With inputs from Ankit Misra, Senior Solution Engineer
Businesses are collecting more data than ever before to offer the level of personalisation and seamlessness in experiences that customers expect today. But most face challenges around data unification, and data quality control, or difficulty in using data to create more relevant experiences.
- Marketing teams in Indian B2C and B2B organisations use an average of 20-30 data sources. But less than 50% of them are completely satisfied by their data’s completeness, accessibility, and timeliness.
- Improving data quality and accessibility is one of the top sales tactics to enable informed decision-making.
- 37% of service agents have to toggle between multiple screens to find the information needed to do their job.
According to an EY survey, 58% of Indian businesses say gaps in consumer data’s breadth, depth, and quality need to be addressed to enable optimum data-driven decision-making.
Is there a solution? Yes! Customer data platforms (CDP) can bring uniformity and comprehensiveness to the data that businesses use.
How Salesforce CDP can help solve customer data challenges
Salesforce CDP helps marketing teams create a single source of truth and use more intelligent, actionable, and trusted insights. Salesforce CDP unifies data from multiple sources – like your customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning solutions, marketing automation tool, eCommerce sites, mobile apps, etc. – to create unified customer profiles. These can be used to recognise customers anywhere and provide contextual, relevant engagement across marketing, sales, service, eCommerce, and more.
Here’s how Salesforce CDP can help Indian businesses tackle their customer data challenges:
1. Create a single source of truth for hyper-personalised engagement
Salesforce CDP can ingest massive amounts of data and unify high volumes of personal, demographic, behavioural, purchase, engagement data, while managing customer consent across touchpoints . Using advanced identity resolution capabilities like fuzzy matching, it combines different prospect or customer identities into unified customer profiles. These profiles reflect how customers interact with your business across functions and brands.
With unified customer profiles, you can deliver the right messaging to the right customer on any channel and hyper-personalise shopping experiences. The same data can also be used to suppress irrelevant communication. For instance, combine marketing and sales data to discontinue promotional emails to customers who have already purchased related products.
2. Build smarter audience segments easily
Most Indian businesses find audience segmentation challenging as it can be complex, and time and cost intensive. At the heart of Salesforce CDP is an effective segmentation engine that enables business users to quickly query a rich set of data attributes, build audience segments, and activate them for targeted mobile messaging, advertising, personalisation, and more.
Salesforce CDP provides a flexible, user-friendly interface with drag-and-drop functionality for easy audience segmentation. This allows you to create multi-dimensional segments by pulling attributes from sales, service, commerce, loyalty, ERP, etc. to get immediate population counts on the fly.
3. Unlock insights for more informed decision-making
Having unified customer data can help you drill down into insights like calculating customers’ lifetime value or engagement score; which can help further enrich profiles and create intelligent audience segments to boost your engagement metrics across campaigns and channels.
Use native CDP connectors to activate rich data in business intelligence tools like Tableau and Datorama. Visualising metrics in a simple and interactive format leads to a deeper understanding of customers to inform critical decision-making. You can also accordingly adjust your marketing and sales campaigns to optimise their performance.
For instance, use data visualisation to compare the performance metrics of different marketing campaigns in a single view. Quickly identify campaigns that work well for specific customer segments to refine your marketing mix and optimise budgets.
4. Break down data silos to offer consistent, connected experiences that build customer loyalty
The best part about Salesforce CDP is that you can activate the data and insights generated on the platform across functions, throughout the customer lifecycle. You can increase audience reach with lookalikes, drive engagement through behaviour-based targeting and upsells, and increase retention through loyalty segmentation, special offers, and churn identification.
Salesforce CDP can also integrate with Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Interaction Studio to enable cross-channel personalised messaging journeys across both outbound and inbound channels, respectively. The solution works with CRM to provide deep behavioural insights around the customer that drive cross sell and up-sell, as well as provide contextual signals to the service agent for faster case resolution.
Salesforce CDP also has the ability to create intelligent experiences for shoppers – by building segments, and generating insights through a combination of transactional order data and other cross-channel data.
Given the privacy and safety concerns surrounding third-party data, it is becoming imperative for businesses to generate rich, first-party data to know their customers better. Salesforce CDP can help businesses gather, analyse, and enrich first-party data. It’s simple and intuitive user interface makes understanding and using data easier. This means, even business users can leverage AI-powered analytics to gain actionable insights and make data-driven business decisions.
Click here to see Salesforce CDP in action.
