It takes more than just good products or services to win loyal customers. The companies that retain customers are those that offer a customer experience that is personalised and customised to each customer. Salesforce Customer 360 is designed to help you keep customers at the centre of your business, so you can connect with them 1:1 at scale.
What is Salesforce Customer 360?
Salesforce Customer 360, the world’s #1 CRM platform, unites the entire organisation — from marketing and sales to service, commerce, and IT teams. AllSalesforce products and integrated third-party apps together form Salesforce Customer 360, providing all teams with a single, shared view of all customers.
By helping track customers’ online activities, interactions with the company, and other customer data across touchpoints, Salesforce Customer 360 gives each team the information they need to collaborate better and do their best work. And, in turn, provideconnected, consistent customer experiences at scale.
How does Salesforce Customer 360 work?
Customer 360 has user-specific solutions for all prominent business functions. Core Clouds – such asSales,Service,Marketing, andCommerceconsolidate customer data from multiple sources on one platform. MuleSoftcan help you integrate data from third-party apps and even legacy systems into Salesforce Customer 360. All this is built on the robust SalesforcePlatform, which helps you customise solutions and also build your own apps and workflows just using clicks.
On the solution, each customer is assigned a unique Global Profile ID (GPID), and all their data from across sources is connected back to it.This helps create a 360-degree customer view.So, when a customer makes a purchase using one credit card or downloads an article using a secondary email account, Customer 360 ties it all back to one GPID.
All relevant information, customer data, and tools are neatly displayed on each user’s dashboard based on their role. You can also use Tableau to visualise and make sense of big data and instantly share reports across the organisation.
Salesforce solutions are powered by a built-in Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine —Einstein AI. It captures discrepancies common to data gathered from multiple sources (for example, different first names with the same email ID) and suggests best practices to fix those errors. Using the GPID, Customer 360 ships the corrected data back to the respective sources, ensuring data stays uniform across sources.
Einstein also provides data-driven insights, product or resource recommendations, and next best actions. This aids decision-making and helps each team perform their tasks faster and more accurately.
Why do teams need a 360-degree customer view?
When we hear ‘customer service’, we immediately think of customer support teams that handle customer concerns. However, in an increasingly omnichannel world, customer service, like any other function, is no longer a standalone role. All business functions need to work together to deliver consistent, personalised customer experiences, regardless of the touchpoint contacted.
This requires every team to know their customers inside-out and as a single entity. Thorough customer profiling is possible only if data flows frictionlessly across systems and teams. Also, hyper-personalised targeting, messaging, and servicing relies on comprehensive segmentation. Businesses can only create audience segments with rich data on customer behaviour from across sources.
Suppose a customer who recently purchased a product from you receives a discount code for their next order. However, the customer forgets to enter the code and realises it only after placing the order. They contact customer support to check if they can enter the code and process the discount from their end. For the customer service representative to do this, they should be able to view the customer’s purchase history, which falls under the purview of sales.
Or, to ensure that customers enjoy their offers, the customer support team suggests that the marketing team show a pop-up displaying a coupon code on the e-commerce site at checkout. Marketing teams need to personalise coupon codes and messages for each customer based on their purchase history – and this again, requires sales data.
Why should businesses use Salesforce Customer 360?
Apart from the above benefits that an all-rounded view of the customer offers teams, here are a few more ways in which Salesforce Customer 360 helps businesses: 
1. Breaks down data silos
Isolated data in disconnected systems prevent teams from getting the full context of customer issues, resulting in a sub-par experience for the customer. Customer 360 breaks down silos by centralising data from multiple sources into a single, shared platform. It provides teams with complete context on every customer interaction or purchase, enabling them to make informed decisions.
2. Improves team efficiency
Customer 360 data lives in the cloud, so users can view data and delight customers from anywhere, on any device.Since every team has full customer data at their fingertips, they don’t have to spend time searching for missing bits of information and can serve their customers with zero delays. And the built-in Slack integration ensures teams can easily coordinate in real time to stay on the same page.
3. Boosts customer engagement
The exhaustive, context-rich data that Customer 360 provides helps teams segment their audiences andhyper personalised targeting and messaging throughout sales, marketing, and service. Hyperpersonalisation enables one-on-one conversations with customers across channels, driving better customer engagement.
4. Ease of use
Customer 360 is designed for business users. Its interactive dashboards, intelligent analytics, code-free integrations, and AI-powered next best actions enable users to do what they do better.
5. Ensures data security
By creating global customer profiles that round up data from disparate sources, Customer 360 acts as a single source of truth, keeping customer data standardised. Having all customer data in one place makes it easier for businesses to enforce compliance with data regulation laws such as GDPR, CCPA, and CPRA. Through the GPID, these policies are automatically carried out on other apps and services that hold the same customer data.
6. SaaS-based platform
Customer 360 is hosted on the AWS cloud, which ensures round-the-clock availability and negligible downtime. The cloud service provider handles infrastructure and maintenance, so businesses can start using the platform right after they sign-up without worrying about set-up costs.
Primary Salesforce products under Customer 360
Salesforce Customer 360 strings together the following Salesforce products: 
Salesforce Customer 360 also offers industry-customised solutions, such as Financial Services Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud, Health Cloud, Consumer Goods Cloud, and more.
Sales, marketing, customer service, IT, commerce, and analytics teams benefit significantly from Customer 360.Salesforce Customer 360 is customisable, which means it can be modified to fit the needs of different departments and industries. All teams get access to rich customer profiles and contextual data, empowering them to deliver unmatched customer experiences every step of the way.
How is Salesforce Customer 360 priced?
Businesses of any size and type can use Salesforce Customer 360 to create delightful customer experiences. Salesforce works on a subscription model, which means you only pay for what you use. There are two pricing options for businesses:
- Editions: When you select an edition, you get a bundle of the most popular features in one package.
- Add-ons: Each add-on you select helps you customise your CRM solution so it can be what your organisation needs the most.
What to know more about Customer 360?
Click here to know how you can deliver better-than-great customer experiences with Salesforce Customer 360.
