Salesforce Announces New CDP Innovations for Smarter Customer Interactions

Introduction

A CDP or Customer Data Platform includes a customer database that also provides automation in marketing, multi-channel management of campaigns as well as interaction with management in real-time. Precisely, CDPs are used for the time when a marketing database is required along with user-level data.

Now, let’s move forward and discuss more Salesforce CDP and its innovations that have been announced.

What is Salesforce CDP?

While being built on the world’s number 1 CRM platform, Salesforce CDP would also help the companies in unifying the customer data from any source, which would further involve sales, service, marketing, loyalty as well as commerce, and also build a primary source of truth that are used for powerful marketing, advertising, personalization along with analytics use cases that helps in growing up of the relationships and revenue generated with the same.

As of 13th May 2021, Salesforce announced some new CDP innovations to ensure that the customer data would become smarter as well as more connected, which would make it easier for the companies to act upon them in a more trusted way. These Salesforce CDP updates would further ensure that the companies are prioritizing their first-party data and help in its usage to improve the customization that is asked for after almost every customer interaction. Furthermore, this news was announced at Salesforce’s Success Anywhere World Tour live stream.

Why Do You Need a Salesforce CDP?

A Salesforce CDP is required by many organizations, because of the following reasons:

• Personalization: CDPs ensure to have a unified profile and further make it available to all the addressable channels, while also initiating personalization and relevancy. The customers who wish to see customized content according to their interests are supposed to be five times more likely to be engaged with a specific brand.
• Suppression: A unified profile ensures that it is connected to marketing as well as purchase data which would further enable the marketers to make sure that optimization of their addressable spend is done properly. This is basically done by suppressing those specific consumers that already have made a particular purchase, and then ensure that those dollars are redirected toward new customers properly.

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• Insights: Most of the analytics systems are operating in silos. It ensures that for an outside retailer, for example, a customer’s marketing interactions has been tied with e-commerce data (that is purchase history) and website interaction data (that are the products viewed multiple times) and further ensure that these insights would be made available to a service representative in the call center.

How Does a Salesforce CDP Work?

The first initial thing that CDPs are required to do is to ensure that all of an organization’s customer data is collected in one specified place. That further means not only stitching a single customer ID back together and that too from quite many different instances of CRM (Customer Relationship Management), but also combining the databases that traditionally don’t work towards sharing any customer data. These include marketing clouds, service software, along e-commerce engines. This can be further termed as customer resolution.

The next thing that the CDPs have to do is to ensure the reconciliation of the identities that they have about the known customers (for example, email and mobile numbers) with what the organization already know about customers before their data has been shared with the organization (For example, anonymous cookies, and mobile device IDs). This way, an interaction that was associated with an email campaign can be initiated and further continue over the website along with the same customer. This could be considered as a cross-device identity.

Latest Innovations by Salesforce to its CDP Platform 

Salesforce CDP is Customer 360 Audiences relaunched. C360 has made quite a splash with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud a few months back, which would bring good excitement for the future of SFMC. The innovations that were introduced on 13th May are briefly discussed as follows:

• Updates on MuleSoft: Mulesoft would be building a comprehensive view of the customers for an organization. Mulesoft is the world’s number one integration as well as API (Application Programming Interface) platform and Salesforce acquired MuleSoft in 2018 for $6.5 billion. It further helps the marketers to have a strong connection to any external applications and the data source from anywhere, such as ERP, loyalty, and point of sale systems, in a very secure way. The innovation as brought by Salesforce for this platform would help the organization and customers both. For instance, marketers could further create a connected digital experience particularly for customers which would be done by unlocking data from either AWS or Microsoft and integrating the same with Salesforce CDP data to provide a view of their customers which would be a 360-degree view. 

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• Enhanced Segmentation: The newly improved Enhanced Segmentation builder would be using type-ahead functionality to suggest quite new attributes and this will further help the users in enhancing, replicating, and easily sharing the previous segments, so that the delivery of the same will be faster than usual. This feature of Salesforce provides the ability to query over data and further develop smarter audience segments with ease to the business users.
• Updates on Tableau: Tableau is the world’s leading analytics platform, which also includes unified profile IDs and the insights so calculated, such as propensity to buy or churning for quite a deeper exploration. Marketers, with the help of this platform, can understand a lot of factors driving their business, like the engaging customers, the channels with which they are engaging with business, and the factors further driving their interest by drilling down to levels like campaign, offer, content, channel, customer and product dimensions. Salesforce bought Tableau in 2019 for $15.7 billion.
• Calculated Insights: Innovations in Calculated Insights would help to further enrich their unified profiles with few metrics like customer lifetime value as well as engagement scores. The brands could also rank or segment customers into some categories such as “loyal top spenders” or “newly lapsed customers” to build a smarter relationship.
• Open Access: Salesforce CDP would also help the customers for the activation of their segment data with the help of AppExchange apps from the participating ISV (Independent Software Vendor) partners. This would further help them create customized experiences across the web, mobile, and connected TV advertisements. This would also provide a safer way for the customers to deliver and enrich their CDP data with high-quality behavioral, location information, intent, and more.

The Integration with Mulesoft has been planned for later in 2021, while the Integration with Tableau has been made available now. The main aim for the same is to help the users in gaining new insights into their customer data. For the next announcement, Salesforce is further planning to build a connector between its CDP and Datorama. Datorama is the data integrator that Salesforce bought for $800 million in 2018, which was just a few months after the MuleSoft deal. While being a part of an upcoming release, marketers could also create reports and dashboards in Datorama, which are further based on the data in their CDP. This upgrade can come in June.

The SVP (Senior Vice President) of product management for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Robin Grochol, in an interview, said that “This is about connecting all of a marketer’s customer data, a lot of which is already in Salesforce, through our sales, service, marketing, loyalty, and commerce applications. But we also recognize that data can exist outside of Salesforce in a customer’s ecosystem, which is why we want to make it as easy as possible for a customer to pull their data together.”

Conclusion

To summarize, the Salesforce CDP is built on the company’s main core CRM platform and was evolved to help companies while collecting all the customer data in a single location, while disregarding its source. These new and renewed updates along with integrations have been designed in such a way that customer data would become more connected, more trustworthy, and more actionable for all the users spread across various departments and industries. The CDPs are concerned to do few primary tasks, which are- data collection, data unification, data activation, and also data insights.

The features that Salesforce has started adding to its CDP, are designed in helping marketers to increase their customer data, even though it has been stored within one of Salesforce’s clouds or maybe elsewhere.

Reach out to us at Cyntexa if you are looking forward to Salesforce CRM development services for your organization as well. Cyntexa is a Salesforce Development Company and is considered as one of the top Salesforce Consulting Partners in the USA, UK, UAE, Australia, Singapore & India.