Data Cloud is the real-time platform for customer magic. By harmonising data that’s updated every millisecond, it enables your teams to meet your customers right where they are, like never before.
Have you ever called a support line and spent unnecessary time talking the agent through your purchase history to get the right level of support? Or how about browsing through an ecommerce site, expecting to see those pants you’ve been looking at for weeks, but instead you need to dig around for it? These are familiar scenarios for most of us. We expect every experience we have to be connected and updated in real time. When they aren’t, we’re disappointed.
Now take a moment to think about the wealth of customer data available to businesses these days: by global volume, it doubles every 12 hours. Data Cloud makes it easy for every business to make sense of all their data from any system, channel, or data stream. It integrates data from every step in the customer experience into a unified customer profile record. And that real-time customer profile can be used to instantly create an unprecedented level of personalisation, which feels like magic.
Here are a few scenarios that show how Data Cloud makes the customer experience so much better:
Across any industry, companies can leverage a unified profile and real-time data to deliver more personalised experiences. As you can see in all these experiences, milliseconds make all the difference. The cost of not keeping up could be poor reviews on social media, a loss in healthcare efficiency, and more.
Customer data platforms, which have historically been more of a marketing tool, unite siloed data into a shared view. Data Cloud takes this one step further by funnelling a nearly infinite amount of dynamic data to Customer 360 in real time. This means your customer data is continuously updating with new data from any of their touchpoints, faster than ever.
Everything in this unified customer profile record is visible and actionable across Salesforce’s entire suite of products, including all industry solutions. You can also build custom apps that take advantage of Data Cloud, allowing you to meet customer expectations for apps that reflect their behaviour in real time.
Data Cloud supports marketing, sales, service, commerce, Tableau data analytics, MuleSoft integration platform, and more.
Its constantly updated data, massive scale, and unified profile also enable:
Two major things differentiate Data Cloud. The first is that it is real-time, which means it collects and unifies data in milliseconds and lets brands act instantly. The action could be a product offer for something a customer is looking at right now, versus something they already bought last week, or a service interaction for a problem a customer is having at this very moment. This enables a new level of customer interaction that is very different from what has been possible for brands until now.
The second is that it enables all your teams — across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and more — to adapt the experiences they provide in real time to whatever is going on in your customer’s world.
Other customer data platforms on the market focus only on marketing and/or commerce. That represents a fraction of the interactions customers have with your brand. It’s impossible to give your customers the magical experiences they are looking for when you’re basing your engagements on a fraction of what your company knows about them.
Customers feel the impact of this every day. It’s the reason, for example, why a service rep you call for help is not aware of the product you bought yesterday, or you get marketing emails for baby clothes you bought for your sister’s baby.
Real-time, connected data is the game changer in all these scenarios. Data Cloud is the first product to provide that.
Key to that process is the way Data Cloud resolves identities, so a customer’s complete history of interactions with your brand – both known and anonymous – is consolidated into one profile.
Data Cloud stores all this data using a lakehouse architecture. This makes it easier to categorise and classify the array of unstructured data that businesses rely on – such as medical records – which have historically been messier to deal with. The result is that Data Cloud can more quickly access all this data and put it to work for you.
What’s the point of having a big pool of data? It’s all about your customer. With privacy and compliance built in, Data Cloud can resolve all that data so that you’re no longer looking at each customer through a narrow lens – a customer opens a mobile app, a customer opens an app on their smart TV. Now, you’re able to treat each customer not as a transaction or a number, but as a person.
It means that, for example, when you call customer support, they know what you were just doing with your product. They don’t have to ask you. They can answer your question proactively.