Global Financial Services Leader Principal Financial Group® Uses Salesforce Data Cloud to Help Deliver More Personalized Customer Experiences

Principal® – a global financial services company that helps individuals and businesses build a financially secure future — has expanded a 10-year relationship with Salesforce and adopted Data Cloud to unify customer data, powering more personalized, automated digital experiences for customers. 

Data Cloud provides a 360-degree view of a company’s customers to build stronger relationships across every line of business by unlocking actionable data. By unlocking customer data from any source, Data Cloud powers more insights and automation and enables trusted AI that keeps customer data secure while tapping into all business data and metadata to enhance overall customer experience. Data Cloud addresses the core challenge businesses face — unlocking data and making it actionable for CRM, AI, automation, and analytics across all touchpoints and channels.

Now, with Data Cloud, Principal has a more complete view of customer-related data, which is essential to driving automation, analytics, personalization, and trusted AI across every interaction at scale. As a result, teams can make data-driven decisions directly in their flow of work and provide a consistent experience across multiple channels, fostering sales growth with new and existing customers.

The challenge: Assembling relevant customer data in one place is a significant hurdle for most businesses, with more than 80% of business leaders reporting they struggle with data fragmentation and data silos. And, disconnected information undermines customer experience, as evidenced by the fact that 74% of customers anticipate improved experiences from the data they permit companies to gather about them.

The impact: By unifying Principal’s customer data in Sales Cloud with Data Cloud — including third-party repositories — Principal can:

• Deliver speedy and personalized customer engagement: With Data Cloud, Principal is creating efficiency and enhancing ROI by tapping into its comprehensive, unified profiles to deliver highly targeted communications at scale to millions of customers. These unified profiles are continuously updated, combining historical and recent data across Sales Cloud, web, and email to drive smarter content, more targeted offers, and compelling recommendations. In fact, with Data Cloud, Principal consolidated multiple source contact records into one unified record, with a consolidation rate at 34%.
• Enable customer-centric experiences: With the first use case, Data Cloud offers Principal a financial professional unified profile incorporating all product lines — which were previously siloed datasets. Current and future use cases will enable opportunities to cross-sell and broaden customer relationships. With access to insights gleaned through Data Cloud, Principal can enable customer centric experiences for financial professionals, employers, and individuals.
• Centralize data: With Salesforce’s zero copy data integration, Principal can bring data from third-party data repositories into Data Cloud without having to move it. This offers Principal a more efficient, secure, and user-friendly way to connect data to business applications and also provides centralized access, control, and visibility into the data while addressing governance and security requirements.

Customer perspective: “Salesforce has proven to be a powerful asset for Principal, enhancing our operational efficiency and refining the way we engage with our customers. Data Cloud is crucial to our customer-centric approach and is instrumental in empowering our teams to engage customers with personalization and efficiency.” – Kathy Kay, EVP & CIO, Principal

Salesforce perspective: “By consolidating its customer CRM, web, advertising, and email data into a single, harmonized, and unified view through Data Cloud, Principal is now uniquely positioned to deliver highly personalized and enriched customer experiences. Recognizing that data is the cornerstone of every customer interaction, Principal will leverage our zero copy sharing technology to easily access and take action on all of their customer data, no matter where it resides, fully leveraging it to drive business growth.” – Rahul Auradkar, EVP and General Manager of Unified Data Services & Einstein, Salesforce

Recognizing that data is the cornerstone of every customer interaction, Principal will leverage our zero copy sharing technology to easily access and take action on all of their customer data, no matter where it resides, fully leveraging it to drive business growth.

Rahul Auradkar, EVP and General Manager of Unified Data Services & Einstein, Salesforce

Go deeper:

• Learn more about Data Cloud and see how organizations use Data Cloud to improve customer experiences
• Check out Trailhead for interactive challenges and learning paths to gain practical experience with Data Cloud
• See more Salesforce customer success stories