new experiences like augmented reality, Chopra related.
Cross-product connectivity, use cases, and solution kits
Salesforce Customer 360 aims to simplify cross-product connectivity by providing an Admin-based set of tools. In an introductory session Trailblazers took a look at the underlying platform and architecture Salesforce is building to deliver a 360′ view of the customer and how Salesforce is empowering admins through a declarative UI that registers and establishes trust between data sources, maps customer data against the Salesforce Information model, configures data match and reconciliation rules, and performs powerful stewardship actions.
In a related session on customer data, we covered the nuts and bolts of Salesforce’s data federation model and how the Customer 360 platform is a new way to connect any data into the full power of the Salesforce ecosystem.
We then went into what is possible today with a session covering the basics of how to connect commerce to your marketing and service clouds, what foundations need to be laid before getting started, and how to think about your data strategy. Many of today’s connectivity challenges can be solved through Solution Kits: guides that take the most common use cases — and those with the biggest business impact —bundled into easy-to-use, digestible assets that you can download.
A single unified ID
In our session on integrating service with commerce, we dove into Salesforce’s approach to delivering a single unified ID and how this will empower customer service agents by giving them access to relevant customer data at the moment that information is needed.
"Customer interactions with agents can be wonderful opportunities for creating deeper relationships, Customer 360 empowers customer service organizations by arming the agent with all the information they need in one view," says Steven Kostrzewski, Senior Director, Product Management on Customer 360.
The future is Customer 360
We know that a Unique ID is what will make truly connected experiences all possible. In an awesome session on how to create a single customer ID and profile on Salesforce Customer 360, we covered best practices aimed at creating a single customer ID and profile across disconnected systems. Our data management expert then went deeper into this topic, which continued to build on the theme of data quality and understanding. While data quality can be challenging, this session shared the data considerations that are important to have top of mind when setting on this path and leveraging the full power that Salesforce Commerce, Marketing and Service cloud deliver together. More on this session coming, also feel free to check out the video.
That’s a wrap for now. We’ll be expanding on each of these topics with a full a blog post in the coming weeks. In the meantime, check out the recorded sessions, download a solution kit, or join the Customer 360 mailing list to stay abreast of product and solution updates.
