COMPLETE GUIDE TO SALESFORCE CUSTOMER 360

Customer is the King

Customer is the Hero of your story

There is only one Boss, the Customer.

We come across these quotes frequently. Ever wondered Why?

We all live in a Customer-centric era. Today the customers expect data-driven, personalized and unified digital experience. On the other hand, companies are finding it difficult to integrate siloed systems into one.

Salesforce Customer 360 is here to help companies to keep pace with the customer’s demands.

In this article, we will cover

What is Salesforce Customer 360 ?
Why Should Businesses Use Customer 360 ?
Salesforce Hub and Spoke Design (Architecture)
Customer 360 Truth
Connected Customer Experience Use Case

What is Salesforce Customer 360?

Salesforce Customer 360 Data Manager is an Integration tool developed by Salesforce. It can collect all customer data from Salesforce/other third-party applications and present a unified view of the customer.

The Salesforce ecosystem has multiple products used by different teams within the organization. Customer data is often not shared between teams/departments, causing Information Silos.

Customer 360 is designed to sit in the middle of this ecosystem.

Why Should Businesses Use Customer 360 ?

Customers get nearly whatever they want today. They also expect seamless experience more than just purchasing a product. It’s a whole new game for businesses as they win or lose based on how they make the customers feel.

“A brand is defined by the customer’s experience. The experience is delivered by the employees- Shep Hyken”

On the flip side, businesses are using legacy systems for different business functions to interact with customers. In few cases, customers are even forced to login multiple siloed systems to access their data.

“Customers require the effective integration of technologies to simplify their workflow and boost efficiency – Anne. M. Mulcahy”

Privacy regulations like GDPR added more fuel to the fire. It is difficult to delete for a particular customer across multiple systems.

Customer 360 Data Manager came as the savior for businesses for a number of reasons.

Manage all data at one place without having to login multiple systems
Compare and combine customer data from Sales, Marketing and E-commerce systems into one global profile
Delete Individual profile data easily without searching for hours to comply with Privacy regulation requests
AI enabled Dashboards to evaluate the global profile information, mapping, source data, etc
Marketers can create audience segments and communicate with customers through their preferred channels.

Salesforce Hub and Spoke Design (Architecture)

Now that we know the power of Customer 360, we will dig into the Design of Customer 360 Data Manager.

We can all agree that there is no one solution fits all approach when it comes to businesses. There are multiple systems used by businesses and usually they are integrated from Point A to Point B.

The problem comes when multiple systems need to be integrated and you end up in a messy loop of data. Also you will start dreading the data management and Integration monitoring at some stage.

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Salesforce came up with Hub and Spoke design to maintain integration between multiple systems. Customer 360 data Manager acts as the Hub and Salesforce/third-party apps act as Spoke.

Data Manager becomes the core of your organization. You could create a global profile of customers and maintain information at one place. But is it even possible to compare “n” number of sources and integrate seamlessly?

Salesforce uses Cloud Information Model (CIM) to connect all data sources. The CIM data model uses components like Entity Groups, entity, etc.

One you connect a System, let’s say Sales Cloud to Data Manager, you need to map the Sales cloud data to CIM. Eg: You could map Account Contact field to an Entity in CIM.

Customer 360 Truth

With Customer 360 Data Manager, you could create a global profile with a unique global ID (GPID) across all systems. The global profiles become the single source of truth once you integrate data from all systems. Data Quality is highly dependent on the source system’s data.

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Let’s take the above example and see how Thomas GPID is created.

Thomas Data is exported by admins from data sources and uploaded to the staging area of Customer 360 Data Manager. Then admin runs a data job to match the profiles and errors are rectified after viewing the dashboards. Finally an export is done from Data Manager with Global IDs and this is exported back to the Source system to reflect the GPIDs.

The data is matched and profiles are evaluated by the Data Manager using a set of rules.

Preparation Rules – Basic data cleansing rules are applied here Eg: Adding Mr in Names, adding country code to phone numbers, etc.

Match Rules – You can match the fields from two systems using Exact Match logic or Fuzzy Match logic Eg: Tom and Thomas can be matched
Reconciliation Rules – After two profiles are matched, only one data can be added to Global profile.This rule is used to decide which data to use in Global profile.

Connected Customer Experience Use Case

In the previous section of the article, we covered how to create global customer profiles. The whole purpose of creating a global profile is to offer a seamless and unified Customer Experience. How can this be achieved ?

Prebuilt Lightning components can be set up in Salesforce to display data from Integrated sources. Eg: You could view order history of a customer from Commerce cloud inside Service cloud.

Service representatives no longer need to access multiple systems to find out the real issue. Similarly Marketing cloud could have abandoned Shopping cart information from Commerce cloud.