As customer expectations continue to evolve, companies all over the world have discovered the only way to stay one step ahead of the curve is with access to the right data. Data is the lifeblood of any customer experience strategy, guiding brands to create more intuitive, innovative interactions for consumers across every stage of the consumer journey.
However, capturing, processing, and leveraging data in an efficient and compliant format hasn’t always been easy. That’s why leading CRM companies, like Salesforce, have introduced tools to help make meaningful insights more accessible.
Built into the Marketing Cloud for the Salesforce ecosystem, the Salesforce CDP (Customer Data Platform) is a self-service solution companies can use to organize, unify, and align their data across all potential sources. Once information is implemented into the CDP, companies can use their all-in-one solution to deliver engaging, personalized experiences.
What is the Salesforce CDP?
The Salesforce CDP, or Customer Data Platform, is a tool designed to provide businesses with an end-to-end view of the ever-changing consumer lifecycle. In today’s complex world, consumers often move through a range of stages when interacting with any brand, but they expect a personalized, convenient service wherever they are. The CDP provides companies with the behind-the-scenes view they need of the customer journey to improve overall experiences.
The CDP combines data from a host of different omnichannel touchpoints into one platform, leveraging real-time streams of information for instant results. The technology collects, harmonizes, and evaluates data, transforming distributed information into comprehensive customer profiles.
With this platform, companies can:
- Create unified customer profiles: Draw information from multiple touchpoints, and connect identities, engagement information, loyalty, and marketing journeys into a single profile.
- Improve audience segmentation: Use behind-the-scenes insights of different customer groups to filter through different types of audiences for marketing and sales.
- Unify disparate data: Connect the various data strings from across the marketing and sales landscape to activate insights from anywhere in an organization.
- Analyze meaningful data: Leverage additional Salesforce tools like Marketing Cloud Intelligence and Tableau within the Marketing Cloud for useful insights.
- Expand and evolve: Work with a network of trusted providers to transform data into actionable steps for improving customer experience and enhancing marketing campaigns.
What’s Included in the Salesforce CDP?
The Salesforce CDP solution is a tool within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It provides companies with the tools they need to connect and unify data from both Salesforce tools and third-party solutions, including hundreds of industry-leading APIs.
Once companies have all of their data insights integrated into the same space, they can match data to people to create enhanced customer identities. There are built-in matching rules and AI to assist with profile creation, as well as tracking tools for monitoring consent and preference management.
Salesforce CDP includes access to “Calculated Insights”, which allows companies to add modelled data like LTV metrics to audience segments. Plus, it offers access to Marketing Cloud Intelligence and Tableau, so business leaders can activate the information they collect.
The most recent additions to the CDP landscape include Salesforce Genie, announced as part of the Dreamforce 2022 event. Genie supports companies in leveraging real-time and open data sharing between Salesforce and Snowflake for a 360-degree view across the two platforms. Users can also partition Genie data with “data spaces” for customer graphs and segments.
Genie also has a built-in “preference manager”, which helps to streamline requirements for data portability and compliance with the “Right to Be Forgotten”. Other new additions include:
- Instant analytics for Tableau and CRMs: With integrations to Tableau and other Salesforce tools, Genie can provide instant access to data and real-time analytics. There are also Genie data prep recipes available so users can create reports with drag-and-drop functionality.
- Real-time automation: The Genie technology also supports real-time automation through native connectors, the Salesforce AppExchange, and MuleSoft, for workflow development. The Marketing Cloud Engagement platform also allows for convenient journey orchestration.
- Integrations and connections: Companies can create WhatsApp business messaging capabilities with access to their CDP environment, call RPA bots from the Flow RPA solution, and use MuleSoft Anypoint connectors and accelerators.
- Predictive analytics: No-code AI predictions are available from Salesforce Einstein and Genie, to transform data from the CDP into predictions which can be used to accelerate business growth and unlock new opportunities.
- Decision optimization: Using the power of Einstein discovery, companies can create optimization models based on real-time constraints, such as budget and supply chain interruptions, to help keep disruption to a minimum.
- Data stories: Data stories for the CRM analytics environment within the Marketing Cloud dynamically delivers narratives in natural language to provide insights into how KPIs and important metrics in the business are evolving over time.
- Preserve compliance: Genie and the CDP solution are built on Hyperforce, offering immense reliability and scalability, with 24/7 engineering support and external encryption key management for better security and compliance.
What Can Companies do with Salesforce CDP?
The CDP solution from Salesforce is an integrated part of the comprehensive Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which works seamlessly alongside other critical tools in the ecosystem. With the CDP environment, companies can not only build more powerful profiles and insights into their audience but also leverage powerful analytics tools and analysis capabilities.
With the Salesforce CDP, business leaders can unlock end-to-end visibility into their customer journeys, connecting data points from multiple different environments. Using this all-in-one platform, companies can build smarter, more refined audience segments with enhanced filtering capabilities and pinpoint new opportunities for growth.
Alongside the CDP, the Marketing Cloud also has access to a host of tools for personalization, account engagement, loyalty management, and intelligence so that every business can make decisions about CX faster. Salesforce offers a range of educational resources and tools for users to access when leveraging the CDP environment here.
