Organizations everywhere are grappling with unprecedented pressures from the economy, supply chain disruptions, labor shortages, and changing consumer behavior. And the data environment organizations operate in has never been more complex. It is not uncommon for an organization to have data in hundreds of different applications. Yet with all of that data, businesses routinely struggle to effectively utilize the vast majority of it1. Add in data from web activity, wearable devices, service interactions, and an infinite number of other sources, and the data landscape becomes extremely difficult to navigate. Moreover, the pace of data creation is only going to continue to accelerate. How are organizations supposed to effectively survive in this fragmented, fast-paced data environment, and much less thrive in it? The path forward can become clearer with the combination of Salesforce Data Cloud and Tableau.
Salesforce Data Cloud is not just a rebranding of Salesforce’s Customer Data Platform. It is an evolution into an integrated, embedded data platform enabling organizations to connect, harmonize, and segment their disparate data. By doing so, they can effectively engage with their customers at the right time and through the right channels. Tableau, with its native connection to Salesforce Data Cloud, empowers people to glean robust insights in a few clicks, and then take action in Salesforce with Flow External Actions.
It all starts with creating a single, unified view of a customer. By bringing together data from different sources, businesses can create a 360-degree view of each customer and gain insights into their behavior, preferences, and needs. Customers engage with businesses through a variety of channels and devices and pulling all of that into a unified view is a challenging proposition.
Salesforce Data Cloud simplifies the process of connecting to virtually any data, including semi-structured and unstructured data, from any source via a range of native connectors or the powerful Mulesoft platform. It then transforms this data into a unified customer profile without the need for complicated code. With a unified customer profile, you can easily create robust marketing segments, calculate insights that feed data into predictive Einstein Discovery models, or trigger Salesforce Platform events with Data Actions. The potential use cases that benefit from a unified customer profile are virtually endless, but two important ones for virtually any industry or company are calculating customer lifetime value and personalizing customer interactions.
Customer Lifetime Value
Imagine you run a company with multiple Salesforce orgs for different business units, and your customers frequently purchase your products from those different business units. It can be challenging to get a complete view of those customers and understand what and how much they are buying from your company in total. Salesforce Data Cloud solves this problem by creating data streams from multiple Salesforce orgs, unifying the customer data into a single profile, and calculating a total customer lifetime value. This metric could be utilized for marketing segmentation, loyalty program membership, as an input to propensity score models, or used in combination with Streaming Insights in Salesforce Data Cloud. For example, you can send coupons to your most valuable customers when they enter one of your stores or shop on your website. With Tableau, you can gain deeper insights into these customers and take action back in Salesforce, such as adding a subset of these customers to a special campaign, in just a few clicks.
Personalization
Personalizing interactions with your customers is another key benefit of Salesforce Data Cloud. More than half of customers report that service interactions with organizations feel fragmented and 80% said interactions with organizations were as important as the products and services they sold. Customers expect complex issue resolution after talking with one person 2. Without unifying all of the interactions, purchases, support cases, and activity of their customers, organizations are set up to disappoint. By unifying data from your various transactional systems, Sales and Service Clouds, and website data, Salesforce Data Cloud provides a 360-degree view of customers, allowing organizations to get ahead of issues in real-time and solve the right problem, at the right time, through the right channel. With a complete customer picture, Tableau makes it easy to explore additional insights and take actions that drive business value.
There are numerous industry-specific use cases that Salesforce Data Cloud can significantly simplify, such as segmenting customers based on major life events in Financial Services to integrating multiple health telematics systems to create Unified Health Scores, but the theme is the same – Salesforce Data Cloud and Tableau are two powerful tools that can help businesses unlock the full potential of their customer data. By combining the power of Salesforce Data Cloud with Tableau analytics and visualization tools, organizations can unleash the power of data to gain deeper insights into their customers and make better decisions that create value.
