How You Can Use MuleSoft and Data Cloud to Take Automation to the Next Level

Your business is probably already automating some customer experiences. But you’re likely only doing so with a slice of the data you have about each customer. This prevents you from realizing the true promise of automation – at a time when it’s critical in helping all of us do more with less.

Consider a process that starts with a customer interaction on your website and then ends with a complex supply chain request, like an order being placed with your supplier for more inventory to meet your customer’s need. These types of experiences have been extremely difficult to automate from end to end, with every manual step of the process truly eliminated. 

Now, there’s a way you can bring automation across the breadth of your company, delivering a new standard of automation for the business and elevating customer and employee experiences along the way.

In September 2022, Salesforce unveiled Data Cloud, now powered by Tableau, to help businesses better understand customer data and deliver actionable insights in real time and at scale. Data Cloud now processes more than 100 billion customer records on average daily across the entire Customer 360.

This is a game changer for MuleSoft customers because Data Cloud now enables every business to unlock real-time data across any modern or legacy system.

MuleSoft retail customers can use real-time data from campaigns, loyalty rewards, and point-of-sale transactions to deliver automated, personalized marketing and in-store experiences for customers. Likewise, patient care managers can prioritize underserved and high risk individuals at the right time. And marketers can segment their patient and member populations and create personalized care journeys at scale with more comprehensive health data.

Here, I’ll answer some common questions about how you can use the power of MuleSoft and Data Cloud.

What is Data Cloud and why does it matter?

In today’s economic environment, you need to focus on your customers, and it all starts with data. Businesses have massive amounts of siloed, fragmented, and difficult to manage data. In the past, companies needed to build complex data pipelines and platforms, which resulted in  issues with data duplication, stale data and ultimately, undermined decision making. 

Organizations need to seamlessly connect digital and real-world customer interactions to provide relevant, personalized, and compelling moments-that-matter. However, their efforts to drive this real-time engagement are often hampered by the absence of a single source of truth about their customers. 

On average, organizations use around 980 applications to run their business. These applications create data silos, resulting in potentially hundreds of versions of “the truth” about a single customer. This challenge is only going to compound as the amount of data created and processed each year continues to increase exponentially.

Data Cloud helps overcome these challenges by processing and harmonizing real-time data from third-party systems and Salesforce into a customer graph, at massive scale. It includes built-in connectors that bring in data from every channel and stream, including mobile, web, APIs and proprietary data lakes. In addition to the built-in connectors, MuleSoft acts as the real-time data ingress layer for literally any system, anywhere. 

Why is MuleSoft so important to Data Cloud?

MuleSoft is fundamental to Data Cloud as both an ingress and action layer. As we mentioned, MuleSoft can help Data Cloud process real-time data from any system, application, or device into Data Cloud. In addition to this, MuleSoft is natively integrated as part of Salesforce Flow which enables it to act as the action and automation layer as well, allowing you to seamlessly automate your enterprise enriched by the power of this customer graph and the AI-driven insights it provides.

Business leaders all over the world are focused on delivering success now by connecting with their customers in more valuable and cost effective ways. Automation is top-of-mind for almost every one of them — 91% of organizations reporting increased demand over the last two years, as we all figure out how to do more with less. The investments companies make now will determine their success today and into the future.

What’s magical about this experience is that data and insights from Data Cloud are as easily addressable as any other object in the Salesforce Platform, so when combined with Flow and MuleSoft, we can deliver sophisticated end-to-end and intelligent automation across both the Customer360 and all other systems in the enterprise. 

What excites you most about Data Cloud and MuleSoft?

Our customers rely on MuleSoft to connect all of their systems and data in their ecosystem with a resilient and scalable composable design. As those application networks have matured, our customers can use that same connectivity fabric to compose and automate entirely new workflows and experiences.

With Data Cloud, our customers can better understand their customers through this real-time unified customer graph. This enables us to bring this insight into every orchestration of their composable enterprise, making them more intelligent and personalized. This enables our customers to deliver the types of seamless and automated experiences their customers are looking for, and to deliver the promise of an automated enterprise overall. I’m excited to see where our customers take this next.

How will Data Cloud and MuleSoft benefit society at large?

As part of our 1-1-1 model we have been supporting the nonprofit sector since 1999, with over 39K+ organizations using our donated software. Countless other organizations use our platform to drive their environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives.

Everything we’ve described above also applies here, including the overall productivity improvement the sector can achieve through data-powered automation. By analyzing real-time data, food banks can identify where those who are in greatest need are, along with exactly which goods are in shortest supply. Organizations working in the emerging world, can capture a lot more data from the last-mile of their work, and can scale efforts to engage these communities. In the renewable energy sector, energy companies can work with their customers to capture more granular energy usage data from devices in the home, so that they can make real-time suggestions for how to optimize their energy usage and take pressure off the grid.

With the power of Data Cloud and MuleSoft, we are extremely excited to bring the immense opportunity of real-time data and automation to these incredible organizations that are helping our communities and the planet.