Salesforce applications by and large are very efficient applications that address several business problems with great ease, efficiency and increase the bottom line for the businesses.
Most of the time Salesforce applications are developed as a combination of different clouds within its ecosystem for optimum solutions. These multi-cloud applications are usually a combination of Sales, Service, and Marketing clouds that efficiently automate all day-to-day business processes along with insights within each stream of the business i.e., Sales cloud addresses the sales team’s business processes, Service cloud addresses the service team’s process and so and so forth. These applications are successful and give businesses the benefits of;
- Improved customer experiences
- Increased sales
- Reduced Costs
- Improved decision making
- Targeted marketing
- Improved efficiency
There are challenges too within these applications that need be addressed;
- Quality of data (duplicate records, incomplete data, etc.)
- Centralized and disconnected view of the customer records
- Lack of near real-time or real-time insights
- Lack of personalization to the optimum levels.
- Automation of processes
- Lack of cross-business unit record sharing
These challenges can be addressed within the current application but that would need heavy customization and efforts that can lead to a very large, cumbersome application that would need heavy maintenance whenever there is an enhancement, new release, testing, etc. which is not at all a viable IT solution for any business.
To address these challenges businesses can implement Salesforce’s Data Cloud in combination with Sales, service, and marketing cloud for a wholesome solution. It comes with out-of-the-box features that can address all the challenges mentioned and provide further benefits. It can be a great way for a company that is already using Salesforce applications to include Data Cloud for improving business results.
Salesforce Data Cloud seamlessly communicates with other clouds within the Salesforce ecosystem. It can also easily connect with any type of non-Salesforce systems like marketing automation, social media etc. to pull in customer data normalise and harmonise into customer360 Data model and create a single source of truth also called as unified record which helps in gaining insights into their customers, and make better decisions.
Data Cloud address the challenges as follows;
Quality of data:
It can efficiently improve the quality of data by checking for quality, completeness and consistency there by removing or merging duplicates records and eventually enriching the record and result in a unified record of the customer.
Centralized and disconnected view of the customer records:
This unified record provides a unified view of the customer to the other applications of Salesforce Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud by combining data from all of these sources into a single record. This can help businesses to better understand their customers and help improve customer segmentation, targeting, and personalization.
Lack of near real-time or real-time insights:
It helps with gaining almost near real time or real time insights about the customer’s interests, behaviours, demographics. This can be used to improve customer targeting, personalization, and retention. It also helps with insights about the market, competition which can be used to identify new opportunities, improve products and services, and reduce costs.
Lack of personalization to the optimum levels:
These insights can help businesses to create more personalized marketing campaigns by understanding their customers’ interests and behaviours. This can help businesses to target their marketing messages more effectively and to get better results.
Automation of processes and cross – business unit collaboration:
Further data cloud can automate a variety of business processes such as data loading, data cleansing, data cleansing, data enrichment, and data analysis. It can also trigger some business actions and enable collaboration between different teams within an organization. This can lead to improved efficiency by reducing the time it takes to share information and coordinate tasks. Eventually this can save businesses money, time and resources and lead to improved efficiency.
On top of all such and many more great benefits Data Cloud can help businesses to comply with data privacy regulations by providing them with features for managing consent, encryption, and access controls by easy configuration of the out of the box features.
Here are some specific examples of how Salesforce Data Cloud can benefit a company that is already using Salesforce applications:
- A company that sells software could use Data Cloud to unify data from their CRM system, their website, and their marketing campaigns. This would give the company a single view of their customers, which they could use to target their marketing messages more effectively and to improve their sales.
- A bank could use Data Cloud to understand its customer’s behaviour, by getting customer interest score from their interaction with website, Knowledge articles and email campaign click ratios etc., and use the information to better engage with customers and suggest products or service offerings.
- A healthcare provider could use Data Cloud to track their patients’ medical records and to identify patients who are at risk for certain diseases. This would help the healthcare provider to provide better care to its patients and to reduce the cost of healthcare.
These are just a few examples of how Salesforce Data Cloud can be used to improve business results. If you are looking for ways to improve your business’s results, then Salesforce Data Cloud is a great option to consider.
