In our previous post on Achieving a Unified View of your Customer, we discussed the role of digital transformation in moving towards customer centricity, which ultimately requires a single unified view of the customer. Yet, achieving that 360-degree view of the customer is no easy feat. Salesforce Customer 360 is structured to make that path easier for administrators to achieve. Let’s take a look at how.

 

Simplified integration structure

Leveraging a canonical data model simplifies integrations and allows data to be shared and queried across different systems. It will consist of an enterprise messaging platform, data federation service, the customer resolution engine, and an easy to use user interface (UI) for Admins and Data Stewards.

 

Enterprise messaging platform 

The Salesforce Customer 360 architecture connects your commerceservice, and marketing clouds with a single unified id and federates data to them. Administrators will configure rules for data matching and reconciliation across the systems in a simple click-based UI. 

 

Customer resolution engine 

Often different systems of record contain different information about the same customer. It could be that the same information is entered in different ways or that the customer information has changed. For example, a service organization may get the latest information on a customer’s name change, or commerce may get a new address for that same customer. 

 

How do you ensure a common understanding across these different systems? 

Our customer resolution engine applies the logic determined by your administrators to incoming new information, to generate and reconcile Salesforce Customer ID and profile records. This is how a unified ID is achieved, enabling important information about the customer to be displayed at the time of need, such as a call into your service department. 

 

The right information at the right time

More than half of customer service agents are toggling between multiple screens to find the information they need to do their job. Salesforce wants to make the swivel chair a thing of the past with our data federation services. This means data is retrieved only at the time it is needed. The end result will be a UI that pulls data from different systems as well as the ability to leverage lightning components for a single unified view of the customer at the exact time it is needed. Agents will be able to see marketing history, purchase activity, and service interactions all within one UI. Here’s how it can work within a service agent console.

Each of the columns shown above displays information from different systems starting with the Customer 360 master profile shown in the left column, purchase history from Commerce Cloud in the middle and on the right column, data that exists within the Service Cloud. Our data federation service will enable this unified view within one UI and without the need to copy all of this data into your Service Cloud!

Salesforce understands that every customer’s infrastructure is different, so we’ve made it easy to connect to external systems and across connected data sources. We aim to provide out of the box cross-cloud solutions to solve for specific-customer use cases such as empowering service agents by bringing Commerce Order data into the service agent console experience.

By reducing the number of screens they must access during a single customer call, we minimize the “swivel chair” impact on service agents. This enables faster time to resolution for customer inquiries, provides a better overall service experience and potentially increases sales by empowering service agents to make informed product suggestions based on the customer’s order and interaction history.

To learn more about how Salesforce Customer 360 will lead to a unified view of your customer, check out these helpful recorded sessions, or join the Customer 360 mailing list to stay abreast of product and solution updates.